Review: Duke Nukem Forever

With its notoriously long development time, my expectations for Duke Nukem Forever weren’t very high to begin with. But now I regret that I may have given 3D Realms (and Gearbox) too much credit. Duke Nukem Forever is simply atrocious. It is filled with uninspired levels, plagued by technical issues, and worst of all, spends large stretches of the game on mind-numbing platforming and vehicle sequences. Top it off with humor that tries too hard and fails spectacularly, and the only award this game will contend for is “worst FPS of the decade.”

The first thing you’ll notice when starting Duke Nukem is how long it takes to load a level. In some cases it takes up to a minute to load. During the course of the 10-12 hours it took to complete the single player campaign, I probably spent an hour stuck at loading screens. The worst of it was in boss fights, where you need to take a few deaths to figure out the strategy. Every death had the added penalty of the loading screen tacked on to it. I’m all for challenging bosses, but not if part of the challenge is to survive the load time.

I attribute some of this to outdated technology; the Unreal 2.5 Engine used on Duke Nukem Forever hasn’t been updated by Epic since ~2005. It’s a relic of the prolonged development time that they didn’t use Unreal 3, which famously supports great streaming for corridor-based games. Now it is possible to have functional streaming in the older version, as BioShock showed, but it requires a technical proficiency that seems to have eluded these developers.

The load times aren’t the only technical problem. Frame rate hitches are quite common, textures pop in all over, and the game even hung a couple of times. And this programming ineptitude spreads to other aspects of the game. The artificial intelligence is extremely artificial, and not very intelligent. As far as I can tell, the enemies don’t even bother to take cover, or flank you, or perform any advanced tactics. They either will just straight up rush you, or just run and gun. It’s very easy to outsmart the AI, and you need to because some of the enemies (such as Octobrains) are poorly balanced.

Technical issues can be glossed over if the gameplay is sufficiently entertaining. Unfortunately, this is definitely not the case with Duke Nukem Forever. The best levels are merely uninspired, and the worst ones are horribly repetitious. One such repetitive level has you running around in an alien hive structure. You run through the purple-green nest for easily 45 minutes, and nothing of note really happens. When the loading screen came up and said “The Hive Part 3,” I wasn’t very happy to say the least.

It also seems like most enemy encounters are 20% longer than they should be. A notable case is on a rooftop where waves of drop ships spawn enemies over and over again. There were easily 10 waves of enemies on the exact same small rooftop. And I’d have to say after the third or fourth wave I was waiting for it to end. There’s another encounter where you are doing a basic physics puzzle, but have to fight waves of enemies every step of the way.

The same length problem crops up with the non-shooting segments, which in my opinion are the worst parts of the game. For some reason, the designers seemed in love with their bland driving mechanics. Early on, you have a sequence when you’re mini-Duke and drive around in an R/C car. This is alright, but still a bit too long. Later on, there is an incredibly long set of levels where you drive around in a monster truck. This part of the game easily lasts an hour, with only brief shooting sequences interspersed throughout. I’m not sure who thought driving around in a mundane desert would be fun for more than five minutes, but I guess you have to artificially inflate the game’s length somehow.

The monotony of the driving is only topped by the platforming sequences as mini-Duke. Being tiny and jumping on everyday objects could have been amusing in small doses. As the game goes on however, you will learn to dread turning into mini-Duke. That’s because these sequences are terribly long; in one instance you jump around a fast food restaurant’s kitchen where the floor is. If you miss a jump, have fun with the loading screen! And even if you the jumps flawlessly, it drags on for way too long. I thought designers had learned that first person platforming in long stretches really isn’t fun, but I guess I was mistaken.

To top it off, there’s a host of gimmicky one-off sequences. One puzzle has you rerouting freezing gas by turning valves and rearranging pipes. Duke muses that he “hates valve puzzles” (so clever, right?), but you still have to solve this pointless one. In another instance, you’re running up stairs while exploding barrels are being thrown down at you a la Donkey Kong. Duke makes another lame quip, but that doesn’t give the sequence a free pass. There’s also an entire level that’s underwater and features almost no shooting.

Put this all together, and the middle of the game is a disaster. It has the boring hive level, followed by a fetch quest in Duke’s dream, followed by platforming as mini-Duke, followed by more platforming, followed by an hour in the desert. By then the Canary was already dead, but I had to soldier on to write this review.

This kitchen sink design philosophy extends to the little things that Duke can do to increase his ego, the game’s health system. You can bench press weights, or play pinball, or put money into a slot machine, or even shoot a basketball. I have no problem with mini games as a concept, and in certain games they can be fun. But given that the core game has so many issues, it’s befuddling that so much development time was spent on things that really add so little. Mini games should be like cherries on a great piece of cake. If you top a piece of manure with cherries, it won’t make it more appetizing.

Being a first person shooter, you may wonder how good the shooting mechanics are. Sadly here too the game falters. Many of the guns are essentially worthless, and I spent most of the campaign running around with a shotgun and RPG. And even the shotgun has problems; it has the smallest splash range you’ve ever seen on a shotgun. It seems like unless your extremely small reticule turns red, you will do no damage to the enemy. Even if the enemy is in melee range, if the reticule isn’t red and you fire, they don’t even flinch. It’s pretty frustrating when you have a pig cop right on you, fire three shotgun blasts in their direction, and do absolutely no damage. Combine these uneven shooting mechanics with poor enemy AI, and it really isn’t fun even when you’re just blasting through enemies.

Finally, Duke Nukem Forever features some of the most pathetic attempts at comedy in recent memory. I have no problem with raunchy comedies, and I like Judd Apatow films just as much as the next guy. But in this game, I didn’t laugh even once. I wasn’t offended, as some seem to be, but I wasn’t amused either. It feels like the script was written by a ten-year-old who just learned how to swear. To that kid, just putting curse words down automatically makes it funny, but to everyone else it’s not amusing at all. If your favorite comedy of all time is Dumb and Dumber, maybe you will be amused by the jokes in Duke Nukem. If on the other hand, you prefer more subtle comedy, as I do, you’ll wish you could just disable the cut scenes.

The game also features a multiplayer mode, but it’s an even bigger failure than single player. When I first loaded into a multiplayer game, I thought something was wrong because the textures looked like they were from 2002. It turns out that’s just the low fidelity multiplayer experience they provide. Furthermore, I had difficulty staying in game; 50% of my matches ended prematurely with disconnections. The game is also limited to bare bones modes: death match, team death match, CTF, and a king of the hill variant. You gain experience, but all that does is unlock new outfits and/or items to look at in an in-game apartment. The multiplayer did provide an outlet for the neglected weapons from the single player campaign, but when the game can’t even keep you connected that’s irrelevant.

Duke Nukem Forever is a game that you should stay away from at all costs. Even if you find it in a bargain bin for $5, where it will be soon, don’t buy it. That money is better spent on something, anything, else. If your choices are Duke Nukem Forever or Imagine: Babiez Kinect Edition, you’ve got to go with the babies.

VERDICT: DEAD CANARY

Duke Nukem Forever is available now on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Review was conducted on the Xbox 360. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.

This was a special double review Friday. Next week, I’ll take a look at Double Fine’s Trenched.

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Dead Canaries, Duke Nukem Forever, PC, PS3, Xbox 360

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