User blog:Sammyfun1/Video Game Review: Duke Nukem Forever (An iconic joke)

Note: I know Ouro already has a review on this game, and while it's an excellent review I didn't agree with some of the points he made, like how Duke was funny (I find him to be overly vulgar and immature). I also didn't want to throw this article away since it took me hours to write. Let's begin, shall we...

...So this is what we've been waiting for, it seems: a tedious and unattractive sci-fi shooter. Duke may be an icon, but he's just going through the motions in this stitched-together collection of poorly paced levels, which do the unimaginable: they make Duke boring. Some see the cigar-chomping alpha male as a pig, others see a clever and ironic take on macho clichés. Neither crowd is likely to get worked up over Duke's actions here. Sure, he spouts the occasional sexist quip. He receives a lap dance from a topless stripper, smacks monsters in the crotch to humiliate them, and has no problem using words beginning with the letter "f." But there's nothing sexy, provocative, or sly about his portrayal in this long-awaited sequel. In Duke Nukem Forever, there is little joy, little excitement, and little fun. That is, unless your idea of fun is to catch an occasional glimpse of digital nipples while you jump and drive around, and only occasionally shoot a few brain-dead aliens.

Duke Nukem Forever is an example on what happens when random ideas are slapped together without regard for how they fit with one another. You might spend only three or four minutes on one level, doing nothing but walking and jumping a bit, before reaching the inexcusably long loading screen that introduces the next. Other sections drag on interminably, and there are frequent stretches in which nothing is happening. The game slows to a crawl constantly. Take, for example, a series of levels in which you drive Duke's four-wheeler. In these sequences, you drive over aliens and use ramps to jump across chasms. You see a lot of the same brown canyons and cliffs in these sections, and on scripted occasions, the rover stalls and you have to get out and search for gas cans. It's nice that you get the chance to shoot some aliens amid all this bland driving. But this structure repeats itself three times in a row. The driving just goes on and on, and then on some more. And just when you think you're going to get the chance to do something different, you get in your monster truck and drive up more ramps.

That kind of pace-killing monotony is frequent in Duke Nukem Forever. You do a lot of plat forming and some occasional puzzle-solving, but all of these portions are dull as dishwater. Several jumping sequences see you shrinking to action-figure height. Playing as pint-sized Duke is a neat idea, and he spews profane chatter as if he has inhaled a tank's worth of helium. ("Size only matters when you're full grown," Duke reminds us with his chipmunk voice.) But these sections drag on for ages, such as a prolonged excursion across burger patties and kitchen shelves. It's cute at first, but five minutes in, you wish it would just end. An excruciating plat forming section across rotating gears is wholly un-fun. Puzzles that have you pushing orbs around on the ground turn a voyage through an alien hive into pure crap. Few first-person shooters are this focused on monotonous actions that don't involve shooting.

Duke Nukem Forever isn't just boring; sometimes, it's plain awful. The last 90 minutes of the game are putrid, featuring seemingly unending underwater excursions in which you swim over bubbles to catch your breath. There's only a bit of action here, and the need to constantly replenish your breath meter is frustrating, as is the ease with which you can get caught up in the environment while swimming through tunnel entrances. A level soon after has you running up a staircase as explosive barrels come rolling toward you, all while the rising water level forces you to push forward. Not fun; not even close. Furthermore, the ridiculously flippant ending that follows is an absolute insult. Duke himself says in his unenthusiastic monotone: "What kind of s*** ending is that?" So Duke knows the finale is abysmal, which means the development team(s) did too. But making a joke about it doesn't make it excusable. The game pulls the same trick earlier on, cracking wise about a boring valve-turning puzzle, but once again, Duke's claim that he hates valve puzzles doesn't make this boring and cliched task suddenly entertaining.

