There are two types of gamer in this world: those who played Duke Nukem 3D when it was released in January 1996; and those who have listened (likely with the bemused exasperation reserved for elderly, slightly mad relatives) to the tales told by the former group about how totally awesome Duke Nukem 3D was. I fall in to the first group, and beyond logical reasoning, I wanted Duke Nukem Forever to be some sort of fairy tale of a game that triumphantly justified its belated release.
Despite my best efforts to find the silver lining, there is only one word that anyone needs to understand Duke Nukem Forever – disappointing.
I feel that a brief history lesson is warranted to set the stage for a review of Duke Nukem Forever, and I hope you bear with me through this lengthy review.
Duke Nukem Forever was announced in April 1997, and back then that news was probably tantamount to Valve announcing Half-Life 3 today – it was going to be huge. Everything pointed to a mid-1998 release. Then it was delayed – and so began a 13 year cycle of promises and disappointment. Over the years, the 3D engine was changed – Quake II (id Tech 2), Unreal, in-house developed engine, and finally back to Unreal 2.5. Entire chunks of the level design were scrapped, physics were introduced, and then physics engines were changed. This was development hell.
Finally, 3D Realms went under in May 2009 as their publisher, Take Two, pulled the plug on funding. Many hoped that this would be the final nail in the coffin for one of gaming’s sorriest stories. However, a core team of individuals from the Forever project resorted to working from their homes to try and cobble together the pieces of the game. Duke Nukem Forever effectively became an indie project. In September 2010, Gearbox Software under the direction of CEO Randy Pitchford, stepped in at the eleventh hour to resurrect the game. Gearbox bought the Duke Nukem IP and undertook to polish Forever up into a shippable state, and also port it to consoles.
With its 14 year history of development hell, there was little hope that Duke Nukem Forever would emerge as anything more than a butchered mess. Duke’s only hope was his loyal fan base. To a new generation of gamers who missed out on the original, Duke is irrelevant and his legend nothing more than gaming folklore.
So Duke Nukem Forever has finally arrived, and just about the only thing I feel it can offer Duke Nukem Fans is closure.
Reintroducing Duke Nukem
The game begins by showing off some of its environmental interactivity – with Duke pissing in a urinal. Players can then wander around to a toilet stall and (in an ironically poetic twist) pick up a turd. I’ll leave it up to you dear reader, to draw the metaphorical comparison between handling faecal matter and playing Duke Nukem Forever. Is this the best way 3D Realms and Gearbox could reintroduce gamers – young and old – to a video gaming icon?
From this poor start, Duke’s character does little to grow on the player. Thanks to the familiar voice acting of Jon St. John we have a taste of the old Duke. The fan-favourite one-liners are recycled, and a few unmemorable new ones are introduced. Something is undeniably wrong about the whole presentation of Duke’s personality. It’s almost as if through the attempt to play-up the larger than life persona of Duke Nukem we have also been given a grim insight into the character – a shallow, misogynistic, ego-centric, beer swilling, muscle-headed, steroid junkie. Perhaps Duke is meant to be an anti-hero of sorts, and should be viewed as such, but he seems to have lost his charm. I leave it to the forum debates to decide on Duke’s evolution as a character.
3D Realms trots out a few classic jokes from Duke 3D, such as Duke stumbling across dead contemporary gaming heroes and dismissing them with a crass one-liner. This comes off as nothing more than poor attempts at fan service that carry little weight. The rest of the humour found in Forever consists of terrible sexual puns, sexual innuendo, and swearing. The plot is the same old story – Aliens invade Earth, kidnap the babes, and Duke kicks everyone’s ass.
Visuals and sound
Forever appears to be built on a modified Unreal 2.5 3D engine, or at least something comparable. Forever looks like a game that may have visually impressed in 2004, but in 2011 it appears woefully out-dated in a world of Unreal 3, id Tech 4, CryENGINE 3, and even the stalwart Valve Source engine. In fact, had Forever been released in 2004, it would have been up against Half-Life 2, and even then I believe it would have fallen short of the mark.
That said, the visuals aren’t terrible; they are thankfully acceptable, showing off a standard array of lighting, shadow and texture mapping technology, making attempts to slug through the ±14 hour campaign tenable. There are rarely examples of inspired level design. The alien hive levels are probably the most visually interesting, even if the inspirational source is glaringly obvious – the art of H.R. Giger.
Unfortunately this is a brief reprise from slogging through rather bland environments: an oddly stale looking Las Vegas destroyed by alien attack; Duke’s casino; a dreary strip club; the exterior and interior of a towering Duke Burger; and a drive through the desert around Las Vegas on the way to the Hoover Dam finale. The only other levels worth commenting on are brief stopovers in an old west style town and a decrepit mine – even those provide only a mildly entertaining segment of corridor shooting action.
One of the positives of the visual design is the alien bad guys. They seem to have been reworked many times over the years, and they have lost a lot of their comic appearance from the Duke 3D days. They now look rather terrifying and brutal, with nice attention paid to detail. Unfortunately the design inspiration appears to have stopped short of introducing any new regular enemies, with only a few larger iterations of existing aliens serving as boss monsters.
Aside from Jon St. John’s work, the voice acting is decidedly average, the script generally asinine, and the sound effects merely passable. The music also leaves much to be desired, with various recycled versions of the classic Duke Nukem theme cropping up throughout. In some areas, shockingly bad 16-bit midi music rears its ugly head – this is certainly something that should have been left back in the 90s.
It is probably worth noting at this point that the console versions (Xbox 360 and PS3) of Duke Nukem Forever have proven to have terrible visuals and performance. After some hands-on time with the 360 version, I can confirm this. Thankfully the PC version doesn’t suffer from these problems. For a closer analysis of the differences check out Digital Foundry’s expert dissection of Duke Nukem Forever.
