I waited 14 years for this?!?
I can't believe that I waited almost a decade and a half for a game that mixes generic action with terrible “jokes.” Duke Nukem 3D may have been a genre-defining classic and pop culture phenomenon but the long delayed sequel sadly fails to surpass its predecessor by losing the series' soul. Duke Nukem Forever mixes some of the most generic shooting I've ever played in my life with genuinely unfunny humor to create an absolute mess of a game.
The campaign is short. Or more accurately even shorter than the leaked design document from 2009, meaning 3D Realms didn't even finish 2/3rds of what they set out to do, which is sad considering how long this game has been in development. To make matters worse, the level design stops being interesting during the last third of the game while Duke shoots his way through bland corridors that all have the same textures while solving some absolutely pointless puzzles. As much as I hate saying, “rushed” and “Duke Nukem Forever” in the same sentence, that's exactly what the ending of the campaign feels like which is pathetic.
Falling apart during the third act is the least of the campaign's flaws. Duke Nukem Forever also suffers from some horrible coding and some of the worst writing I've seen in a video game in years. The single player campaign seems to do everything that a game can possibly do wrong with the only redeeming feature being the fact that the easy combat makes the game shorter than intended despite being often frustrating due to a number of questionable design choices.
Moreover, the graphics coding is terrible. I'm able to play The Witcher 2 on higher settings than Duke when TW2 has a much more powerful engine behind it and more detailed graphics. The problem is decade-old legacy code ported between engines causing instability which the devs never bothered to tighten up. Engine switches normally do this but at the same time, Duke was being worked on for 14 years which gave the four development studios working on this game more than enough time to rewrite most of their code and optimize it for the Unread Engine. Having a game crash because it can't handle a game of pool at max settings when it can display explosions going off all around me is just sloppy.
The graphics are best described as uneven. Duke Nukem Forever looks amazing... except for when it doesn't. Rain effects, explosions and models look beautiful. There's no doubt about the game looking amazing in that regard. On the other hand, some of the textures look either muddy or pixelated. It's clear that many objects in this game from early development made it into the final build without a touch up. What's even more pathetic is that they're often objects the player is forced to look at up close. I appreciate how many time the graphics have been redone but Playstation 1-era pixelation in 2011 is embarrassing to look at and even playing at 1920x1080 with anti-aliasing on doesn't make these ugly textures look any better. It's even worse on some types of haircuts that female characters have and really needed to be fixed before the game hit shelves. Hair is something that the industry is finally starting to do well and yet DNF does it wrong in one of the worst ways that I've seen in years.
Then there's the game not being able to handle mirrors and windows without an insane amount of jaggies. Anything filtered through glass seems exempt to anti-aliasing is becomes so blurry it's unrecognizable. This is such a rare graphical issue that I've only seen in a handful of games which isn't easy to overlook or forgive.
Don't even let me get started on the writing. For a game that prides itself on humor, DNF is not very funny. The humor mostly consists of cock and poop jokes mixed in with more profanity than The Sopranos. While some of Duke's one liner's are actually funny (“Fork you” was perhaps the only one that really sticks out as being completely awesome) so many of them aren't, with many of the quotes being repeated constantly to the point where it becomes tiring. Hell, most of the attempts at humor mix the unfunny slapstick vulgarity of Freddy Got Fingered with the inane randomness of Bio-Dome. It's almost like the writers didn't care about this game at all and just wrote whatever they felt like before cheaply cobbling it together.
Worse than the game's “humor” is the characterization. While Duke Nukem is meant to be one-dimensional, everybody else in DNF is as well. Every character is a narrow archetype who lacks anything close to a personality. Female characters have it worse than males. Women in DNF only fill three roles: hot chick, victim and damsel in distress. I get that Duke Nukem 3D had unmoving, static female characters sprinkled around as scenery but that was more due to engine limitations. This is simply a case of horrible writing and instead of making Duke Nukem seem like the lovable horndog he is, it just makes 3D Realms' writing team appear sexist.
Speaking of 3D Realms' sexism, one level that really rubbed me the wrong way was The Hive. Depending on which version of Duke Nukem 3D you played, you were forced to either abandon or free captured women stuck in vines. Objectifying women is one thing but Duke Nukem Forever rewards the player for slaughtering captured women while uttering truly tasteless one-liners as he does it. For players unwilling to shoot crying defenseless women, they better be ready to shoot some of the most annoying enemies in the game bursting out of them at random. I'm all for difficult moral decisions in games but this was just disturbingly misogynistic. The Hive is neither funny nor sexy and anybody who finds it to be either is probably one of the subhuman animals who gets off to Max Hardcore's “Films.” No game since Custer's Revenge has made me feel this uncomfortable. For a shooter described as a fun, silly romp to include this kind of content stands out amongst countless flawed design choices that permeate the entire game.
