Duke Nukem mods part trois
TamDuke
An impressive feat of level design cobbled together by a drunk, suicidal ice mongol, TamDuke is a cautionary tale of science being so busy asking "
could I", that it forgot the most important question: "
Should I?"
Comprising a handful of maps - based on what I assume pass for locations of note in the loose confederation of dirty hamlets that comprise the Finnish nation - TamDuke features some of the most detailed environmental design I've seen so far, certainly at least on par with the vanilla game. Unfortunately, the mod grows increasingly self-indulgent with each new level - maps growing in size and puzzles becoming more convoluted by the minute. Expect lots of obscure air vents, grates hidden behind posters, hidden switches, and in the worst case, a hidden walkway that's only visible when teetering right on the edge of a broken window. I had to refer to a developer-made youtube walkthrough several times. I think it appropriate that the penultimate map, climaxing in a massive battle with at least a hundred enemies plus every single vanilla boss from the original game, constantly glitches out in the final sequence, throwing over an hour's work out the window. Strangely, the very last map is rather more subdued, taking place in some sort of underground arcade.
I think the mod's biggest failing is the painful over-reliance on scripted enemy spawns. By the second map, you're already tired of the same trick of teleporting aliens behind you when you enter a room or pick up a key, and it only gets worse from there. My "favourite" was spawning 20 pig cops behind you in a narrow corridor. That said, if you could handle the pixel-hunting and puzzles of American Assault, you won't have too much to complain about here.
Alien Invasion TC
Another vanilla-esque map pack that makes extensive use of custom art (particularly from other games), Alien Invasion is a three-episode (plus four secret levels) tribute to famous action, sci-fi and horror movies, with a little flavour from other sources. This results in a great variety of different themes and settings that, combined with the typical vanilla map length, makes this perhaps the best-paced conversion I've played so far. Expect to visit everywhere from space stations, moving trains and Nazi submarine bases to Cydonian pyramids and haunted hospitals. After dealing with so many nightmarish puzzle-driven mods, it was refreshing to find that over the course of 20-30 levels, the longest I got lost was for about 10m in one of the John Carpenter maps. Obviously, if you're a fan of such levels, you might be let down here, but I'd still give it a spin.
If I had to complain about anything, I would fault the mod for never really ramping up the challenge at any point. Though I enjoyed the fairly leisurely pace for the most part, you rarely get the sense of a crescendo in the action. There was also an annoying Nuclear Warhead puzzle where you had to solve an 8/10-button puzzle in 10-15 seconds, which I eventually noclip-ed through. The lack of new enemies, even some palette swaps or custom NPCs for the radically different maps was also a downer. Just giving the pigcops space suits or bloody overalls or something depending on the map. Then again I have no idea how much trouble it is to rip, recolour and re-insert Build sprites, so whatever.
Critical Mass
A very short, 2-3 map mod which makes extensive use of custom art, weapons and enemies, and maintains an excellent pace of near-constant action right up to the final boss. Most changes involve swapping out weapons in favour of iconic guns from other games, so the Shrinker is now a BFG, the rocket launcher a railgun, the microwave gun powerful akimbo pistols and so forth. These changes extend to the enemies - Floaters shoot railgun charges, elite alien assault grunts fire mortar shells and so on. The whole experience is about 45m-1hr, shooting your way up a highrise (including the destructible lobby from The Matrix) and into a Nuclear facility, holding off robots, Pigcop tanks and vanilla bosses before battling a teleporting mini-Emperor who fires BFG and mortar shells with alarming speed and accuracy.
I can't really fault this one for anything beyond the length and lack of imagination in weapon choice, so unless you demand a bit of puzzling or switch-hunting in your maps, give it a whirl.
Haunted Nukem
Another horror-themed mod that takes a lot of weapons and art assets from Blood, but tries to set its own tone rather than going the tribute route. Interestingly, many of the reskinned enemies can now be mutilated by gunfire, with heads and arms being blown off by most weapons. I'm not sure whether there's a locational damage system - the amount of shots each enemy took seemed to vary by quite a bit - but it's a cool little addition that helps increase the sense of reactivity and weapon feedback, something I've felt the vanilla game now lacks slightly compared to Brutal Doom.
The almost omnipresent darkness and hidden enemies means you can expect to edge your way through the five maps relatively slowly, but it's not a noticably difficult mod otherwise. Will probably take the average player an hour or two to finish, though it does seem to be semi-compatible with the original Episodes (I believe there are more extensive Blood TCs if you want that, though). Also, it would've been nice to have new or properly reskinned bosses and more custom weapons, but for the length you can't really complain. I also had to disable Polymer's dynamic lighting for the boss fight, but those sorts of performance issues aren't unusual with Polymer.
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