Kissing Lenses

Let’s be honest. When the first achievement that is attainable in a game involves fishing human waste out of a toilet, and you are then able to throw it at the walls, then you already know the tone that a game is trying to set and you know that you’re going to be in trouble. There is just absolutely no recovery. Yet, Duke Nukem Forever manages to resort to pure shit flinging within the first fifteen seconds. We can understand that Duke is meant to have risqué humour and exhibit risqué behaviour (that is what made Duke Nukem 3D so memorable, after all). But this is borderline unacceptable. We can understand that that sort of humour would appeal to some gamers, especially those who are members of Xbox360Achievements.org as evidenced through this link. But when your game has to assign 10 Gamerscore to acting like a chimpanzee in a zoo, then – actually. A chimpanzee doesn’t know any better. Human beings have a sense of decency, but you are expected to resort to the levels of an animal that is lower in the evolutionary ladder than us in order to get rewarded. Maybe they could add DLC that involves you ripping the head off a hooker while you’re fucking her. Hey, if you want to make the player act like a chimpanzee then why not make them act like a female praying mantis too and bring them down to that level? Go the whole hog, why don’t you? And that really sets the tone for Duke Nukem Forever. It is, by far, one of the worst of the worst in modern day video games because it seems to think that it is from six years ago, around the time of the conception of the target audience.

Whilst it is sad that after fifteen years of development (and it becoming an in-joke in the game community for being notorious vapourware) it’s finally come out as the biggest let down in the entire history of gaming, there are still no excuses as to the, frankly, sub par attempt at trying to make a Duke game. That joke is now on you. In fact, I would even argue that Gearbox Software (of all people. Creators of Borderlands) didn’t even try. Let me just make a quick point. After Duke Nukem’s original developers 3D Realms went under, Gearbox bought the rights to the game and the game up to the point it was at so far. The constant word from 3D Realms was that the game would be released under the “when it’s done” basis, but Gearbox purely wanted to make money and held one of the great icons of gaming to ransom.

After the acquisition, it’s pretty clear that rather than do what 3D Realms were trying to do (i.e. make sure every detail is perfect), Gearbox simply took the sections that were done and made a game around those, filling in the gaps with long, generic corridors and unfairly hard enemies in order to pad out a five hour game to around twelve on a good day. Particular culprits to this are the driving sections. The environments are quite simply shoddy and are a joke in modern standards, especially with games such as Half-Life 2 doing much better jobs are keeping the long driving sections interesting. To start, they don’t pad them out for over an hour, the jumping sections are ridiculously stupid, there is a cooldown on the turbo which could involve you tumbling off a cliff, there is no penalty for messing up a jump so you don’t care by the end of it, and the truck keeps running out of gas coincidentally at the start of cave systems and buildings that are full of gas cans scattered around the environment. There is absolutely no reason to have something such as gas in a game that was simply made for mindless action, button mashing and shooting. This is purely an attempt to break up driving sections with action sequences and it’s a simply poor attempt at doing something that could have been fun. After running over your third Pig Cop, it gets boring. So imagine running over your fiftieth. And your sixtieth……. Who thought this was fun again? If you want to make a good driving section, and if anyone want to play one, I recommend Half-Life 2. You can stop at some points for action sequences and puzzle solving but, bar two (which are essential to learn how to use new weapons and how to beat new enemies), they are optional. You don’t have to stop on your way to Nova Prospekt at all in Half-Life 2. With Duke Nukem, you need to stop roughly every five to ten minutes. Did I mention as well that that section of driving goes on for over an hour unnecessarily? Just in case you didn’t get enough of the tedious and boring driving section as a shrunken down version of Duke in an RC car driving for his life, you have to do the exact same thing with even more of those annoying jump sections. It wouldn’t be as bad if the graphics were pretty, and when we get games like Far Cry 2 (which came out in 2008) and Portal (which came out in 2007) producing utterly great visual treats to us, then you can assume that Duke Nukem will definitely deliver. I mean, Borderlands (another Gearbox game) looks great, right? *sigh* Sit down… This is going to hurt.

There is no easy way to put this. Duke Nukem Forever uses Unreal 2.5. That’s an engine that was released mainly to support the XBOX. Not the 360; the original. May I remind you that the XBOX was released in 2001? 2001?! The engine that this game is running off is older than the target demographic. So you can imagine that the graphics and effects for such a game are, how do you put i- awful. Constant physics glitches, inconsistent hitboxes, non-damage scaling hitboxes, buggy controls. Granted that the engine is a heavily-modified version, but if you try and build a game off of a ten year old technology then I really don’t think that the game will be able to perform next to titles such as any single one of them mentioned in this review so far that was made after 2005. Even the jokes are outdated, with references to Leeroy Jenkins, Team America and Christian Bale’s ranting. The game seems to be stuck in the past with no new innovations, instead taking too many steps back and simply resorting to nudges and hints at Duke Nukem 3D. The game plays off nostalgia but it seems like something that you see on a bad Newgrounds site. I feel insulted to have, not only pre-ordered, but paid money for this game. I feel like I have been severely let down by Gearbox and it is such an insult to one of the great video game characters that we have all come to know as “The King”. There is a reason for that.

