It's Not A Bad Shooter
My memories of Duke Nukem 3D are vague, I was too young at the time of its release and all I remember was some older kids playing it on the Nintendo 64, therefore, I didn’t have many expectations for DNF other than an homage to classic FPS’s.
And it was that…kinda. The game is a weird mixture of old and new, it has a bizarre attention to interactive objects on the level that managed to even remind me of Deus Ex, it also carries the recharging health and two weapon limit that rule the current generation of shooters.
I understand the recharging health and I think it’s way better than having to scrounge for medkits after every close call you have, however, I can’t understand on how the two weapon limit is a good way to play this game, the weapons don’t complete each other, the shrink ray and the freeze ray are two weapons that have actual use in few situations, limiting the player to two weapons makes one worry about which weapon would be useful all around instead of “Oh yay! A new weapon! Fun!”
The game starts well once you learn the joy of the shotgun and the executions, which completely recover your Ego (your health in the game), however, you learn all this alone, the game is too focused on making funny jokes to show the player it’s weapons and features , the game tells you to use melee to conserve the meager ammunition it gives between resupply boxes, however, the melee in the game is only useful against smaller enemies, most attempts of using melee on larger enemies will consist of you getting shot down to at least half of your health so that you may give the enemy a weak strike that seems to annoy them a bit, then you get shot a bit more, after you understand how the combat rolls and start using the pipe bombs and tripwire mines ,which keys are badly located on the keyboard and may lead you to down a bottle of steroids while being attacked by enemies too far away for your fists, you will probably find yourself actually enjoying blasting aliens and Pigcops.
You also will do a lot of platforming and physics puzzles which seems to have been very…”inspired” by Half-Life 2, the game is kind of schizophrenic on its level design, sometimes you’ll see a pipe that reminds you of a seesaw or maybe a series of platforms made by various objects on a path and will instantly and satisfyingly solve the problem of the room, other times you’ll do leaps of faith on rather thin tentacles or weird parts of the map that look more like secret detours or outright death hoping that is the right way or you will be searching for barrels to shove in a very first-Half-Life 2 to create a way.
The good parts of combat, puzzling and platforming follow the game through two thirds of the game and is actually a fun experience, however, it takes a turn for the worse, the game instead of bringing new elements starts reusing old set pieces to the point of exhaustion, you’ll see the same puzzle but, oh! The part that you need to climb is now hidden in this weird area! Combat becomes a chore, you’re spammed with basic enemies that you defeated countless times and the platforming gets outright bland.
Then, the coup-de-grace, the underwater parts, the first time the game introduces you to water combat is with tiny annoying enemies which were pushovers in land are now crazy hard to hit bastards that can easily swarm you , thankfully, this type of enemy is used only once but that doesn’t make the level that is entirely underwater any better, in what must be the craziest decision in the history of video games, Duke Nukem Forever brings a level that mixes bad underwater controls, a short amount of time between the need of getting more air and ranged enemies that harass you all the time, overwhelming you with annoying stuff to keep track of, the two weapon limit rears its ugliest head here making few of the weapons actually useful.
Even with all these issues I can’t say I didn’t have fun with Duke Nukem Forever, you’ll laugh at it, sometimes thanks to its jokes, other times on its outright silliness and the gameplay holds together most of the time.
The character of Duke is…weird…he’s insensible, cracks jokes at any situation, it’s like he’s less immersed in the game than the player himself, he doesn’t care if that dude just got killed by an explosion or if those girls just got horribly violated by aliens, then, when his words would actually matter he falls silent, it’s like he was riffing (badly) or maybe talking to himself the whole game and has no interest in the actual situation.
In the end, Duke Nukem Forever is an average shooter with a character that is more legend than reality and likes to spew memes and old one-liners.
It’s not bad.