Gameplay
Duke Nukem Forever suffers from a number of bad design choices, and one wonders at which point they were introduced to the game. It’s as if Duke Nukem Forever was constantly striving to keep up with modern FPS mechanics, making concessions for console design, all the while retaining the brutal pacing of Duke 3D, with some interactivity gimmicks thrown-in for good measure. This mash up of mechanics makes for a decidedly frustrating FPS experience. The controls feel especially cumbersome when using a game controller.
First of all is the health system; gone are health and armour pickups, which have been replaced by an ego bar. Throughout the game Duke can increase his maximum ego by interacting with environmental objects such as playing a boring, pace-breaking assortment of poorly implemented mini-games with questionable physics.
The ego bar follows the modern trend of being replenished if Duke cowers behind some cover for long enough – an entirely un-Duke Nukem thing to do. Unfortunately the encounter design and the enemy AI appears more geared towards the old-school player managed health and armour pickups and portable health kits.
Duke can pick up a few helpful items, but only carry one of each at a time. Steroids make him a melee powerhouse and beer toughens him up. Both have visual side effects which somewhat negate their usefulness in some cases, but it’s workable. The Holo-Duke is as helpful as ever, distracting enemies from the real Duke. There are certain areas that necessitate Holo-Duke use, and these become frustrating if the Holo-Duke is wasted beforehand.
Another horrible design choice is that Duke can only carry two weapons. This means players will be juggling their guns around frequently, abandoning one for another, and often winding up having the wrong tools for the next encounter. The designers sprinkle weapon pickups around the level, hinting at what is required for the next fight. Ammo just about lasts for the entirety of an encounter – if you’re lucky. Duke then scurries about collecting ammo before moving on to the next area. Most disappointing of all, is that there are few new weapons; an alien version of a rocket launcher, an alien blaster, a sniper rail gun and the occasional immovable, generic mounted machine-gun or grenade-launcher).
This all seems like regression on the classic Duke 3D style. Sure, the FPS genre has moved on, but like a classic rock song, the old school style surely has its place, and it should have been in Duke Nukem Forever. Something must be said for giving the player a huge arsenal and allowing them to collect ammo for the various weapons and deciding on which to use for themselves, and also preventing them from being left in the lurch when a fight drags on.
The enemy AI is brutal and unrelenting, but not particularly clever. Enemies simply swarm for duke and rarely exhibit any kind of tactical manoeuvring. Otherwise their movements are scripted and despatching them becomes a matter of dying a few times to learn the motions. Worst are the pigcops – they deal a ton of damage and Duke is quite easily killed with their new melee attacks. They also move faster than Duke, so the player is often forced to backpedal and circle-strafe while firing, hoping the pigcop dies before they run out of map. This happens again and again. When fighting ranged enemies Duke will invariably have to cower behind some obscure piece of cover and get off pot shots.
The level design is claustrophobic and often provides little room for manoeuvring around enemies. This is especially apparent during boss fights which reduce the player to hiding in the tiniest pocket of cover while being bombarded by enemies and projectiles, and occasionally being given opportunity to get off some shots. Because of the weapon and ammo carrying design choices, Duke constantly has to run to an ammo and explosives pick up spot to replenish, conveniently located right in the open where he dies easily.
All this might have been acceptable if the levels appeared to have been designed with any of it in mind, but it looks as if the shooting mechanics, enemy AI and level design are patched together from three different games. Death results in being forced to restart a segment from annoyingly spaced checkpoints. There isn’t even the mercy of quicksave on the PC version.
It’s as if the game expects you to die a lot during the first play-through, and then re-approach it with the knowledge of what lies ahead, so that the experience is slightly smoother. Unfortunately, unlike Duke 3D which was so much simple fun that it invited innumerable play-throughs, the prospect of slogging through Duke Nukem Forever again is not appealing.
Overall, one goes from being unimpressed by bland levels, to outrageously frustrated by shoddy implementation of game mechanics, sloppy level design, and unbalanced combat, with only a few entertaining reprieves mixed in to keep one hoping for more fun.
Conclusion
Duke 3D was ground-breaking on so many levels, but 14 years later, a middle-aged Duke struggles to keep up with the younger crowd. There are no fresh or interesting ideas in the game. It’s utterly disappointing to think that after 14 years of development, not a single design document or even a good solid gameplay idea emerged from the mire.
The tale of Duke Nukem Forever is a sad one, bookended by the phenomenal, legend-birthing success of Duke Nukem 3D and the dismal product that eventually appeared over 14 years later. Attempts to understand why the game finally made it to us in this state due to its historical context are perhaps warranted, and these dissections will likely take place in gaming discussion boards for a long time to come, but it doesn’t change the bottom line – Duke Nukem Forever is uninteresting and not a good game. Duke Nukem has returned as a tired action hero making a B-grade comeback; a poor cover version of his previous success.
While considering my thoughts on the game, it occurred to me that the Duke Nukem Forever opening cinematic was perhaps the thing I enjoyed most about the title, and only because it tugs on the heartstrings of the good memories I have of Duke Nukem 3D.
One last nostalgic look at what could have been: below is a Duke Nukem Forever trailer released in 2001, showing what at the time, if realised, would have been some great gameplay innovation and what appears to be a truly interesting game.
Too bad the King returned 10 years too late.
There is one last hope for Duke Nukem. The intellectual property is now in the capable hands of Gearbox Software – the only company with the balls of steel required to ship the unshippable, bring an end to the miserable tale of Duke Nukem Forever, and give fans of Duke the closure they deserve. Free of a 14 year developmental yoke, perhaps Gearbox can build a new Duke Nukem game from the ground up and deliver a title worthy of the legacy he established back in 1996.
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