To try to quickly clarify my opinion on the game, I’ve broken my opinions into two groups: what was right and what was wrong. A quick glance through that content will give you a rough view of how I felt about the game.

Also, it’s worth noting that I played Duke Nukem Forever on the PC. The game seems clearly designed for play on the PC, because of the pace of the shooting, enemy designs, platforming segments, etc… The PC also has no trouble with load times – which is a large complaint in the console reviews.

So, without further delay:

What Duke Did Right

Fast paced, guns blazing action

I was a large fan of Duke Nukem 3D. In fact, I played Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) with my original Duke Nukem 3D mousepad (which I must thank my wife for pulling out of storage for the occasion). The original game had a very strong focus on action – blasting aliens and pig cops with shotguns while strafing around. Sure, you could setup elaborate traps with tripwires and pipe bombs… But at the core, Duke Nukem was about kicking ass. And DNF continues that tradition. I can honestly say that blasting pig cops with the shotgun was completely satisfying.

There’s a lot of kicking ass to do in this game and a lot of different ways to do it. There were a few moments that were absolutely a blast and had me nostalgic for the original game.

Atmosphere

Those who played Duke Nukem 3D know that a large part of the fun is screwing around with the environment. For example, playing with computers, flipping lights on and off, putting your finger in an electrical socket, or getting sodas from the soda machine. In DNF, you can also play pinball, a form of “whack-a-mole” and video poker. I’m pretty sure you can play pool, sorta, but I got frustrated and quit trying on that one. The most enjoyable environmental interaction was playing air hockey. It was surprisingly fun!

But these little gimmicks aren’t the only thing DNF has going for it. The alien environments, casinos, and hoover dam are all very convincing and beautiful. There are certainly better examples of atmospheric level design out there, but DNF is by no means horrible. In fact, it’s quite good. However, one must note that I am making a distinction between atmosphere and fun factor. Some levels may be quite impressive and still very frustrating and boring.

Shotgun

The shotgun was good enough to mention all on its own. The other guns lacked a certain oomph, while the shotgun had everything just right. If you got up in someone’s face and let loose a shot, aimed just right, you’d obliterate most enemies. This was extremely gratifying and a lot of fun. I think I played through the entire game with the shotgun, only dropping it if the situation absolutely required me to do so.

Voice acting

Of course, Duke himself sounded just like Duke always has. He let loose with simple quips and bad jokes, left and right. And yes, they were horribly cheesy, but how horrible they were is what made them funny for me. To appreciate the game, one truly has to let go of their tastes a bit.

The other characters in the game were also done quite well. The other soldiers, the president, the women. There were no situations where the voice acting simply sounded out of place, forced or awkward. Which is truly rare.

What Duke Did Wrong

Gimmicks drag on far too long

This is perhaps the biggest downside of the entire game. There are moments where a cute gimmick gets thrust into the middle of the game. These kinds of moments can make a game great by breaking up the monotony. However, a gimmick is something that players get used to rather quickly. If it goes on for too long, it’s no longer a gimmick – it becomes a long portion of a game that people didn’t pay to play…

Specifically, there’s a monster truck portion to the game that reminded me of the moon rover in the first Mass Effect. These kinds of gimmicks are fun and cool for a few minutes. But since they are secondary gimmicks, they always seem to feel half-assed and tacked on warts of gameplay. And even if they are half-assed, that’s usually not a problem if it only lasts a little while and then you can get back to having your real fun. The monster truck sequence, however, dragged on across many levels. By the time I finally finished that sequence, I was almost ready to walk away from the game.

Duke does have some areas where they did this well, however. The forklift segments were very short and focused. I got to have my fun killing pig monsters with a forklift and then I moved on. The same is true for the underwater sequence. It lasted just long enough to get old and then it was over… So DNF definitely suffers in the pacing department.

Enemies get old too quickly

For the first half of the game, the variants of the pig-cops and alien guys were an acceptable amount of variety. Towards the end of the game, all of the monsters felt tired and boring. This is a very difficult challenge to overcome. Not many games get over this hump effectively. Halo seemed to get over this challenge by introducing an entirely new form of enemy towards the end. Half-Life (both 1 & 2) mixed up the enemies repeatedly, throughout the entire game. However, the list of games which overcame this sort of challenge is far shorter than the list of games that got over this problem effectively.

Frustrating boss fights

Some of the boss fights aren’t bad. The octopus alien with three breasts – that fight was fairly short and simple. However, as you get further in the game, you will run into some fights that are downright infuriating. Particularly the fights that have multiple stages – but still start out at the very beginning if you happen to die. The worst of these fights was the “Energy Leech.” This fight was slow, uninteresting and very difficult. I almost wanted to cheat, just to get past it. Similarly, there was a fight with a big alien on top of the hoover dam, which proved very difficult and annoying.

