Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever has been in the works for the past decade and beyond. Developed by Gearbox and published by 2k Games they have managed to resurrect the king from his grave. You can expect a lot of crass humor as well as some gore and language. To some this could be the game you have been waiting for but for others this could fall short and leave you disappointed. Duke is back and he is ready to do what he does best "Kick @$$ and chew bubble gum, and he is all out of gum." This is not a kids game and should be treated as contraband if you see a kid with it. Now more on the story.

The game starts out with Duke pissing in a urinal and the game lets you then do what you want within reason. You can flush all the toilets and pee in all of them and later there is a whiteboard that you can draw on if you want to. You then follow a path and see several soldiers get shot down. You come up through a tunnel and end up on a big football field fighting a huge robot-cyborg-monster-thing. After killing it the game zooms out to see Duke playing a game of himself. It then takes a while for anything exciting to happen after that. Leaving several dull moments while walking through some corridors. Finally after reaching an invisible wall you have to watch this news broadcast of the aliens coming down. This messes with the already slow pacing because the invisible wall is  just not being able to walk past these three guys. Later when your back in the "Duke Cave" you are told by the president not to engage with the aliens. This doesn't stop them from invading your home though. This is finally where some action happens.

The game play is very slow and can feel a little weird with the controls. Though most of the game progresses through firefights with aliens these encounters are cheapened by very poor AI. Along with the Ego bar that represents your health it regenerates really quickly taking out any sense of urgency to find cover and with the aliens just standing there you can easily line up head shots. The weapons in the game are pretty strong with one burst of fire being all you need to kill an alien. Another problem is some of the other weapons such as the pistol have very small clips and take a long time to reload but it doesn't really matter cause the aliens just stand and watch you reload anyway. There is a segment of the game where you get shrunken and drive a RC car all over this hotel. This is fun to drive around and going in between legs of the aliens. This does have its limits though because it controls poorly and hard to maneuver over jumps. Overall poor game play not a lot of fun and what is there has been done before and better. This sadly is true in the multiplayer as well.

The Duke multiplayer is simple not very good. It is just standard deathmatch stuff with some other features in there as well such as "Capture the Babe" and so on. You will most likely not get the most out of this game through the multiplayer. With everyone looking like Duke but they are just different colors takes out any personality from the game. The shrink ray makes it a bigger hassle to deal with foes because if you can't step on them they can be hard to shoot. The game borrows a point system from Call of Duty where every time you get a kill you get about fifty points and more depending on how you killed them.

This game does not do anything that helps it stand out aside from it being a mediocre shooter with some poor humor mixed in. With the mission to bring Duke back a success, unfortunately the welcoming home parade is not going to be a big one. One thing that works in this game is the craziness because only Duke could get away with most of the stuff that goes on in this game. What doesn't work is the game as a FPS it would make a decent adventure game with some shooting but as a solely shooter it fails at keeping it fresh.

In conclusion this game was not very impressive to me. I did not enjoy a lot of it and the dialogue felt so bland and dry that it made it hard to care. Duke was before my generation and I think that someone could enjoy it if they liked the others but this is not for new comers to the series because it will just fall flat on your expectations. Sad to see twelve years in the making to have such a anti climatic release of Duke Nukem Forever.