| Duke Nukem Forever PlayStation3 GOOD: it exists! BAD: not up to contemporary shooter standards FINAL: You should TRY this game. |  Courtesy 2K Games |
With a troubled history that spans multiple developers and plenty of stops and starts, Duke Nukem's return to gaming is a unfortunate punchline to years of jokes about how it would never happen. When "Duke Nukem Forever" started development in 1996, there was barely an Internet. Today, Duke probably wishes the Internet had never been invented, because eager masses are on hand to savage his ignominious return in a thoroughly average video game.
"Forever" begins with an homage to the well-remembered finale of "Duke Nukem 3D," the 1996 game that made Duke a star, with a battle against a hulking alien beast inside a football stadium. Cleverly presented as if this is a video game being played by Duke himself, this sets up Duke's heroic status as America's oversexed, uber-patriotic, alien-killing authority. The game also takes this chance to toss in some "Jackass"-quality comedy, allowing the player to urinate into toilets and ogle nearly-nude cheerleader posters for no other reason than to revel in urinating and ogling. In this game women are sex objects, and real men enjoy poop jokes.
Then the thin "alien invasion" plot kicks into gear and Duke marches from Las Vegas to Hoover Dam shooting anything that moves. Along the way, the player is given breaks from all the blasting with odd interludes involving driving R/C cars, puzzle solving, and even collecting junk inside a strip club. The problem is that nothing that happens is particularly memorable, just ticking off from a list of potentially macho distractions from shooting.
Even the strip club is just a lazy, barely populated series of rooms. Given the game's insistence that it is lewd and loud, you'd think the strip club would stand as one of Duke's signature locales. Instead, the club is a boring, under-detailed dive with a couple of topless women in thongs, plus some generically clean-cut males standing around pool tables and bar stools. After all the build-up, you'll find more life inside the strip clubs of "Grand Theft Auto IV."
Leaving aside a general lack of creativity and detailing, the game's core competency is in running and gunning. Enemy aliens tend to storm into a room without a care, offering a challenge primarily in their stamina not with their intelligence. This is key evidence that "Forever" is dated material, from a time when videogame enemies didn't know how to duck behind cover or perform complex flanking maneuvers. That doesn't mean you can't have fun shooting down floating alien brain monsters, it just means "Forever" continually provides less of what you would expect.
Duke is limited to carrying two weapons at a time - a strange design decision for a game that wants to be based on absurd, over-the-top violence - which means an awful lot of your time will be spent deciding which two guns you want to keep in ammo. Duke's life bar - dubbed his "Ego," as if it matters - recharges over time, which encourages the player to keep hiding in corners to heal up. Again, this is an odd choice for America's premier bad boy.
The title "Duke Nukem Forever" might be referring to load screens. Each level takes a long time to load, and if you happen to die right away, too bad: the game has to perform a full level load on every single instance.
Publisher 2K Games seems to be willing to let us in on the joke of this mediocre-yet-long-awaited release. After completing the game, you unlock movie clips that showcase the game's long, hard road to store shelves. It is fun to see different versions of "Forever," covering over a decade of preview videos, even if it does confirm your suspicions that most of this final edition is already about five years old.
"Duke Nukem Forever," instead of launching in 2001, has arrived into the gaming wilds of 2011, where shooter games are defined by franchise kings like "Gears of War" and "Halo." Duke pales in comparison, and while it is easy to make excuses for the lackluster effort, that doesn't change the fact that Mr. Nukem has to stand against these new contemporaries. Maybe "Forever" should best be viewed as a casual shooter, not concerned with the deep enemy intelligence and immersive multiplayer modes of modern games. It is a shooter for someone who just wants to shoot things, with the odd left turn into driving a monster truck or staring at naked women.
This review is based on product that was supplied by the game's publisher.
