About a decade ago, a bright eyed and bushy tailed gamer strode into EB Games filled with determination. When he declared to the staff that he wanted to cancel a pre-order they went into ‘retention mode’, trying to dissuade him from cancelling said pre-order. They finally asked what game it was for and when he responded they burst out laughing. The game was, of course, Duke Nukem Forever, and for the record, I’d put a pre-order down for it some 18 months earlier.

Duke Nukem Forever puts you in the stomping boots and fingerless gloves of the wise cracking, cigar smoking, babe loving Duke Nukem in what can only be described as one of the least complex game plots to ever grace screens. Those same nefarious aliens from Duke Nukem 3D are back for revenge and they’re hitting Duke where it hurts, taking all of the world’s babes. This is something Duke cannot abide and so it’s time for him to load up to kick ass and chew gum… minus the gum.

For the record, multiplayer has not been taken into consideration for this review.



If you’ve watched any of the recent trailers or read any single-player previews, you’d know that Duke Nukem Forever is an extremely self-aware game. It’s difficult to round a corner in the first few hours of the game without some pop-culturally relevant one-liner, slight at other games (or even at the Duke Nukem series) or tongue-in-cheek references to our beloved entertainment medium. If you buy into this type of humour, you’ll have a ball with this side of Duke Nukem Forever; and when it works, it works particularly well. But in my experience, a lot of these were more miss than hit and despite Duke’s initially expansive repertoire of one-liners, they became more and more annoying once they started being recycled later in the game.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Duke is how poorly he has aged. There are plenty of visible wrinkles in the form of terrible voice synching, noticeable dated gameplay mechanics and flat-out ugly graphics. I reviewed the game on Xbox 360 and while certain sections aren’t the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, such as the self-referential opening boss fight, the bulk of the game is filled with ugly textures, graphics pop and other noticeable rendering issues. Worst of all, this lack of prettiness is made more frustrating by lengthy loading times. Even with the game installed to the Xbox 360 hard drive, there was still a noticeable pause between sections or when revisiting the respawn screen that added to the overall frustration.

Stepping further into the dangerous fields of outdated land, Duke Nukem Forever reeks of a game that should have been released 10 years ago where it could have been appreciated and, more importantly, relevant to the accepted FPS gameplay conventions of the time. The real nasty side of this is when they’ve attempted to integrate more modern mechanics into the old-school formula, such as rechargeable health and limited weapon options.



Duke Nukem Forever replaces a health bar with an Ego meter that refills when not taking fire from enemies. While this would normally be all well and good, the problems come when the game actively encourages you to refill your Ego meter by performing various acts: checking yourself out in the mirror, benching 600 pounds or fondling weird alien breasts that grow out of walls. This attempt to combine the old-school approach of collecting health kits with the newer approach to regenerating health is a tad on the illogical side.

But the two-weapon limit is a whole lot more frustrating. This is exactly the same gripe I had with Bulletstorm: why create an old-school shooter whose humour partially involves its arsenal if you’re going to restrict the amount of weapons you can carry and, thus, the amount of fun you can have with wanton in-game destruction? Couple this with the aforementioned fact that Nukem can apparently bench 600 pounds and it makes him seem like a little girl when he can’t carry more than two weapons; particularly, when one of those weapons is a pistol.

At least Duke’s very faithfully adapted arsenal still kicks all kinds of arse. The shotgun, particularly, wins back its rightful crown as king of short-range weapons, putting more recent piss-weak attempts at toning down shotgun damage to shame (Killzone 3 springs to mind). Other returning weapons such as the Ripper, Shrink Ray, Freeze Ray and Pipe Bombs are ever-satisfying and provide a hearty bang for your buck. It’s just a pity that the new arsenal choices don’t come close to being on par with the awesomeness of Duke’s older weapons.



Unfortunately, the mostly solid gun cabinet does little to mask the repetitive nature of the combat that’s only exacerbated by laughably stupid AI. When they’re not running at you in a straight line, their attempts at intelligence tend to fall short. Certain foes try to make use of cover and then stay on a corner for easy flanking; others try to launch themselves at you but blatantly miss or get caught up in the all-too-frequent physics fails; while others still attempt to teleport behind you, but putting your back to a wall renders this move useless and they end up reappearing in front of you for an easy melee takedown. Suffice it to say, friendly AI is an almost non-existent affair which, in fairness, isn’t that much of a deal as I get that the game is supposed to be Duke versus an entire alien race.

While Duke Nukem is faithful to his misogynistic and badass roots, he does have the odd character slip-up that stands as a glaring inconsistency and makes him almost politically correct at times. One moment he’s unarguably Duke, throwing one-liners and Pipe Bombs at alien bastards or declaring that he’s going to save the chicks over an assault on a place of tactical significance. But the next moment when dishing out merciful deaths to alien-infested babes he’s apologising to them and justifying what he’s doing instead of taking another obvious leaf out of Bruce ‘Ash’ Campbell’s repertoire with, “Honey, you got real ugly!” Duke doesn’t strike me as the apologetic type.

The real surprise of Duke Nukem Forever is that the mostly violence-free interactive sections are often more engaging than the many, many firefights you’ll find yourself in before the credits roll. Whether shooting pool, swinging a crane’s wrecking ball or driving a remote-controlled car (both with a controller and as a miniaturised Duke), these interactive moments were often quirky and went a long way to breaking up the mundaneness of the abundant formulaic shooting sections. It’s just a pity that the environmental puzzles were so obvious and didn’t really require much grey matter to see what had to be done.



Without a doubt, the biggest problem with Duke Nukem Forever is how long it’s been in development. Many believed that it wouldn’t live up to the hype and they were right; and probably just as many people believed that it would never see the light of day. Duke Nukem Forever sits in a unique and privileged position in that it almost demands that you play it for yourself to make up your own mind.

The game really tries hard to show that a traditional approach to first-person shooters can still be relevant, but even filled with fond memories of Duke Nukem 3D and a burning desire that Duke Nukem Forever would be amazing, albeit rounded off with low expectations from reading/writing various previews, not even my heavily tinted nostalgia glasses could make me overlook some of the glaring flaws of this game that’s been some 14 years in the making.

Alas, what many had hoped would be a glorious trip down memory lane, is a muddled affair that lacks spit and polish across the board. Hail to the king, baby? No. Sadly, it’s more akin to, ‘Fail to the king, baby.’ And I’m genuinely disappointed that I couldn’t love the game more. In a weird way, I hope that Duke Nukem Forever makes enough money for us to see another game in the franchise—one that doesn’t take 14 years to produce—so that we can have a Duke Nukem experience with gameplay that takes genre advances into account and not one that relies too heavily on us wearing old-school-gaming goggles to appreciate a game that is desperately outdated.