Duke still has the maturity of a twelve year old boy, objectifying women whenever possible, and barking out movie quotes. He's unapologetically vulgar, which is good for a few nostalgic laughs as he again kills aliens to save the world. It's disappointing that during Duke Nukem Forever's protracted development, nobody took advantage of the immense opportunity to do something thematically creative. Instead of playing with the idea of Duke as an anachronism, Duke returns in classic form, and he's never felt so old, so out of place, and so embarrassing. Just wait until you find the wall boobs…

You might hope that Duke could at least pep up the proceedings with some trademark raunch--maybe a bit of nudity, some humor, and the occasional wagging of a middle finger. You get all of these things, but Duke Nukem Forever's attempts to recapture that old filthy magic aren't funny, just sad. About halfway through, Duke makes a pit stop to visit his strip club. This is the least sexy strip club you could imagine, because there's no stripping, though you do receive a lewd proposal: a lady friend offers a lap dance if you find her three objects, including a battery-powered device designed for her pleasure. And so your visit to a strip club is characterized not by a rush of sexual energy or a ridiculous riff on Duke's sexism, but by a fetch quest. One that involves popping popcorn in a microwave oven. Really.

The reward for your microwaving skills is to have a stunningly un-sexy woman gyrate without her top on. Like all of Duke Nukem Forever's character models, she moves with the grace of a dump truck; and like all of the game's women, she talks with the dulcet tones of a truck stop waitress. Every attempt the game makes to be "adult" comes across as pathetic. You find nudie magazines here and there, but the naked women you ogle are so pixelated, you might as well be looking at the latest issue of Lego Playboy. The idea of Duke urinating in a dying alien's eye socket sounds filthy. But the game doesn't stylize this or other such moments in any way. The generic, public-domain-quality soundtrack lulls you into passivity; the camera angles do what they need to, but no more. And so the sight of Duke peeing into a body cavity isn't shocking--it's shockingly banal. The game's funniest moment doesn't even involve smut: it's Duke's mimicking of the sound of an industrial fan. This isn't the Duke you knew. This is Duke reimagined as an aging gym bunny desperately trying to recapture his youth, and failing.

It isn't just the tedious pace and bad tastes that make Duke Nukem Forever feel like a thrown-together budget game. It's also ugly. There are hideous amounts of texture pop-in, yet the differences between the original blurred textures and those that replace them are minimal. Blocky characters stand around and unenthusiastically deliver their lines with minimal mouth movement. Buildings in the distance might be all off-white, with no details or textures at all to differentiate them. Yet every so often, you see a clear detail--text on a poster, which sticks out like a sore thumb, considering the hazy surfaces and jagged edges that surround it. In spite of its poor visuals, the game suffers from frequent frame rate stutters, an inexcusable problem in a run-and-gun shooter. How does a game that looks this old not perform smoothly?

To the game's credit, Duke Nukem Forever's shooting sections are simple fun. Charging humanoid pigs and zig-zagging jetpack aliens spawn in battle zones and Duke gets to pulverize them with shrink rays, freeze guns, shotguns and his fists. The real star of the show is the shotgun, which unlike the other weapons that lack a sense of power, can obliterate enemies at close range, sending them arcing off in the distance after a well-placed burst of lead. The shrink and freeze rays are toys, adding some humor value as Duke stomps on miniaturized aliens or executes their frozen bodies. The multitude of stage bosses are enormous and some of the action set pieces exciting. It's all straightforward, classically-styled kill-factory sequences that let you turn off your brain and revel in the primal glory of the aim-and-shoot game play loop. However the long puzzle sequences and the fact that the shooting is too short destroys any enjoyment in the game.

Its multiplayer options might have been Duke Nukem Forever's saving grace. The best idea here is Duke's digs, an apartment where you can purchase and admire various pieces of furniture and other objects. The more you play online and gain experience, the more goodies you get, including new shirts and hats to show off during matches. Online play is characterized by fast, frequent kills and success is largely determined by your ability to memorize map layout and weapon spawn points. It's a traditional approach to online first-person shooting filled with chaotic action, jet packs, jump pads and goofy weaponry like freeze rays, shrink guns and trip mines so you'll never feel safe. It doesn't try to tell a story and doesn't force you into poorly conceived vehicle sequences or drawn-out plat forming sections, so it doesn't share the story mode's identity crisis. Yet there is much lag, texture pop-ins, and glitches, it can hardly be called fun.

Given its storied development history, you might be inclined to grab a copy of this train wreck. Avoid the temptation. While much of Duke Nukem Forever is embarrassingly bad, the kind of game you point and laugh at, its biggest problem is that it's so tedious Twisting valves, jumping on pipes and alien tentacles, driving through drab canyons, rolling alien spheres along the ground, this is what Duke Nukem Forever is about. It's not about shooting aliens, and it certainly isn't about fun. This game takes an icon and turns him into a laughingstock. Except, no one's laughing.