Not worth the wait
Back in the day, I enjoyed the original Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem II, and Duke Nukem 3D. I waited patiently for a while expecting to play Duke Nukem Forever once it came out, but as the years passed since it was announced my sense of urgency dwindled. Still, once it came out and I saw there was a free demo on Steam, I had some curiosity to satiate, so I tried it out.
Not only did the demo help with my curiosity of what a presumably modern Duke would look and feel like, it also made me certain that it wasn’t worth any of my money. Not even for its historical significance. I expected much better — I assume they knew that this game was already the laughing stock of the gaming community, which to me would mean if I was going to release it then it had better be good. And not just good, but REALLY good. People who played previous Duke Nukem games have mostly given up on Duke, so Duke Nukem Forever needed to offer a whole lot more to win us back.
From what I saw in the lackluster demo, Duke Nukem Forever fails to even reach the level of other similarly-priced games let alone gain back the interest of those who gave up waiting. I’m not sure this game is even worth $20. Keep in mind I only played the demo, and I understand the full game has a much longer single-player campaign even though the demo was very short. I’m pretty sure it decided to show two unconnected sequences of the game because it had me defeat a sort of boss creature on a football field and then abruptly I was driving a monster truck through a desert canyon. The truck quickly ran out of gas so it had me get out and go find a gas can to get going again. It felt more like running an errand than playing a game, though it did have me battling some pig cops and shooting down a gunship on the way. I didn’t really expect much of a story since the previous Duke Nukem games haven’t gone much beyond aliens are invading and Duke is going to stop them, though the drastic changes in scenery in the demo were almost like a story black hole.
The game mechanics felt especially rough and that’s what really turned me off. The only able to carry two weapons at a time doesn’t seem to suit a character like Duke Nukem and I thought was more of a console thing than a mouse-and-keyboard thing. This game did come out for computers and consoles at the same time, but given the history I expected it to be more like a computer game ported to consoles than the other way around. The control wasn’t as smooth as it should have been either. Everything else seemed to move as it should have, but Duke’s movement was jerky.
I got the shrink ray at one point and managed to shrink some enemies (which is still fun) but couldn’t manage to step on them so they just kept shooting at me until I switched to a weapon that would actually damage them. I was hoping to fly around with the jetpack a little, but I didn’t come across a jetpack in the demo. It did include a white board I could write on, complete with a guy standing by to tell me I’m some sort of tactical genius and he can’t hope to understand what I just did there.
The part that did meet my expectations was the graphics. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but the quality you would expect from a modern game is there. The world seemed especially shiny though, like maybe it had just rained. As in just rained some sort of industrial lubricant. In the desert. That was more of an odd choice than shoddy work though — if making everything glisten was intentional, then good work.
My impression of Duke Nukem Forever may be suffering somewhat by the extreme shortness of the demo. The part of the original Duke Nukem available for free as shareware back in the day I’m pretty sure was the first third of the full game, but this demo isn’t nearly enough to get you wanting more. Maybe you wouldn’t want more anyway, since it doesn’t seem that great, but it takes me more than a boss fight, a driving level, and a fight-your-way-in level for me to get a good feel of the game. It’s enough to show you that the game has problems, but not enough for you to play through them and start to like it anyway.
I think I’ll stick with Serious Sam as my wisecracking tough guy who shoots aliens.
