Duke Nukem Forever

Apparently, this is what we have spent the last decade and a half waiting for, a shooter so boring and ugly it makes you wonder why you even cared about the Duke Nukem series to begin with. Because while Duke Nukem Forever's brethren were tongue-in-cheek run and gun shooters starring one of the most wonderfully obnoxious and iconic protagonists in the genres history--this long, long awaited sequel is nothing short of a mess that isn't worthy of anyones time and money, and any expectations you had should be jettisoned straight out of the window.

Pretty much everything about Duke Nukem Forever is as straightforward as it gets. This is a shooter that insists on being stuck in the past, using a lot of throwback elements that are severly outdated and frankly dead at this point. When was the last time you played a shooter that had an entire level devoted to platforming, for example? And save for a few modern touches --you're only limited to two weapons at a time and your health meter recharges-- this is one game that could have been passable maybe three or four years ago, but given how high the bar is nowadays for first-person shooters, Duke Nukem Forever comes off as being incredibly odious.

If you know the series' lead Duke Nukem, than you know how much he's into terrible one-liners, women and action, and even fourteen years later, he's just as immature as you remember him. He makes remarks about everything and his banter ranges from stupid to mildly amusing to downright disgusting. The stuff he says is good for a few chuckles but his in-your-face bravado wears off quickly and the only time you're likely to crack a smile is when the game makes fun of other shooter juggernauts, such as the Half-Life and Halo series.

If you have played any other Duke Nukem game, than you know that story has never really been the series strong point, and the same holds true here. After his commitments in the earlier games, Duke is now looked upon as a heroic icon but not long before the

aliens show up once again and beat the Duke to all the ladies, prompting him to take up the fight once again in a eight hour long single-player campaign that's surprisingly devoid of any sort of action. Duke Nukem Forever supposedly falls into the first-person shooter genre of games but there really isn't a whole of shooting going on during serveral portions of the game. Instead, the game seems to be more about driving and platforming with a bit of light puzzle-solving involved too. These are the sort of elements that are regularly used to break up all the on-foot shooting but it's the other way around here, as the game features entire sections that are devoted to either driving around in a truck or platforming around the bland and cluttered level design that often leads to confusion.

When you're not doing any of those things, Duke Nukem Forever plays a lot like a shooting gallery, featuring moronic enemies, boring weapons that lack punch and bosses that can easily be defated by circle strafing around them while you're filling them with lead. A few turret sequences are par for the course too, but in spite of all the attempts at variety, Duke Nukem Forever is a chore from start to finish and an awful underwater sequence and a part involving fetching gas cans for your truck brings the game down even further.

The weapons that stumble upon are all very typical, with the Shrink Ray serving as the only fun armament in the entire game. Here you can shrink enemies into a microscopic size and then stomp on them, but even that gets old fast and you'll likely just end up resorting to your shotgun, which can lay off most enemies with a single blast but heavier weapons such as The Devastator are required in order to kill the many bosses that you'll infrequently cross paths with. As a whole though, the combat is flat and monotonous and there are no set-pieces that spruce up the action.

Let me take a moment to discuss the excruciating load times that plauge the game too. It's not uncommon for levels that are only a couple of minutes long to be bookended by equally long load screens. This can be a major pain, especially during some of the later difficulty spikes where death happens regularly and you are forced to wait maybe a good fourty seconds before you can revert to an earlier checkpoint. They are even more intrusive given that this is an ugly, ugly game. Texture pop-ins, jerky frame rates, stiff animations, blocky character models and other visual oddities lead to a game that, despite its development time, feels rushed. Even the abysmal ending serves as an indication to this as well, and even Duke himself curses the developers for the abrupt and dumb ending, but that doesn't make it less crappier. The sound design fares a bit better, with some campy voice acting and stirring guitar riffs but the weapons sound very underwhelming.

There is also a multiplayer component to the game but it's very lackluster. As of this review, the game suffers from some terrible lag-issues online and even if you do happen to come across a smooth game, you'll the find the archaic modes and maps to be boring and even the leveling meta game comes off as dissapointing, as there aren't enough unlocks and customistation options to build some sort of incentive. So if you want some fun and fast-paced multiplayer action, there are far better alternatives out there.

So no, Duke Nukem Forever isn't raunchy, sexy or humourous and especially not fun. The campaign is a test of patience, with its boring gameplay sequences and horrendous load times and the visuals range from mediocre to awful. It has a few novel weapons and some clever nods to other games, but this is such a terribly flawed shooter that's deeply buried in all sorts of design and technical blunders that any chances of you having fun with it gets gets tossed by the wayside immediately. To put it bluntly, Duke isn't poised for a comeback and you should avoid his latest video game excursion at all costs.