Small Victories
Duke Nukem Forever is a real product that can be purchased from store shelves. In a way, that seems like enough of a victory for the troubled shooter. The sad, but perhaps inevitable reality is that existence is one of the game's few triumphs. Everything contained within the package that is DNF can best be described as broken, boring, or bland; it's a relic from the 90s that, if anything, just goes to show how far the games industry has come since The Duke's heyday.
The game gets off to a comparatively strong start, with a tongue in cheek throwback to Duke 3D, a ton of silly environmental props to play around with, and a menage a trois with two buxom young ladies actually kind of eliciting some chuckles. But what begins as dumbly endearing quickly becomes flat out dumb. The gameplay actually devolves from this point, with the mediocre shooting often being watered down by rancid platforming segments and weird driving sections. The environmental interactivity quickly reveals itself to be nothing more than a gimmick; who cares if you can turn on all of the sinks and doodle on a whiteboard or two when the game surrounding this extraneous interactivity is so broken? Even the young ladies quickly become more disturbing than titillating, their dead eyes and rigid postures giving them the appearance of mannequins being manipulated by some sick puppet master.
By the time the story really gets rolling and the alien invasion begins in earnest, the game has already sunk under its own weight. The endless sexual euphemisms begin to seem desperate and, at worst, actually a little creepy. Everyone has already heard about the wall of boobs at this point (breasts just grow right out of the walls in the alien hive, because hey, why not?), but it's worth mentioning again for just how pathetic it comes across in the game. It certainly doesn't help that these nightmarish mammaries are immediately preceded by a room full of topless women suspended from the ceiling by alien goo, all begging to be put out of their misery. Oh, and their naked breasts jiggle around as you put a bullet in their heads and blood sprays from their skulls. And that marks one of DNF's major problems -- the humor comes across as less "wink wink, nudge nudge" and more "Duke has grown into a sadomasochistic rapist." At one point, a woman even implies that Duke will leave her to die unless she performs sexual favors for him in return. All of the women ceaselessly fawning over Duke could have been funny, but it was just handled wrong.
It's fair to say that the humor was misguided, and the same complaint can be leveled at the gameplay. This is, first and foremost, a shooter, but it feels like the majority of time spent playing DNF is spent platforming, driving, or just wandering around. The driving is at least functional, but the platforming is nightmarish. The concept of first person platforming has been bred out of modern shooters, and for good reason. It's imprecise and frustrating, and the fact that it comprises a solid third of the game is telling of DNF's monumental development cycle.
That's not to say that the shooting fares much better, though. This is as basic as games get. Point the reticule at an enemy, pull the trigger repeatedly while circle strafing, rinse and repeat. The only challenge inherent in the game's design comes from the fact that enemies spawn into the environment with no rhyme or reason, so it's impossible to tell where the next attack will be coming from. It's like someone sneezed aliens all over the levels and called it a day.
At least there are a few creative weapons thrown into the mix to make the shooting less dull. In addition to FPS mainstays like the pistol and shotgun, which are actually fairly satisfying to fire, a shrink ray and freeze ray are introduced later in the game. The shrink ray is the less viable of the two, as it reduces enemies in size but does nothing to prevent them from firing back at Duke, even in their reduced state. The freeze ray is more satisfying, as it actually encases enemies in a giant block of ice, which can then be shattered with a melee attack.
These guns can also be used in DNF's multiplayer modes, but they're no more fun there than they are in the campaign. In fact, the multiplayer is where the game shows its age most of all. There are no modes beyond the standard Deathmatch and Capture the Flag variants, and the maps seem to have been designed a decade ago and not touched since, which, in this case, is actually pretty plausible. A progression system has been hastily tacked on, but it only unlocks trivial items for use in Duke's penthouse. There's no incentive to come back to the dated shooting for a second round.
The Duke's latest adventure may be cloyingly misogynistic, leeringly creepy, poorly thought out, and horribly dated, but hey, at least it's finally out. Maybe now the industry can stop talking about it, because it really doesn't deserve the attention.
