Because every (mainstream) review of this I have read has been complete and utter shit that can't make heads nor tails of why this is a bad game....SPERGIN TIME!
*Initial Impressions*
So I got some time with this. It's not good, not at all. Basically it feels like Call of Duty crossed with Quake 4, somehow selecting for most of the worst traits of both as a result of this union.
Oddly enough, the game starts out decently, pitting Duke against an old-school FPS boss monster with a big gun. You're dodging, strafing, and shooting a lot of rockets at a bad guy in a big arena to electric guitars. Classic stuff. Good stuff. Sure, he's pretty easy, but he's the first fight, and not a bad way to start things off, all things considered. The game takes a sharp nosedive after you deplete it's health bat however, as you soon find out it doesn't explode in a gory death animation to a witty catchphrase.
Nothing like, say....this:
Nope...the monster falls to its knees, starts glowing, and requires you to do a button mashing quick time event in which you finish it off in gory fashion. How I hate the gaming press for lionizing this design feature around 04 with the double whammy of Resident Evil 4 and God of War, both being heavily driven by quick-time-events, and being lauded for it. It's around this time, Duke Nukem Forever shits the bed. Here I realize the opening fight was just a heavy dose of spices to cover up the rancid taste of a game gone bad from over-extended development. And no...it doesn't get better for Duke.
What follows is a sequence laden with cutscenes, "minigames", a lot of exposition (mostly crap), and not a whole lot of shooting. I can't recall exactly, but I don't believe you even get a hold of a gun until 20 minutes have elapsed into the first episode. That's not a good thing for an FPS to do, at least if you want it to be well paced. Even after you get access to weapons, they are a dinky pistol and a lame alien laser. You don't even get much use of them before having to slog through 10 minutes of turret shooting, followed by 20 minutes of shrunken Duke driving around linear corridors in a toy truck. Fun. Finally, you are returned to normal size and grab yourself a boomstick. Now the good stuff starts, right?
Nope. The game just rears it's ugly "next-gen" head. The first fight, post-shotgun acquisition, echoes the worst of Quake 4; a couple of monsters in a small room over and over again. That's exactly what it is too. Two monsters spawn. You kill them. Two more identical ones spawn. You kill them. Now a pair of flight-enabled ones appear. The get the business. And two more pop up, only to be smitten by buckshot. All in a relatively small room devoid of interesting environment. Then you are gifted with corridors full of encounters with melee pigs charging at you. One at a time though. What? Did you think this would be like Doom, Serious Sam, or Painkiller? You know, fun? Not Duke Nukem Forever, nosiree. There might be a miniboss too. I don't remember.
Later on, the game apes Call of Duty, but in a bad way, drawing from only the worst of encounters. A couple of
krauts/russians/aliens show up in a locale with cover allowing Duke and the aliens to trade shots until all the baddies are dead. It's not run and gun; it's stop and pop in the most boring way. Enemies don't flank you, cover is rarely interactive or destructible, and enemies are quite dumb.
Basically, my experience so far is that the game is made up of shootouts that ape the worst of games like Call of Duty and Quake 4, yet none of the good features. These are punctuated by half-baked puzzles, rather poor turret sequences, and platforming of which the best that can be said is that it is simple and will be over quickly. That sounds more like what an anesthesiologist would say before surgery to a nervous patient, not exactly ringing praise for a big part of a game's play.
*Misc Stuff*
Guns are nothing to write home about. Most are forgettable fare, save the shrink ray, which is more of a gimmick than anything, albeit a fun one. I haven't found the freeze ray or the BFG yet, if they even still exist. The shotgun is decent...sometimes. It has some real punch, but the randomization of the bullet spread seems to make for some weird situations in which a point-blank shot seems to pass through enemies without harming them. Actually, all the guns seem to suffer from this sort of malady further adding to the suckfest of dealing with weak weapons that have pitifully small ammo capacity, both in clips, as well as in reserve.