Duke Nukem was such a breath of fresh air from games like Wolfenstein and Doom. Rather than focus much on strategy or anything, Duke gave that the finger and went in with a rocket launcher in one hand and a can of beer in another. Now Duke Nukem focuses too much on puzzle solving in something that should have been a game that was all about mindless stupidity. However, when the first seconds of your game involve pissing in a urinal and picking up shit then that is not what we meant by stupidity. However, it does balance out the utterly, mind-numbing boredom that the rest of the game brought to me. I couldn’t play more than two and a half hours at a time without having to take a break or do other things. It is really a game that shouldn’t be played in one sitting. It needs to be done over several weeks as you hack away at it. The patience you need for Duke sees no payoff either, with the final boss being a reskinned version of the very first boss that you meet in the game (which may I add took place inside a video game inside your video game and never really happened).

The elephant in the room is what drove a lot of players to the point that Gearbox must have been testing their patience. This section is The Hive, where the women kidnapped by the aliens are absorbed into the hive, raped and impregnated with other aliens that then try to kill you by exploding out of said women. Whilst there were mutated women in Duke Nukem 3D, these women didn’t feature naked breasts, they weren’t crying, they didn’t explode and when you shoot them, their guts don’t spew out all over the floor. Gearbox seem to think that this is a joke to them. They seem to think that this what players really want to see when they play Duke Nukem, a game about a guy with a steroid and peroxide addiction going around with shotguns and rocket launchers killing aliens. Well, Gearbox, this isn’t what we wanted to see. It just proves to everyone who has played your game (yes, your game) that you have a hard-on for this sort of sadistic behaviour. We want action in an action game. We don’t want to put the barrel of a shotgun in the mouths of women that have been kidnapped and raped and then blow their brains out. This is simply an insult to every single person who has held out for this game all these years and they should simply be ashamed of themselves for putting out such a product.

Duke also has a multiplayer aspect to it. Whilst I do applaud Gearbox for placing all of the achievements into the single player campaign only (so we don’t have to rely on pulling off thirty headshots in under ten seconds or something ridiculous like that to get Gamer Score), the motivation for multiplayer is a little weak. It’s good to have a central hub that handles multiplayer (Bioshock 2 had your bedroom in Rapture, as an example) and Duke has his building to house all of your multiplayer rewards. It’s a nice idea, but the concept falls flat when there isn’t a lot to actually do in multiplayer. You level up to get trophies and women to appear in your penthouse suite. As for the multiplayer itself, the game modes are generic, boiling down to Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and King of the Hill. The maximum number of players are four per team (with games like Team Fortress 2 from 2007 allowing 16 per team) but I still feel that the servers are simply unable to handle even eight players. This isn’t due to graphics or network problems (ping is reported as less than fifty), but purely due to poor network code. Players teleport, jump backward, perfect shots cause no damage whilst complete misses instant kill. And explosives are unbelievably overpowered with the ability to spawn kill also being present also. It doesn’t help that every single player looks like Duke. Every. Single. One. There is one character model for multiplayer with the only differences being different coloured shirts for each team. That. That is unacceptable. That’s lazy. Why didn’t you let us play as characters like the Pig Cops or the Armoured Aliens or the EDF soldiers? You missed out on so many opportunities here to make a multiplayer that rivalled Goldeneye for awesomeness. That could have given you so many points in your favour. But it was a rushed job. It was multiplayer experience that couldn’t even compete with a college game project.

This game is simply a mess, and it is out simply because Gearbox wanted to make money as quickly as possible without even attempting to listen to customers. I didn’t even mention the fact that Duke uses the Halo weapons mechanics of two weapons at a time only. How was this necessary? Old Duke was like Gordon Freeman and could carry a rocket launcher with a dozen rockets without breaking a sweat, so why change that? It worked, didn’t it? This is, quite frankly, the lowest a game can sink. PC Gamer’s Dan Stapleton gave this game a glowing 80/100. I now question this man’s journalistic and reviewer integrity. In the past, it was not uncommon for some developers and publishers to buy a good review. A classic case of someone who went against this and spoke his mind, despite being paid to give a good review was Jeff Gerstmann of Gamespot. Eidos (the developers of Kane and Lynch) sunk a lot of money into advertising Kane and Lynch on the Gamespot website, including a full reskin and a change of interface. After Jeff gave only an average review of the game, he was promptly fired for “undisclosed reasons”. This lead to editors Alex Navarro, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker, and Vinny Caravella leaving the site out of protest against advertisers buying reviews. These people who don’t cave into corporate pressure are the ones we should be listening to with our reviews. If you want to find a site with good journalistic and reviewer credibility, go and take a look at Blistered Thumbs. They do amazing work over there and are completely independent. They give disclosures and they are fair and honest with their reviews. Seriously, go and check those guys out.

Duke Nukem Forever, as it is, is simply a corporate tool, used to blackmail gamers into parting with money. It is simply serving shit onto a silver platter, sprinkling it with icing sugar and putting a can of beer next to it. Duke Nukem Forever gets a final verdict of 2/10. And that is being generous. This is simply a must-avoid game. Do. Not. Buy. This. Game. This shouldn’t be Duke Nukem, this shouldn’t be $60, this shouldn’t have been released. It is appalling that this should be allowed. Avoid this game at all costs and buy an actual good game. Get something like L.A. Noire. It has a lot more sophistication, it’s a lot more intelligent, really well made, immersive, significantly longer, much more entertaining and there is a massive potential for DLC with extra cases. Buy L.A. Noire and avoid Duke Nukem Forever. It’s simply a rotting turd sat on top of the golden throne that once belonged to a much better man much more worthy of it.