14 years in the making: Duke Nukem Forever review

It's always good news when the controls listed in the manual assumes you are using an Xbox 360-controller.

I didn't have any high expectations at all when it came to Duke Nukem Forever. Ever since I got to know that the game would use regenerating health and a maximum capacity of two carried weapons, I knew something was wrong. I even wrote a long article that you may or may not have read about these two issues.

I do have good news though! Duke Nukem Forever was not at all as crippled by these design decisions as I originally had thought. I played through the game on the hardest difficulty you could choose without have beaten the game already, and while it was a pain in the ass to die so quickly in the early stages of the game, it got way better later on. Sure, some fights were hell, where you had to take cover to avoid an onslaught of rockets or similar, but the game felt way more run and gun-ish that I thought it would.

The two weapon limitation doesn't feel all that bad either. Sure, some weapons like the freeze ray and shrink ray might as well not be in the game - I only used each weapon once, and that was the very first time I ran into them. I would much rather have any other weapon in the game than one of those. Some other weapons are rendered quite obsolete as they are quite rare, and you at least won't be carrying them for longer moments, but it's not nearly as bad as with the two ray-weapons.

Does this mean I think Duke Nukem Forever is a good game then? I mean, my two biggest fears turned out to not be all that bad. Well, no. Not at all. I have written in another article how shooters with heavy emphasis on cover (DNF doesn't have this though) need to do extraordinarily well in other aspects, such as environments, animations, weapons, you name it. This doesn't make shooters more action-oriented immune from this though.

Duke Nukem Forever is a game that should have spent more time (ha-ha) on such aspects, like the weapons, environments, animations and so on. First of all, the weapons feel weak. The single weapon in the entire game that doesn't feel like a toy gun is the shotgun, but it doesn't feel much better than that either. And it certainly doesn't help that it has an effective range of about two meters.

The environments are just as bland as the weapons feel weak. Most of the game consists of linear corridors, and while there is some variation in the environments, none of them look good. Ugly textures exactly everywhere ruin what could have been slightly interesting environments, and you can't help but wish things looked different.

The same issue plagues all the characters in the game. Every character you will run across has absolutely awfully textured, and to add to that, at least the enemies' animations are among the worst I've seen in years. Their AI isn't particularly good either, as I've seen Pigcops get stuck on walls, and even air, slashing at seemingly nothing. It should be added that this was more frequent in early levels.

Duke Nukem Forever is deserving of its 18+ rating. It's filled with breasts, drugs, profanity and violence. This connects to another problem with the interaction with The Duke's enemies. While you will find more and more dismembered and mutilated corpses the further in the game you get, and you can find your enemies' corpses limbless and elseways brutally slaughtered if you happen to look at them after a fight, but it's hardly noticeable during the actual gunfights.

It's a really, really weird feeling to be spraying 20+ bullets into a Pigcop, without noticing any sort of blood spray at all, when the game is quite violent indeed in other ways. I do know that there, at least sometimes, sprays blood from enemies when shot, because I managed to see it a couple or three times during the campaign. It still doesn't change the fact that I could hardly see any of it, though.

Duke Nukem Forever features several gimmicks as well. First of all, there is the ability to execute some enemies to regain your Ego instantly. This might just as well have been left out. There's an achievement to get 20 executions in single-player, and I managed to get it on the level just before the ending boss, finishing the game with a total of 21 executions. None of them were needed to save my life either.

There's also the Holoduke, but I couldn't tell you how it works. I not once used it during my entire playthrough of the campaign. The Duke also has the ability to use Steroids to instagib most enemies with one melee attack, although he is only working at 75% of maximum health capacity. This is used on some of the first enemies of the game before all hell breaks loose, and I also used it on one boss together with the beer when I became desperate. The beer blurs The Duke's vision, and makes him much more resilient. Besides said boss, I used this item once later on, where I found it useful.

The Duke also manages to increase his maximum health pool by doing certain things, like defeating bosses, winning a game of air-hockey, and various other things. I found most of these opportunities to increase your health during the parts of the game where you socialize with other humans, with no aliens nearby. This is also a negative thing with Duke Nukem Forever. Judging from an achievement, there are 100 of these things you can accomplish to increase your health, but almost all of them are complete time-wasters, only necessary to help you survive.

Besides air-hockey, you can play a bad version of whack-a-mole, a bad version of pool with the worst physics I've seen, Duke Nukem 3D included, a bad version of poker and a slot machine. The pool and the slot machine mini games were so ridiculously boring and a waste of time that I skipped them. On lower difficulties, you can probably skip more, if not most of these annoying game-lengtheners.

That's basically what they are, stupid things that don't add anything at all to the gameplay, but take time, thus making the overall experience last longer. The same goes for the two areas where you won't see any combat. I spent at least one and a half hour in these meaningless areas. The first hour of the game for me was like this, but it will be much quicker if you don't insist on checking out almost everything. This means you'll lose out on max HP, though.

The second are is one in The Duke's fantasies, where he goes on a quest to find a few items in his strip club to get a private lap dance. I believe I spent half an hour here, trying to increase my max HP among other things. This, too, could be removed from the game without any harm done, as all it does is annoy, drag out the game length, and perhaps turn on a few teenagers who shouldn't be  playing this game anyways.

All these elements add up to Duke Nukem Forever's biggest problem. It's boring. Simple as that: the game is a total snoozefest. After seeing my first combat around an hour into the game, I wanted the game to come to its end after a total of two hours play time. Few games I've played during the latest years have been this boring. The combat is boring, the minigames are annoying, the graphics are ugly, and the humor and style are..? Well, I appreciate the style Duke Nukem 3D has, but I would say that Duke Nukem Forever is suffering from a case of trying too hard. Five minutes into the game I had heard enough of it to become bored, although some of the oneliners made me smile later into the game as well.

That doesn't change the fact that if this title wasn't a Duke Nukem game, no one would buy it, no one would pay attention to it, and no one would remember it a week after its release. A completely anonymous and forgettable experience that you wish would end a bit quicker.

The most entertaining parts of the entire game for me was none of the things you'd expect a Duke Nukem game to be great at. The most joy, or at least the least boredom I got from this title was one of the two major driving sections, namely the part where one got to drive a monstertruck, because behind the wheel I wouldn't have to suffer the drowsing combat nor the terrible textures up close. And that says a bit about a FPS.

The game took me about 7 hours to get to the credits, all loading screens, deaths and cut scenes included. I died a total of 35 times during the playthrough. The multiplayer aspect of the game might as well not be there, and you will most likely have a hard time finding a game in a week. It's lazily done with a maximum of 8 players and no dedicated servers that I know of. At the most I've seen five games up, and as of writing I managed to find one active game in the browser.

Pick this game from the bargain bin if you manage to find a copy there, or rent it over a weekend. I can't recommend a purchase even to the most die-hard Duke Nukem fan.



4/10