Title: Duke Nukem Forever
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: 3D Realms / Gearbox Software
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
Genre: First Person Shooter
Release Date: June 14th, 2011
Price: $59.99
Rating: M
Seriously… Like, where to begin with this game.
Duke Nukem Forever is the latest (and to most gamers the first) in a “franchise” that has been more synonymous with delays and vapor ware than… well ANYTHING really. Duke Nukem forever started out as a sequel to the hit game for PC “Duke Nukem 3D” back in good ol’ 1996. As development started for DNF it was originally supposed to be on the Playstation One, if I am remembering correctly. Designer George Broussard and creator of Duke 3D announced in 1997 that development for DNF had started. Back then PC gamers were super excited to get their hands on another game staring the wise-cracking, lady killer. Expectations and anticipation was needless to say pretty high.
As the years went by however, Duke Nukem began a long and mostly comedic spiral into obscurity and obsolescence. After several delays and more than a few questions about when we as consumers and gamers could expect Duke to resurface, 3D Realms flat out told the public, it would be out “when it’s done”. This effectively was the moment at which Duke Nukem Forever would become the joke it is today. Entire time lines have been created of things (mostly games) that have come and gone since then. If you wanted to shelve a title or give some meaning behind the delay your title might have, you would say “It will be out after Duke Nukem Forever.” Hell, even the acronym for Duke Nukem Forever stands for Did Not Finish, in other circles.
Flash forward to 2009 and a court case against 3D Realms that would set in motion the final, FINAL coming of DNF. 3D Realms was going through down-sizing and as a result TakeTwo Interactive decided to sue them for basically never finishing the game. For several months there was speculation that Take2 would be handing off the Duke IP to someone to finish and actually get to the market. On September 14th, 2010, Take2 announced that, yes in fact they had given the IP to a developer, and that dev was Gearbox Software. Oddly enough Gearbox is run by a former 3D Relms producer and someone that actually worked on Duke 3D, Randy Pitchford. After all that, Duke Nukem Forever was set to release May 3, 2011. Much to the amusement of pretty much everyone outside of Gearbox and 3D Realms for that matter, DNF was pushed back one more time to June 14, 2011. As the day neared most everyone anticipated another delay, however that never came, and Duke Nukem Forever was finally released upon the world Tuesday June 4th 2011.
Thus ends the history lesson of Duke Nukem Forever and begins the debacle that is the game proper.
Duke Nukem Forever is a game that rose from the ashes of it’s past, to be released into a future that didn’t need it anymore. Let me explain that statement. Duke Nukem the character and even the game Duke Nukem 3D was a game all about machismo, bad one liners, and “saving the babes”. For the time it was perfectly acceptable as a game. It was going almost head to head with industry leader Doom, much like the way that Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row battle it out. It’s hard to put into words the feeling you get playing Duke 3D verses DNF. I think no one else has encapsulated this better than Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb, when he said that “Duke Nukem just feels like your weird Uncle. When you were young he was cool and gave you a beer and always had a hot chick on his arm. Then you grew up and he stayed the same. You realized he is just a douche bag.” A douche that probably still lives in his mothers basement watching action movies and banging trash. The jokes aren’t funny (save one that actually did make me laugh out loud) and most aren’t even correct.
Most everything about Duke Nukem Forever just feels dated in some way. Besides the character of Duke, the action is just rife with things that first person shooters don’t do anymore, and with good reason. Long gone are the days when people actually accepted entire levels that were platforming in a first person shooter. It doesn’t control well, and it doesn’t lend itself well to keeping the action consistent. Speaking of consistent, the games levels are so disjointed that you can almost see that there were different groups of people working on it over the years. One level in particular feels so out of place that you can almost imagine the development team saying “Hey, what if he went to a strip club.” This would be fine on it’s own if he had just walked into one like in Duke 3D, but instead it’s some sort of dream level that you literally wake up from. Not to mention that in that particular level you are on a fetch quest for a dildo… yes, a dildo.
As first person shooters go DNF is serviceable at best. The controls are pretty easy to get used to and they do the job well enough. There aren’t really anything special to be found in Dukes arsenal. He has “Duke-Vision” which is just night vision. Also he can drink a beer to gain stamina and take steroids to become more powerful for short periods of time. That’s about it. It’s kinda sad that a game like “Eat Lead: The Return Of Matt Hazard” did a better job of playing the outdated version of first person shooters than one that actually WAS.
The biggest problem found in Duke Nukem Forever is Duke himself. Besides the bad one liners that he frequently will get wrong, he just feels like a relic from the past. It reminds me of the whole of (bear with me) Encino Man. It’s about a guy from the past that is woken up in the future. He also has no idea how to act and falls back on his primitive ways to get by. Also it stars a guy that probably shouldn’t be working in any medium anymore (Pauly Shore). Everything about it is just dated, much like Duke. It was fine for the time, it was accepted and there were a lot of people that loved it, but we have mostly all moved on from there.
Duke Nukem Forever just fails to be a fun game. The environments were boring, the characters you have seen before, and the action did nothing notable. It’s not even that I was looking for some masterful story here. I mean, it IS Duke Nukem, after all. There have been a lot of people giving the game shit because the “narrative” wasn’t what they wanted. I love that Randy Pitchford came out and defended DNF by saying “like eating a greasy hamburger instead of caviar” and having “Rolling Stone finding a deeper meaning for a Ke$ha song” it’s just pointless to complain, I get that, and I back him up.
It felt really fitting that the first achievement that you can get from Duke Nukem Forever is one for picking up a turd. This also was one of the only times I laughed out loud. It did so because upon picking it up the character Duke Nukem and myself actually said the same thing at the same time, “What the fuck?!” My biggest hope for Duke Nukem Forever is that people have enough morbid curiosity in the finality of the game to purchase it. Seeing what 3D Realms made out of the game with the finishing touches put on by Gearbox, kinda leaves me wanting more. Only if Gearbox can put their special spin on the title and make it great again. Stripping down Duke to make made him good the first time, and updating EVERYTHING about it. Duke needs to either go all the way and not take itself seriously at all or just grow up and become a real man.
Hey, I fully admit to being excited by this game when it was first announced, or rather finally announced to be coming to the home consoles this generation. I put money down on the limited edition package which I later removed. However this was a case where a demo for the game actually may have been a bad idea. After playing the demo I knew deep down there was no way that Duke could live up to the hype. Was I disappointed, maybe. I knew that I had to see this things through to the bitter end. I had been to vested in the storied history of Duke to abandon him completely now. Having played through it, I now know how it ends, and it wasn’t pretty. There will be more Duke to come rest assured, and I can only hope that it will be better than what came about from the soap opera past of this one. Balls of steel!
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