Duke Nukem Forever

Review from Sarge - Monday, 27 June 2011 @ 8:31pm

This is the moment that I thought would never come. I must admit, I was quite skeptical that this game would ever show up - even as I put the disc in my 360, I couldn't believe that this was actually the Duke Nukem Forever that I was promised nearly 15 years ago. Regardless of your interest in DNF, or even what you think of the game, the sheer fact that it's actually been completed is an amazing achievement, and one that everyone at Gearbox should be proud of. Yet despite this, I don't envy anyone at Gearbox as they sit back and wait for the feedback. As a developer, they were always going to be in a tough situation - there's no way that a game like this can live up to 15 years worth of hype and come out the other end winning. Video games have changed so much in the last 15 years, how do make a game that keeps up with the current style of First-Person-Shooters, without straying too much from the pure essence of what made Duke Nukem awesome to start with? More importantly, as someone who's given the task of reviewing this game, how do I review it accurately and fairly with all this in mind?

It's fair to say that Duke Nukem Forever truly is one for the fans. If you're young enough to have never played a Duke Nukem game before (and it's scary to think that there are gamers now who haven't played the originals), then all this talk must be slightly confusing. It's not surprising - this game truly does take "fan service" to absolute extremes. DNF is, if nothing else, an amazing time capsule of the quintessential story of "the little video game that could". It works exceptionally well, and it's a shame that more games don't do this. It really does humanise the entire development cycle.

So, what about the game itself?

In this section, these twins blow you while you play a video game about yourself. Yeah. Classy, huh?

The game's storyline is ... well, to be honest, do you really care? Duke Nukem, blah blah blah big aliens blah blah blah awesome one-liners blah blah blah big explosions blah blah blah. It has all the trappings of a cliche 90s action flick. To give you an idea, at the start of the game you're on a call to the President of the United States who's telling you that they're going to use diplomacy to get out of this problem, and you're not to do anything to mess it up with your guns and explosions and cool one-liners. But do you listen? Fuck no! You're Duke fuckin Nukem!

One of the first things that becomes apparently with DNF is this - you need to play it on PC. There's 2 main problems that I've seen with the console version versus the PC version. I'm not normally one to care about stuff like this - the whole "console vs. PC" argument is one that I am absolutely loathed to enter in to, I enjoy playing most FPS games on consoles just as much as I enjoy playing them on a PC, however the controls for the 360 version that are awful. Aiming is atrocious and some of the mini-games throughout the game border on the unplayable, so make sure you get the PC version if you can. Okay, so one more gripe I have about the game: loading times. If it's not the number of loading screens, it's the time it takes to actually load the damn game! No matter what is loading, be prepared to wait at least 45 seconds each time. The frustrating thing is that it loads any time, no matter what's just happened. At one stage, I waited 47 second for the level to load, and in less than 3 seconds i fell off a ledge and died. Cue another 47 second wait. Yeah okay, so maybe I shouldn't have sucked during that part of the game, but waiting that long twice is almost a deal-breaker for me.

For those that have fond memories of Duke Nukem 3D, one of the main disappointments is it's lack of open-worldness with the levels. Nearly every section of DNF is exceptionally linear. There's still that element of exploration, where you can interact with objects in the levels, much like you would come to expect (switching lights on and off, for example) but given that many games over the last 15 years let you do this, it doesn't quite have that same thrill as it once did. However, it's not without it's upsides. Interacting with various object in the Duke-verse doesn't have just cosmetic results, but is also used to increase Duke's health meter, or should that be, "Ego meter". Things like lifting weights in the gym, flicking through nudie magazines and even admiring yourself in the mirror all increases your Ego. During the levels themselves, Ego works in the regenerating health way of measuring health, much like in Halo.

This is a loading screen. You're going to see these. A lot.

I mention Halo in particular because there seems to be a running theme of pop-culture references all throughout the game - much like the Duke games of old. At one point, Duke meets up with some soldiers who ask if he wants to put on some armour to fight the alien hordes. The camera then turns to the armour which is designed to look exactly like Master Chief's armour and Duke proudly claims "power armour is for pussies". During another level, Duke spots a dead body on the ground who looks a hell of a lot like Isaac from Dead Space, when he says "ooh, that's one Dead Space marine". There's a lot of these references, but they're so forced that it doesn't have nearly the same comedic effect that it once did. I don't know if it's the current internet-age we live in where jokes are made and then instantly made old 2 weeks later, but the 'jokes' that Duke makes just do not work. At one point Duke even sings the line "America, fuck yeah!" from the Team America movie; a movie that came out in 2004! They're just not clever in the slightest, nor does it do anything make the player feel slightly awkward at what they just witnessed.

Look, we're all friends here, so let's just cut to the chase, Duke Nukem is really dated. Like, really really dated, even when you take into the fact that development started 14 years ago. Everything about this game feels old and that it's been done before. Graphically, the game looks like it's a port from an original Xbox or PS2 - the levels are ugly, the character design is sloppy and the animations are terrible. The sound effects are just as bad, the controls are woeful, the plot is awful, the script reads like it was written by a 14 year old and many of the elements used in the game have already been seen in previous Duke games. Duke Nukem is essentially that guy who rocks up to your 10 year High School anniversary who's still living at home, works part-time packing shelves at Coles and who can do an uncanny Austin Powers impersonation. It pains me to say it, but this is really a cobbled mess of a game that truly does feel like too many people have put their 2c in, and been heard. The game lacks any form of real direction and it painfully shows.

I've always considered the worst thing you can say about a game is that "it's boring", but Duke Nukem Forever truly is a boring game to play. I felt like I got nothing from this game. If anything, I feel stupider for the experience. Yet, there's something about this game that made me still play through this game. Is it nostalgia, or something stronger and deeper than that, something deep inside that brings out a certain inner-egotist that I try daily to push down?

This is a sketch of a character that doesn't appear in the game. Handy, huh?

No, it's nostalgia. I really had to force myself to push through the single-player campaign, then shuddered in embarrassment as I played through some of the multiplayer modes - well, that is to say I was, when I wasn't being disconnected, or rage-quitting after waiting to long to wait to join a game. Actually, you know what - I just thought of something positive to say about the Multiplayer - when searching for a game-type, not only can you see the list of games that are currently being played, but you can sort the list by Ping. Now, I know you PC gamers are reading this thinking "... so?" but trust me, this is a god-send for console gamers and I hope that more FPS games use it in future. There! I did it! I said something nice!

At the end of the day, I play these games for you, dear reader, so that you don't have to - and you have no idea how much of a bullet I've taken for you. This game is so bad, I don't know what to tell the children.

Pros

• almost nothing about this game

Cons

• almost everything about this game