But what’s most frustrating is that while earlier boss fights made me want to scream, I beat the final boss fight in one shot by circle strafing the entire time and eventually killing him. This helped to make the ending very anti-climactic…

Checkpoint save systems

I understand that checkpoint saves are handy for consoles and make players actually overcome challenges, rather than rapidly saving their way through any difficult areas of the game. And yet, I don’t care. At all. I immediately dislike FPS games on the PC that don’t have a standard “save at any time” feature. I disliked it in the original Far Cry so much that I downloaded a mod/cheat or something that allowed me to save whenever I wanted. Give me a real save system. I have more fun saving when I want – whether that’s saving in preparation for a big fight, or saving in the middle of one because I just rocked the first half of it. I care about having fun, that’s it and that’s all.

Glitchy animations and enemy behaviors

You can really tell that DNF was put together in a somewhat haphazard way, when it comes to the glitchy animations. Sometimes NPCS will do strange things with their hands (strange things that may break the hands of a normal person) and sometimes enemies will get caught in strange poses (especially the pig cops). At the same time, the behaviors for the enemy NPCs get just as bizarre as their glitchy poses. Sometimes they will rush, sometimes they will stay back and sometimes they will just seem to forget that I’m there. The latter didn’t happen often, but you can be sure that when it did, I took advantage of it.

Two weapon system

Another concession to consoles, DNF requires that you only have 2 weapons at a time. Unlike Duke Nukem 3D, where you have a full inventory of guns that you can switch between depending on the situation, you get 2… This made the game feel more shallow than its predecessor. There was no feeling of “saving the big gun for something big.” Whenever something big was coming up, you could tell because of the big guns scattered around the floor, along with infinite ammo bins that you can rely on to keep the stream of rockets flowing. I know they had to figure out something to make it work for consoles – but this was a big step back for the PC.

Pacing

As I mentioned earlier, the pacing in DNF is its biggest flaw. There are many action sequences that are effectively broken up into moments of rest and many times this is done quite well. But the aforementioned prolonged gimmicky segments, such as the RC car or the Monster Truck driving, utterly destroy the games ability to be played for prolonged periods. While I put 7 hours into the game, I very infrequently played for more than 45 minutes at the time. I either grew too bored, or too frustrated and required a break. In the best FPS games, I can get sucked in for multiple hours and not even realize where the time went. For Duke, I am keenly aware of the time…

So, What’s My Verdict?

There are many people out there saying DNF is an utterly horrible game. I have played utterly horrible games before. DNF is not one of those games. It is not another Daikatana. (I should know… I played Daikatana all the way through. I still have the scars…)

And yet, reviewers like Ars Technica, GameSpot, Wired, Escapist, Joystiq and 1UP are disemboweling DNF. Check out the Metacritic pages for PC and Xbox if you wanna look at it all for yourself. What I find more interesting about this situation isn’t actually how good or bad Duke Nukem Forever is, but the nature in which the gaming community has responded to it.

A number of reviewers have taken some sort of moral stance regarding how offensive the game is. Personally, I’m surprised that anyone would even try. The game has always been offensive, chauvinistic, childish and lewd. This is not news. Feigning disgust about the tasteless jokes in a tasteless game is just a form of  sensationalist journalism. And if your disgust is sincere, then you may want to consider adjusting your expectations… In summary, writing an article about how incredibly offensive DNF can be is either an attempt to get attention, or the biggest no shit statement of the year.

Duke Nukem Forever may end up being one of those rare games that tells us more about the reviewing community than anything else. Everyone knows that gamers love hating on bad games. Zero Punctuation, while I absolutely love it, has exacerbated this  phenomenon in recent years. But recently it seems that the indignant enmity being frothed up in the gaming community has actually become our new entertainment medium. DNF, being so insanely hyped up and having absolutely enormous expectations, has now fallen into those sights and is getting utterly roasted. But it’s getting roasted unfairly.

Is DNF a fun game? Yes, at times. At other times it’s not much fun. And at certain times it’s downright frustrating or boring. It’s not a good game, but it’s not a horrible game either. Should you buy it? Maybe, when it costs $15 or less. Heck, if you’re bored and it’s $20, maybe you should go for it. But does this mean it’s a horrible game? NO. I wouldn’t even spend $5 on Daikatana, or many of the other horrible games I’ve played.

There’s definitely some fun to be had in DNF. But overall, it’s an amazingly mediocre game. If I were to pick an arbitrary score out of a hundred, I believe my final score would be:

65/100

It’s also interesting that when I had only played 2-3 hours of the game, I was thinking I’d give it a 70-75/100. Then the monster sequence truck happened…  

That being said, I believe anyone giving DNF a score lower than ~50/100 is showing their hand. If someone thinks DNF is deserving of something less than 50, then they are either inexperienced, cynical, or sellouts. (Sellout in the sense that they are allowing themselves to get lured in by the easy readership gains of hate and anger, rather than being good, objective writers). Of course, this really only applies to anyone reviewing the game for the PC. I imagine this game would be frustrating as all hell to play on a console. I certainly don’t plan on finding out.