Duke Nukem Forever

Oh my. It's… It's here. He's here! I… I think I need a moment.

The Duke is back!

This has to be one of the most momentous events in recent gaming history. People, this is no ordinary game, this is one of the most anticipated games ever made. It has been in development for 14 YEARS.

That is not a typo. A decade and a half. Almost.

It started development in 1997, as a sequel to the much acclaimed and popular Duke Nukem 3D, a DOOM-Style (Build Engine) based 3D game with a protagonist “a combo of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold Schwarzenegger”. Full of slapstick, over the top macho-man, and altogether up-to-11 awesomeness.

It was wildly popular. It was pure, bottled fun.

This sequel has changed engine three times. The development team has been downsized and changed twice. It has burned through all the money the original developers made with Duke Nukem 3D and all their other titles (over 20 million US$), it has been long considered the quintessential example of vaporware – software that was promised but never released.

And it wasn't just naiveté on our part and that of the gaming press. More than just words and promises, over the years the developers have shown tech demos at gaming events that showed the game not only progressing, but being awesome. The reason it was always so awesome (and why always seemed too far from completion) was George Broussard, who was never happy with the game and always wanted more and more stuff added. There was an ongoing joke inside the studio of having a prize for whoever could come up with something to distract Broussard long enough to prevent him from playing new games, because every time he saw something cool he ordered the team to add something similar to their own game.

In 1998, they showed Duke fighting aliens and shooting from the back of moving vehicles – very impressive at the time, and we all loved it, critics included. In 2001 another E3 Expo showed Duke walking through an impressively interactive environment and life-like protagonists in what seemed to be Las Vegas, and the hype went up again because it looked awesome (with a flashy new engine, the Unreal Engine, having gone through the Quake II Engine). By 2004 yet another switch was made, this time to the physics engine, and the result was something that blew Half-Life 2 out of the water (no small feat, that!). It just kept getting better… But it never released.

You'd think after all this time we wouldn't care, but when in 2010 a playable demo was put in the Penny Arcade Expo, the queue to play the game was over four hours long. To play a demo. At a gaming convention FULL of the latest and greatest.

That's just how big this game is going to be.

Don't believe me? When 3D Realms approached Randy Pitchford (Gearbox's CEO) to help them finish the game and port it to consoles, Pitchford, who had worked on an expansion of Duke Nukem 3D before, agreed to help, because, and I quote, “Duke can't die” and decided that he was going to help “in Duke's time of need”.

This IS gaming history, my friends. Don't let it pass and be the one who, ten years from now, says “I had a chance to get Duke Nukem Forever when it finally released, and I didn't do it”.

I'll start with the bad news first- This is not a game for PC gamers.

You have regenerating health, (Meaning strawberry jam all over the screen when you get hit) strange controls, and worst of all, you can only carry 2 weapons at a time with a truly pathetic amount of ammunition. 5 rockets for the RPG is not enough to warrant carrying it around instead of say, a shotgun, given how rare the ammo is and how sporadic the lazy-designer's-shortcut infinite ammo boxes are. The gameplay is disappointing in that regard.

Now I'll go to the good- Duke's style remains. (If you ignore the chance to fling poo in the tutorial)

Though the shooty parts of the game are a disappointment, the setpieces are decently designed, and there is much encouragement for exploration in the form of permanent ego boosts, which increase your maximum health. These take the form of one-off tasks you can perform, like bench pressing 600 pounds, getting a dunk in a basketball hoop, drinking all the beer in one level, finding a hidden adult magazine and flipping through it, and winning a boss fight, which gives the biggest boost.

The humour is definitely Duke. It starts off slow with the first few levels seeming clearly designed to suck you in and possibly draw a newer audience, but once the game gets going, it seems to get a lot more comfortable with itself. A great many of the jokes and jabs Duke makes are aimed at people who would have been old enough to play Duke Nukem 3D in the 90s, and so the youngsters may be scratching their heads wondering what Duke meant by a particular reference. Even if it's unintentional, since the game IS 12 years old, effectively, I think it's good they've shown a bit of love for the audience who have waited for Duke to come back all this time.

If you want a solid game with great gameplay… This isn't it.
But if you want to hear Duke Nukem again, and miss his humour, then I don't think you'll be disappointed in that regard, as long as you give yourself a chance to warm up to it.

Game is nothing like the old school Duke3d. graphics look dated, only things that looked nice was the 1st boss fight and the ladies…

Although I wasn't expecting a game that had a development time of 12 years I still expected a nice polished game.Sadly I didn't get this.
Duke is still the man we love but the game is anything but. I feel a few decisions made by the people upstairs as well as an actual deadline have caused this game to feel like a rush job.
I still managed to have fun but not the 90 dollars worth of fun I expected from a game that has Dukes name on it.