I wasn’t going to turn this into a whole big thing, but wow. What a difference a day makes. Huge scandal involving blacklisting threats from 2K Games/Gearbox’s PR company, the Redner Group, all coming from the torrent of negative reviews about Duke Nukem Forever. And why? We’ve waited 15 years, and to say the end result is underwhelming is being nice. Duke Nukem Forever
Forget the juvenile humor and the toothless titillation. This is Duke, we knew what we were in for. Sure, the humor feels less “mature” and even less “naughty” than a 12 year old boy who just discovered how great it is to stare at cleavage and talk about farts, but that’s part of the oeuvre. I can’t fault the game for that.
I can, however, fault the game for awful graphics, awful gameplay, and even awful physics. Duke looks bad. Even by the standards of five years ago, Duke only looks mediocre, with horrible animations and modeling. Everyone and everything looks plastic and empty. There is no sense of weight or inertia in anything in the game. Every NPC shows the same lazy head-and-arm movement that worked half a decade ago, but only makes characters look like grotesque mannequins now. It’s not just the animation and modeling, which are admittedly difficult. Even the little, stupid crap is botched. Water is shown as a rippling surface that does absolutely nothing when you step in it, and doesn’t reflect anything. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind came out in freaking 2002 and it had better water effects. Shadows? Try nearly static, blurry outlines of Duke cast uniformly across every surface, regardless of what you’re doing. Even depth effects, usually a gentle filter that slightly blurs objects in the far distance or up close depending on what you’re looking at, is a jarring instant-blur that obscures NPCs talking to you when you look at a door directly behind them. It is an utter mess.
Gameplay similarly sucks. The weapons have no real weight or feel, and heavy hitters like the RPG are only slightly more menacing than the shotgun. Enemies take the same tactics of either running around you, teleporting or flying around you, or just charging you. Until they finally explode into bloody gibs, there’s no sense that you’re damaging them. It’s always a matter of hitting the enemy until they fall down, with no feel that those hits matter until they actually drop. As for interaction in the world, you can activate certain objects by moving up to them and pressing a button. When you activate them, they do something. You can also pick up some small things (but only some small things, and which small things is totally arbitrary) and throw them, and no matter what they’re made of or how heavy they should be, they go flying about as far and about as fast as everything else. This is interactivity that was cutting edge when the Build Engine was still in use.
Multiplayer feels similarly weak, with concepts that were common years ago but now feel stale. It might be fun for a few minutes, but Duke Nukem Forever online just doesn’t feel fun. Everyone is Duke, wearing different headwear, glasses, and t-shirts, and since it’s multiplayer there isn’t any opportunity to hear Duke’s quips, which is one of the only reasons this game even exists. As it stands, it feels like a generic multiplayer shooter with Duke thrown in. A leveling system is blatantly crowbarred in to give it some “depth,” but all it does it unlock more costume parts for Duke and decorations for your virtual home. Duke’s pad is a fun extra and I’d love to see it in other, better games, but you will not explore your trophy gallery more than once.
If it wasn’t as big a name on the box and wasn’t as big a developer attached, I could go easier on this game. However, 15 years of development and a big company like Gearbox finishing it up, and this is the final product? It turns Duke Nukem Forever from mediocre into simply unacceptable. This game might have been great five years ago, but today it feels like a relic. Not because of Duke’s humor, or the classic FPS tropes, but simply because the graphics and feel of the game seem so devoid of effort. Considering how many resources and people were brought in from 3D Realms, the horrible version that was eventually released after over a decade might have simply been inevitable. Gearbox tried to build a decent shooter on a terrible foundation. My recommendation? Say what we all are already thinking, that the game was made purely for nostalgia and immature humor, that little effort was put into the gameplay or graphics and that it certainly wasn’t Gearbox’s A-game, and that Borderlands 2 is in development. A game this shabby from such a big name and after so much hype can only be forgotten. Then the healing can begin.