The story then seems to no longer exist after the halfway point when the NPCs all seem to disappear and Duke gets a lot quieter. Without any women for Duke to hit on and only a few scarce one-liners, DNF loses all personality and devolves into what it would be without Duke: the most generic shooter to hit the market since Chaser. The game clearly needs Duke's personality to succeed but it manages to pull it off in all the wrong ways, creating an absolute wreck of a campaign.
For as much fault as the writers, artists and graphics programers get, the sound team was just as lazy. While the sound effects for firearms do sound powerful, the sound designers clearly didn't care about much but cool sounding weapons. The rest of the foley just so happens to be a bunch of generic sound effects that often sound like they came out of the public domain. They're just plain boring and I've heard the same sound effects for years now. Moreover, outside of weapons, nothing sounds big. Sound effects sound distant, even when it's a large gate opening or a grating being pulled off. They also didn't do much better with the voice acting. Everybody but Duke sounds bland and like they didn't care about their lines nor could they take their job seriously. DNF has given me the worst voice acting that I've heard on a AAA title in years. It just sounds like a Japanese to English localization on a handheld title. That's how banal it is. There's no emotion, just bored people delivering stupid lines.
The biggest failure of the sound team happens to be the music. It's just a bunch of remixes of Grabbag and Stalker from Duke Nukem 3D. Yes those are two of the best pieces of video game music ever written but I can only hear the same song remixed so many times before I get bored
That's just the fault of the graphics, sound and story. Duke Nukem Forever's gameplay isn't much better. My biggest complaint is that there is no quicksave feature. There is neither a hotkey nor a pause menu option for quicksaving, instead giving the player some scarce checkpoints that never occur when you need them most. Quicksaves are such a staple of gaming and have been for years that not being able to use one is so backwards that the campaign is often unplayable on higher difficulties.
Since boss fights need to begin again from the beginning, it's probably a good thing that three of them are fought twice, with the first boss also being the last. Also, bosses can only be hurt with turrets and explosives, making most of Duke's arsenal useless and ensures that every player uses the same strategy to fight every boss, giving no reason to replay boss levels. While the bosses can have some interesting tactics, the bosses are frequently pushovers that die way too easily.
Speaking of easy, Duke's health regenerates far too quickly, allowing me to circle strafe enemies until my health regenerates. This makes almost every fight too effortless for me to ever really feel like I was challenged throughout the entire game. Almost all of my deaths came from puzzles with only a few actually resulting from enemies, boss or otherwise.
Of course this could be because I used the overpowered rail gun, rocket launcher, shotgun and three-barreled assault rifle throughout the entire game. Every single other weapon in the game is horribly underpowered. The pistol takes most of a clip to kill a basic enemy, the laser chaingun is too slow, the devastator doesn’t do enough damage to be worthwhile, the freeze ray takes too long to freeze enemies and the shrink ray's projectile is tiny and travels slowly. Thankfully two of the only four guns in the game worth using are the two most common guns in the entire game. And since I can only carry two weapons at the same time, there was never any incentive for me to swap either of my main weapons except for boss fights.
The level design isn’t much better. Most of the game takes place in small corridors with the occasional open room..... and that's when level design is actually decent. The rest of the levels use everything that I usually hate about shooters. There are some first person platforming levels which thankfully aren’t as difficult or as banal as they usually are but that doesn’t mean that these are any good.
These levels can be decent, except for then they feature backtracking puzzles. While I don't mind backtracking, forcing me to solve puzzles by going through the same area is terrible level design. Oh, and while solving them, Duke is in a dark area and has to turn his night vision on and the object he's pushing back to the other end of the level makes it too bright to see with night vision but too dark to see without nightvision turned on. In other words, Duke needs to remember the layout of the level while hoping that he's still pushing the object while going through a level completely blind. It's just aggravating and took me far too long to actually finish while I just wanted to go back to running and gunning again.
The levels that truly suck are the underwater levels which suffer from horrible collision detection, making it a horrible chore for me to get through doorways. Meanwhile I'm stuck gasping for air as the timer on the bottom of the screen runs out. Thankfully those levels don't pop up until the end of the game and don’t last nearly long enough for me to whine too much about them.
