Let me start off by saying I've played all the Duke Nukem games (including the original 2-D side scrollers) and loved them. I was really looking forward to see the latest incarnation. I was disappointed to see all the negative reviews and thought it couldn't possibly be as bad as they say. I rented the game from Redbox to check it out before shelling out the full price. I am saddened to say the game really is bad.
My complaint is with the mechanics of the game play and not the crude humor. It's Duke Nukem after all. If you don't like crude, vulgar, sexist humor (and I do) then you shouldn't buy it to start with! The problem is the poor game play, boring levels, frustrating targeting and unbalanced damage received vs inflicted.
You have to interact with your environment by opening doors, picking up objects and pushing buttons, many times while trying to avoid enemies. Duke has to align precisely with the objects in order to interact. This is tedious when not fighting and deadly when trying to pick up an object to throw at an enemy while it is inflicting damage on you. The targeting on the weapons is difficult to control while in a battle resulting in a lot of wasted ammo. Also, the crosshairs are white and tend to blend into the background making it hard to determine where you are shooting. You can also only carry two weapons, which takes away a lot of the fun of the old game where you could kill enemies in varied ways by switching between the many weapons you carried. You also tend to run out of ammo quickly because you only have two weapons.
Some levels are frustratingly tedious like the RC car level where Duke is shrunk down and drives an RC car. The whole level is spent driving around and trying to figure out where to go with no obvious destination in mind. The plot and action in general are very slow (you can't jump past story line video even if you've already played it once). The load time between levels is also exceeding long for some reason.
The graphics are good with some humorous references to old Duke Nuken games and more modern first-person shooters (like Halo) but overall the game is not worth paying full price for. Wait a few months and I suspect you will find it in the bargain bin. Duke Nukem Forever
For the first time in my life, I am considering selling a game before finishing it. I wanted to love this game, and it really pains me to say this, but this game isn't worth the frustration it causes--and it certainly isn't worth the absurd price tag.Sadly, this review won't contain any information that hasn't already been stated ad nauseam by all the other frustrated players who are probably wishing they hadn't bought the game, either. Even so, I figured I would add my 2-star review in the hopes that others will take us seriously when we say YOU SHOULD NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!Let's start with the basics. There's the graphics. It's blatantly obvious (at least to me) that most of the graphics were developed a decade ago, and then were retextured at the last second before final release. Unfortunately, the developers did an abysmal job covering their laziness. In the very first level, all one has to do is walk up to a wall and look at the posters to see the developers' error. Extreme pixelation that becomes blockiness up close? I wouldn't even expect to see that in a game from 5 years ago. I wouldn't even expect to see that on a Wii, which has a fraction of the graphics-rendering power of the XBOX 360. This should not be happening, period. It speaks volumes about the amount of effort that went into this game.The controls are clunky. They just don't feel right. They lack the kind of smoothness one would hope to see in an FPS. Then there's the slow gameplay in the beginning, and the fact that you find yourself going through the levels with no weapons or enemies to fight for such an amount of time that you will find yourself wondering if you're even playing an FPS. And then there's the weapons... One of my favorite things about Duke Nukem 3D was the ability to carry all of the weapons. In this game, you are limited to 2. This makes ammo a problem. I've found myself running around with empty weapons more times than I care to mention. To be fair, the developers put in a lot of stocking crates, but what about later in the game when the more interesting weapons--such as the Shrink Ray--appear? Am I really going to fight off an army with the Shrink Ray and the RPG? It may be more realistic, but Duke Nukem has never been known for its realism. The ability to carry all of the weapons was a charming aspect of the originals that is sorely missed here. Finally, the deal-breaker: The loading times in this game are Draconian. If you die in the game, you'll wish you'd have died in real life; by the time Duke is restored to the last checkpoint, you may already have from old age. I have never played a game with such long loading times. Worse, you find yourself looking at loading screens frequently. A skilled FPS player may find himself spending more time looking at loading screens than shooting at Pig Cops; an unskilled player certainly will. Today's sophisticated gaming console allows for a near total absence of loading screens except for those that are necessary between levels. Player death simply does not warrant such long pauses. It's abusive, both of the console's capacity and the player's patience. Having just replayed the same scene 7 times in the last 30 minutes (which speaks more to my poor FPS skills than the game's quality, but I do believe it has to do with the clunkiness of the controls), I put down the controller and stopped playing--for good this time. Until some sort of patch is released to address this issue, the game is unplayable as far as I am concerned.The makers of this game are probably kicking back in Aruba with Pina Coladas and little umbrellas, toasting to their brilliance--and they should be; they duped a generation into buying a video game only because it bore the label of a predecessor that was released a decade earlier. While they are busy laughing their way all the way to the bank, I'm going to be trying to find a way to sell this monstrosity before it depreciates into worthlessness. As of this date (July 9, 2011, less than 1 month from the date of release), the game is already selling for $37.99 from Amazon--just over half of what I paid to buy it. - About Time They Made This - Babes - Finally - Video Games'
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