Duke Nukem Forever2011-07-20 07:12 GMT
While I'm essentially an unemployed scummer living in the magical land of Oz, Skels made me promise to knock out a review or few to pay the rent, so to speak. I guess it beats hoiking my warez on street corners, especially as the weather has turned into a decidedly British Summer (cold and wet). So let's kick things off with the long awaited Duke Nukem Forever...
I'll start by saying that I'm pleased I made the decision to buy this game for the PC as I hear the console load times are horrendous - even just for a simple reload after death - and it's probably something that would've stopped me from seeing it through to the end, which would have been a shame. No seriously!
Despite being a good 12 years too late, and despite being the butt of Internet jokes for pretty much the whole of that time, I actually enjoyed this game. I enjoyed it by playing it as if I were replaying an old classic, and quite frankly, at times it's hard not to feel like you're doing exactly that. It has the same, tired clichés: the explosive barrels, the ammo crates, the underwater levels, but all of them done in a completely non-ironic sense. Of course, at the time these levels and set pieces were originally conceived it was just how games of this nature were done, so you really don't have a lot of choice; either develop amnesia for the intervening years or end up feeling ripped off and a little depressed at just how old you've become in the time it's taken for this game to see the light of day. Once you give in and introduce your head to Mr. Hammer you're in for a fun, if somewhat rushed feeling sequel to the seminal classic. Always striving to recreate the sheer wide-eyed joy of Duke Nukem 3D and never quite getting there. But hey, what sequel does, right?
So then, for the most part I did enjoy it. What I did find odd is that the times the game falls over are the times that it attempts to take inspiration from titles that have arrived in the interim. Things that simply have no place in a mindless A to B shooter like this, such as the two-weapons-at-a-time limit. In Halo it was inspired, in Duke Nukem it serves only to frustrate, and if you're going for the achievement whereby you take the golden pistol through the entire game it becomes a one gun system. The limits of this become all too apparent when the levels designers have been forced to place infintely stocked ammo caches at nearly every turn. An ammo cache with an abundance of explosive weapons? You're in for a boss fight, my friend.
By far the largest hurdle to enjoying this game, though, are the first few levels. The game starts in Duke's Las Vegas casino, where you soon find out that he's become a major, worldwide celebrity since vanquishing the first alien invasion 15 years prior. (During this celebrity the world's population seem to have become base morons, leading to every single product or poster found in the entire game being a tiresome, crude toilet joke. I digress.) You spend a good 10 minutes heading to the bottom of the complex for a talk show interview, which can easily extend to 30 minutes if you bother to do the ego (health) boosting environmental interactions. When the aliens invade and the talk show is cancelled, you have to fight back to the top floor to blow up a big mothership before fighting all the way back down to the ground again. I'd say a good quarter of the game takes place in this casino and it gets so dull. The part where you get shrunk and have to drive a radio controlled car, which would've been inspired if the game was on time, only serves to drag the whole thing out far more than necessary. Endure this intial slog though, and the game gets into its stride. It's certainly no masterpiece but it's a fun romp with some interesting set pieces and bosses, some Duke one-liners and an overall length that's just about perfect.
The thing is, once you've killed the final boss, watched the credits and been dropped back into the main menu, it unlocks a bunch of extras including the videos that were released at the various trade shows during its long history. The very first of these, from way back in 1998, was the E3 annoucement trailer. At 4 minutes long it showcased a whole bunch of great ideas and concepts that, had they just stuck with it, would've been downright awesome. And that's the thing. If they'd just got on with it instead of scrapping and restarting the whole project every time a shiny new engine came along this game would've been so much more than it turned out to be. It would've been released in a time when it was relevant and innovative and this review would be a retrospective of just how amazing Duke Nukem Forever was. You know, back in its day.
I'll start by saying that I'm pleased I made the decision to buy this game for the PC as I hear the console load times are horrendous - even just for a simple reload after death - and it's probably something that would've stopped me from seeing it through to the end, which would have been a shame. No seriously!
Despite being a good 12 years too late, and despite being the butt of Internet jokes for pretty much the whole of that time, I actually enjoyed this game. I enjoyed it by playing it as if I were replaying an old classic, and quite frankly, at times it's hard not to feel like you're doing exactly that. It has the same, tired clichés: the explosive barrels, the ammo crates, the underwater levels, but all of them done in a completely non-ironic sense. Of course, at the time these levels and set pieces were originally conceived it was just how games of this nature were done, so you really don't have a lot of choice; either develop amnesia for the intervening years or end up feeling ripped off and a little depressed at just how old you've become in the time it's taken for this game to see the light of day. Once you give in and introduce your head to Mr. Hammer you're in for a fun, if somewhat rushed feeling sequel to the seminal classic. Always striving to recreate the sheer wide-eyed joy of Duke Nukem 3D and never quite getting there. But hey, what sequel does, right?
So then, for the most part I did enjoy it. What I did find odd is that the times the game falls over are the times that it attempts to take inspiration from titles that have arrived in the interim. Things that simply have no place in a mindless A to B shooter like this, such as the two-weapons-at-a-time limit. In Halo it was inspired, in Duke Nukem it serves only to frustrate, and if you're going for the achievement whereby you take the golden pistol through the entire game it becomes a one gun system. The limits of this become all too apparent when the levels designers have been forced to place infintely stocked ammo caches at nearly every turn. An ammo cache with an abundance of explosive weapons? You're in for a boss fight, my friend.
By far the largest hurdle to enjoying this game, though, are the first few levels. The game starts in Duke's Las Vegas casino, where you soon find out that he's become a major, worldwide celebrity since vanquishing the first alien invasion 15 years prior. (During this celebrity the world's population seem to have become base morons, leading to every single product or poster found in the entire game being a tiresome, crude toilet joke. I digress.) You spend a good 10 minutes heading to the bottom of the complex for a talk show interview, which can easily extend to 30 minutes if you bother to do the ego (health) boosting environmental interactions. When the aliens invade and the talk show is cancelled, you have to fight back to the top floor to blow up a big mothership before fighting all the way back down to the ground again. I'd say a good quarter of the game takes place in this casino and it gets so dull. The part where you get shrunk and have to drive a radio controlled car, which would've been inspired if the game was on time, only serves to drag the whole thing out far more than necessary. Endure this intial slog though, and the game gets into its stride. It's certainly no masterpiece but it's a fun romp with some interesting set pieces and bosses, some Duke one-liners and an overall length that's just about perfect.
The thing is, once you've killed the final boss, watched the credits and been dropped back into the main menu, it unlocks a bunch of extras including the videos that were released at the various trade shows during its long history. The very first of these, from way back in 1998, was the E3 annoucement trailer. At 4 minutes long it showcased a whole bunch of great ideas and concepts that, had they just stuck with it, would've been downright awesome. And that's the thing. If they'd just got on with it instead of scrapping and restarting the whole project every time a shiny new engine came along this game would've been so much more than it turned out to be. It would've been released in a time when it was relevant and innovative and this review would be a retrospective of just how amazing Duke Nukem Forever was. You know, back in its day.