hi instead of looking at my Steam library and installing and playing a good game, I decided to treat a depressive episode with my need to have an opinion on Duke Nukem Forever
this is bad. like, terrible. and not awful in ways in which its reputation proceeds it, but indefensible in ways that are not telegraphed from 15 years of critical drubbing
first and foremost, the game thinks its funny. comedy is already a highly subjective and fraught thing in the best of circumstances, but the writers think that referencing a combination of the pop culture that influenced DN3D and all the stuff that happened in the 15 years between that and DNF is good and funny while I’m left to sit there and go “yeah, they referenced WoW stuff, yeah, Duke said ‘porkchop sandwiches’ after he shot a pig, I get internet stuff” and roll my eyes so hard they get tangled in each other. more to the point, they suggest a universe which Duke himself is revered and is so full of himself that it’s tiring. Duke isn’t a manly antihero, he’s just a fucking asshole. him watching Buddy NPC who’s been helping for most of the game die and quipping “he won’t be in the sequel” is both not funny and suggests a person so hilariously dethatched from the reality of their situation as to be insulting
but that’s boring, I don’t think Duke 3D was a big thing because Duke said the things and it had titty
for a game whose writing is so openly derisive of the 15 years of shooters that came out between it and it’s predecessor (ayy lmao soldier dudes offer Duke Master Chief’s power armor and Duke goes “armor is for pussies”), it’s so violently, painfully operating in the mode of then-modern shooter tropes as to be laughable. it’s the most hilariously, awfully generic FPS in a post-Halo/CoD/HL world that it having the audacity to have commentary on other games while offering nothing new itself is a baffling lack of self-awareness. they’ve drilled level design down to being boringly, hilariously linear, there’s little in the way of interesting combat arenas, they seem utterly afraid of making enemy encounters interesting between the game having… I don’t know, 5 enemy types for the whole of the game? but they never put you against more than 3 or 4 enemies at a time, there’s not a lot of mix and matching of enemy types to actually create any kind of unique or differing fights and enemies aren’t actually hardy enough to justify sending less of them at you, on top of being just, dumb as hell, negative intelligence
the game has regenerating health but again, the encounters are bad so of course it’s not actually really taken advantage of. the opening hour has a turret section and a vehicle section, there are some really out of place physics puzzles (because HL2 had those), the interactive elements sprinkled around levels feel like they’re there because Duke 3D did it and don’t really do anything fun or novel before they get completely forgotten about and they do the 2 carried weapon and swapping thing but again, nothing interesting is done with it. I knew I was in trouble when a loading screen hint noted that bosses can only be hurt by explosive weapons or turrets, so every boss encounter (5? 6? they use two bosses twice so I don’t know how we want to count those) is just about dumping whatever explosives you have and then running to an ammo crate so the RPG and pipe bombs feel like liabilities during normal levels and effectively valueless during bosses because you’ll always have an infinite supply because otherwise the game would be bricked. bosses are bad, they don’t do much and they feel like HP sponges you have to whittle down until you get to do the QTE execution. there’s an interminable and tedious section where you are driving a monster truck to the Hoover Dam and it’s like if you described the buggy section from HL2 to someone who doesn’t your know language or video games
seemingly the game seems to be at the mercy of having been built 3 or 4 times over and up-ported through two different idTech and three different Unreal engines as sections are sometimes more often than not literal minutes of gameplay. you will load into a map and do things for 3-6 minutes and hit another loading screen. like, I know we can sit here and argue that both HL games and Halo games are the same way and they just don’t fade to black and instead pause the action, but those aren’t cleanly broken off like they are here. maps are very much their own entities and they’ll cut you off from backtracking. the game is straining under its tech debt to create the kind of flowing, tightly scripted, continuous world that HL did in 1998 with taking the Quake engine and hitting it until it behanved
this is, in a vacuum, an embarrassing product for 2011 and for that generation of FPS, nevermind as the follow-up to Duke 3D. shit, Manhattan Project is probably the game you should play instead of this. the game actually unlocks the tortured development timeline for the game as an extra after you finish it and it’s telling where the heads of the developers and Randy Pitchford are that one of the entries on the timeline is “hey the infamous Duke sound board Vent call happened in this year”
how the hell was this after Sin Episode and the same year as Serious Sam 3, games that I can at least point to and say that they are in the same zip code of whatever the hell it is people liked about their respective serieses
