![]() The latter is responsible for perhaps the only genuinely clever idea in the game: the bar is actually a measure of Duke’s ego and you can permanently increase it by doing things like admiring yourself in a mirror and looking at porn.By contrast the many technical problems almost seem more forgivable, or at least they would be if 2K Games weren’t still trying to charge £40 for this tripe. The only modern ideas the game does borrow is the inability to carry more than two guns at a time (a real pain given that many are quite specialised) and a recharging health bar. Nor is the fact that there isn’t a single new weapon in the game that wasn’t in Duke Nukem 3D, even if things like the shrink ray and freeze gun are still relative novelties today. There’s still plenty of these, for those who think picking up a virtual jobbie from a toilet is the height of interactive entertainment, but the levels themselves are mostly linear corridors that funnel you from one forgettable set piece to another.This is not what we expected after listening to Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford eulogise the game in our recent interview. ![]() Duke Nukem 3D was as open world as games got at the time and owed much of its notoriety to its mountain of secrets and neat little interactive environments. The controls are horribly imprecise, as if someone has suddenly slashed the sensitivity of your joypad by a quarter, and there’s absolutely no feedback from the weapons or the enemies you target.Enemies who are so stupid (and deaf and blind) they make the average Call Of Duty goon seem like Andy McNab by comparison.It’s the level design which is perhaps the most disappointing though. In fact that’s exactly how Duke himself appears too, with his creepy fetish for grown woman in schoolgirl uniform and endless supply of one-liners so feeble it becomes genuinely embarrassing to listen to them.Rather than an assault on political correctness the game feels uncomfortably like watching your dad trying to dance at a wedding and being rebuffed by a bridesmaid 20 years his junior.Even if you are mad/drunk enough to find the game funny we don’t think there’s a level of intoxication possible that would allow you to forgive just how bad a first person shooter it is. Especially given that the developers probably weren’t long out of their teens themselves, which would explain the pitch of the humour.But now they’re all middle-aged software engineers and everything comes across as a desperate attempt to relieve their youth. But its frat boy style jokes and stolen movie quotes seemed harmless at the time. Despite the humour supposedly being one of the main draws.The original Duke Nukem 3D (the only entry in the series worthy of note) wasn’t very funny either. Unless you want to treat this as an interactive documentary, charting just how much the first person shooter has improved since its inception, in which case it works pretty well.There are so many flaws jostling for attention here we barely know where to begin, but the most obvious problem (simply for the fact that it’s actually a good half an hour till you get to hold a proper gun) is that Duke Nukem – both game and character – is not funny. It’s so incredibly late it’s been redesigned, remade and almost canned so many times it feels genuinely unfair on the original designers that it was released at all.In their wisdom though Borderlands developer Gearbox picked up the almost finished game last year (along with the rights to all future Duke Nukem games) and so it is they who must take the majority of the blame here. Clearly no game is going to be worth a 14 year wait, but if you can sit through 14 minutes of this without wondering where you put the receipt we’d be very much surprised.It’d take half the Internet to explain exactly what has been going on with Duke Nukem Forever in the last decade or so but the short story is it’s late. If you haven’t got time to read this whole review we can quickly summarise: Duke Nukem Forever is a terrible game and Duke Nukem is a terrible person. ![]() Duke Nukem Forever (360) â heâs all out of kick ass ![]()
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