And yet, the underwater levels are sadly nothing compared to the driving levels. Duke gets an unwieldy monster truck that he can barely drive but unlike the water levels, I'm stuck driving through 1/4th of the game in a giant mechanical abomination that can barely turn. Oh, and the map design is backwards as I'm driving in the exact opposite direction of the big portal over the Hoover Dam.
What makes the truck segments worse are the physics glitches. At one point Duke has to drive over two police cars to progress and my monster truck got stuck driving over them and wasn't even able to back up, forcing me to reload from my last checkpoint.
Don't even think about doing these levels on foot. There ramps that Duke needs to boost over and glitches when exiting the truck that can send Duke flying through the air and kill him when he comes crashing back down, even if exiting only to kill enemies with Duke's weapons or get some more gas.
The absolute worst part of the level design happens to be the fact that the linearity makes the game no longer feel like the sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. No longer am I exploring levels looking for secrets or choosing which path I want to take to complete the game, I'm now being forced to travel in a single set path which makes me hesitant to even call this a sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. It no longer feels like Duke and doesn't maintain the most important aspect that I loved about Duke's predecessor.
As the final nail in the coffin, DNF is broken in the most fundamental way. I melee by clicking my mouse wheel which is also used to swap weapons, making melee useless in a game where I burn through ammo fast. There are so many other control setups but apparently I'm stuck with accidentally changing weapons when I mean to melee attack. It's a bad choice and one that should have looked horrible enough on paper to have been changed immediately.
If there is anything good to say about single player at all, it's the minigames. They actually manage to be entertaining even if one of them is a tasteless abortion joke. It's unfortunate that the pinball game is so unforgivingly hard and much more difficult than the Duke Nukem map in Balls of Steel. It's still a fun diversion, but it's also one of the most unfair and difficult pinball games I've ever played in my life. Sadly the minigames disappear during the second half of the game, as does most environmental interactivity.
If this game has any saving grace it's the multiplayer which was done entirely by Gearbox and Piranha games in the final stages in development. The weapons are now more balanced with the devastator, freeze ray and pistol all getting a boost in power while the game simply feels faster. It's the best arcade-style multiplayer that I've played in years. The lack of options is compensated for by how fun it is. The map design is great, there's very little lag, Duke's one-liners are actually funny and the jetpack makes a return. The multiplayer mode is the exact kind of shallow brainless fun that DNF was advertised as being and while the single player is bad enough that I don't feel that I got my money's worth, I'm at least glad to see that the game wasn't a total rip off. Multiplayer is indeed worth it as long as you're willing to spend a lot of time online playing it.
There is a Call of Duty style, level-up system that grants Duke a bigger, better apartment as you gain levels. It's a great way to encourage longevity and there will hopefully be some DLC that adds in new modes like Assault or Horde that will keep the game from getting too stale.
As far as the apartment goes, it's great to see that Gearbox and Piranha got Duke's attitude right. Duke's cheesy pickup lines towards the women in his apartment are funnier than anything that Duke says in campaign mode, the minigames are all unlockable for Duke to play. More games with unlockables need a thing like this.
The only complaints that I have about multiplayer are that the lobby needs to fully load before I can choose a game. Thankfully, there is a quickplay option which is good for the time being. That and the fact that voice chat just sounds like scraping which prevents me from saying over voice, “Tengo cajones del acero” when I kill people. These should be quickly patched allowing me to actually get access to the lobby before choosing which game I want to play.
It's sad to say that the only good things that came from Duke Nukem Forever were added in by Gearbox and Piranha but that's exactly the case. The first 12 years of development by 3D Realms were wasted on a game that isn't groundbreaking, falls apart at the end and only lasts 10 hours. The most anticipated game of the year that promised to redefine first person shooters sadly doesn’t live up to the hype. Gearbox is a far better developer than this and the Duke Nukem franchise deserves better. Hopefully Gearbox can redeem the franchise in the future and give gamers the game that they've wanted for more than a decade but this isn’t it.
Pros – It actually got released, the best arcade-style multiplayer since Unreal Tournament 3 (complete with countless unlockables), minigames are fun, Gearbox managed to make an absolute mess of code playable
Cons – Horrible writing, a teenage virgin's depiction of women, The Hive level is sexist and disturbing, inconsistent graphical quality, reused music from Duke Nukem 3D, bad voice acting, gameplay no longer feels like Duke Nukem, too easy, poorly designed swimming and driving levels, unbalanced weapons, your wife will divorce you for buying it
5.5/10