The two guns only system sucks here. I actually like it in Halo where it forces you to scavenge a lot and use whatever weapon is available, forcing you to become more proficient with every weapon on higher difficulties, as ammo is scarce and enemies are numerous. Plus, most weapons in Halo are fun enough and pretty balanced. Here, it makes no sense, as there are universal ammo re-fillers after nearly every encounter in most levels. This takes away the only real benefit of a two weapon restriction, making it seem like nothing but lazy designers trying to streamline the game for gamepad control. Protip; console games can have many weapons at once; try a radial menu that pauses during selection a la Masturfect.
Bosses, after the "prologue" boss, are pretty bad. I've only run into two, but one consisted of playing "ring around the large object of cover" shooting rockets at it, and occasionally restocking on rockets (by the way, bosses are explicitly noted to only be vulnerable to explosives...lame) at one of the ammo crates. The other required bouncing grenades to bring down a "shield" so you could rocket it. It also made little effort to attack you, only spawning one enemy at a time and doing nothing that could harm you while in the cover provided. To be fair, most FPS bosses tend towards low quality, but Duke Nukem Forever really takes things down a few notches from the average.
Duke is really a pansy in this game, contrary to the macho man they play him up to be. He can't run fast at all, and is terribly limited in how long he can run. He can take very little damage; if his Ego is his shield it should be able to take a hell of a lot more. As an aside, Ego doesn't play out much differently at all from typical regenerating health. It would have been a lot better to implement more things to restore Ego through gameplay, things like skillful or stylish kills restoring Ego. They play around with this a bit in some limited situations (QTE execution kills restore Ego) but nothing that you can "bank on", so to say.
Technically, this game is a mess. It performs terribly in almost all aspects. The frame rate plunges oftentimes...when there are only two or three enemies on screen. This is pretty inexcusable given the lack of graphical quality and the fact it already runs at around 30 Frames-Per-Second. This isn't Ninja Gaiden 2 where I could forgive it for running sub-60 FPS when ten ninjas where onscreen each throwing about 4 exploding shuriken every second, turning the screen into one hell of a digital fireworks display. It also has abysmal loading times. Despite the fact that levels are totally linear and it uses the simplest of checkpoint systems, it decides to grace your playtime with a ~90 second load time every time you die. I can tolerate longer loads at the beginning of a level, but if you use a checkpoint system you had best be prepared to make things snappy when getting you back into the gameplay. Halo and Gears of War can get me back in the action within ~3 seconds. Hell, I think even Alpha Protocol did better than Duke in this regard. You know you're in trouble when an Obsidian title is more technically sound.
The humor...well...it's classic Duke for better or worse. Smut and pop culture ripped off without a care and nothing but it. I guess it is a lot more edgy (boob walls and penis monsters especially come to mind), but then again, isn't everything nowadays? The problem here is that Duke Nukem 3D wasn't driven by the humor, and was backed by decent gameplay. Nothing earth-shattering, but some simple fun. Duke Nukem Forever seems to think it can coast off the humor and have bad gameplay on top of low-brow humor galore. Simply put, it can't.
*Closing*
This game is a stinker, and deserves a place in the Shitpile of Awful Shooters, alongside such titles as Killzone, Project Snowblind, and Daikatana. Avoid it. Fuck you Gamefly for sending this to me. And fuck you gaming media for being so incompetent.
http://www.joystickdivision.com/2011/06 ... wed_fi.php
From a gameplay perspective its major sin, as you may have guessed, is how dated it feels. Want the experience of playing DNF without shelling out $60? Load up an HD remake of Doom or Serious Sam on Xbox Live Arcade/PSN. Shooter design has come a long way from the loose, unsculpted levels and messy gunplay of the early days, and yet that's exactly what you get in DNF.
Lol no fuckhead. Doom and Serious Sam are miles ahead in terms of design when compared with modern shooters despite the fact that they may be a little rough around the edges (Sam more so than Doom; but mostly due to budget constraints). Duke Nukem Forever takes all the worst parts of modern ones...that's why it is terrible.
