TL;DR – Duke Nukem Forever is a thoroughly mediocre First Person Shooter game that’s been made with a lot of passion. If you’re a fan of Jon St John or are willing to bear with a 7th generation FPS game that comes with all of the associated flaws, then you’ll probably have a decent time. But those of you expecting an enjoyable FPS should look elsewhere.
Duke Nukem Forever is a game that wears it’s heart on it’s sleeve and that successfully brings across the sheer madcap insanity of the Duke in all of his cheesy, 80’s action star glory. It’s a game with endless one-liners, dumb set pieces, larger than life characters and a constant inability to take itself seriously. Aside from the gratuitous amount of movie references, Duke Nukem Forever also takes the time out of it’s busy schedule to throw in endless little references towards other games including Half Life, Call of Duty and Halo.
Alongside the references the game has also spent a surprising, if not downright overwhelming amount of it’s time on creating interactive elements within the levels. While these are mostly concentrated in the earlier half of the game, they include fully functional vending machines, drinking fountains, microwaves and microwavable popcorn, nudie calendars, dumbbells, flushable toilets and a whole lot more. There are even multiple fully functional mini-games, including Air Hockey, “Alien Abortion” (whack-a-mole), One Armed Bandits and even an entire pinball table. It’s clear that the developers spent a lot of time figuring out ways to let Duke piss around with his environment and honestly it really helps to develop the game’s cavalier attitude towards itself. While having one or two of these interactive elements would be amusing, having so many of them is one of the admittedly rare areas in which this game shines.
Unfortunately this isn’t Duke Nukem’s Farting Around Simulator (DNFAS) and is instead meant to be the heroic return of the eponymous Duke after over a decade spent in developer hell. Sadly, Duke Nukem Forever is thoroughly mediocre and has been saddled with a Monster Truck’s worth of baffling design decisions which were the hottest trend at the time of release. The game does feature the return of The Ripper and the Devastator alongside a shrink gun and freeze ray, but these weapons are significantly handicapped by the amount of ammo that Duke can carry at one time, which is embarrassingly small (I’m sure he would just say he’s too cold…). This choice is then compounded by the fact that you can only carry 2 weapons at a time, which means that the game has to shove conveniently placed Infinite Ammo crates at every location in which you have to face off against hordes of enemies at a time. Much like the abrupt appearance of a multitude of chest high walls in Gears of War, the sudden appearance of multiple rocket launchers and ammo crates is a vivid sign of impending carnage.
And it’s these rocket launchers which best reveal the true issue of this new system, because you can only harm boss enemies with turrets and explosives. But you can only carry 5 rockets at a time, and most bosses require closer to 20+ rockets when you’re playing on the Normal difficulty setting. As such you spend the majority of every boss fight running around, looking for more ammo and occasionally glancing at the boss to make sure you’re not about to get blasted because you haven’t been looking at them. It’s honestly a shame because these boss fights are some of the few encounters in the game that actually require some form of positioning and, for want of a better term, strategy. That’s not so say that’re massively complicated, but they each have their own quirks and they are much, much more enjoyable than the rest of the game’s decidedly humdrum combat encounters.
Which is the main issue I have with Duke Nukem Forever, as it’s a pretty basic FPS experience with rare flashes of inspiration but the tedium of most of it’s combat encounters is too much for even Jon St. John to carry. Due to engine limitations, you only ever fight a small number of enemies at any one time and as a consequence combat encounters will often have 3 enemies spawn in, then you shoot them, then another 3 enemies spawn in, so you shoot them too, then another 3 spawn in by bursting open a hitherto locked door. Then you can proceed through that new entrance for 30 seconds before you get jumped by 2 enemies, who you gun down, so that another 3 enemies can spawn in… and so on and so forth for the better part of 6 hours. Now this limitation in and of itself wouldn’t be a deal breaker, as I personally enjoyed Doom (2016) and that game had a similar problem – albeit with more enemies on screen at once. Unfortunately Duke Nukem Forever tries to balance this lacklustre amount of enemies on screen at once by making Duke surprisingly brittle, as most enemies can do a large amount of damage to the Duke. This would add some challenge to the game but Duke Nukem Forever also has a generic regenerating health system… so what it really means is that you shoot 3 guys, then wait for Duke’s health to regenerate, then shoot the next 3 guys… and so on and so forth.
To be fair, this regenerating health system is called “Ego” and gels nicely with the previously mentioned farting around, as Duke gains an increase to his maximum health by messing around with the environment. This means that it’s in your interest to play the mini-games, sign autographs for fans and slap the alien wall titties.
But even this silliness can’t mask the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is a 7th generation console FPS masquerading as something more than it is. Not only does the game have a limited amount of enemies on screen at a time, and not only are you limited to two weapons at a time, but even the enemy pool is pretty shallow and as such you spend most of the game fighting the same handful of enemies at a time. You’ve got the Assault Troopers with laser guns and jetpacks, the slightly tankier Assault Trooper Commander variant that quickly replaces them and that can teleport (which just makes them annoying to deal with), Pigcops in all their glory who can wield pistols, shotguns, machine guns and RPGs or be berserkers with janky melee animations, the Octabrains who are floating jerks that throw stuff at you or blast you with psychic energy, and the Reptilian Enforcers who have powerful-ish guns that fire homing rockets and occasionally have large metal shields. This is basically it, with most levels having either some Assault Troopers/Commanders or Octabrains (depending on how far into the campaign you are), a bunch of Pigcops and then a couple of Enforcers thrown in when the game is trying to be a bit more challenging. There are also Octolings who are tiny, non-flying versions of the Octabrains that try to swarm you alongside the big fat Assault Commander (essentially a giant pigcop with their bottom half replaced with a metal floation device and helicopter blades), but these enemies are both relatively rare.
Making the enemies even more of a chore, not only does Duke have regenerating health, a small health pool, only 2 weapons at a time with limited ammo pools and a small amount of enemies at a time to fight but he also has to contend with some hit-scan attacks and weird spawning locations. As mentioned earlier, the game doesn’t like to spawn in too many enemies at a time as this game also had to run on the PS3 and Xbox 360, neither of which could handle the sheer unadulterated carnage that having more than a handful of enemies on screen at once would cause. Due to this multiplatform handicap, the game spawns enemies in small groups, but these gaggles of baddies really can spawn in at the most inopportune of timings. Sometimes the Octalings will get stuck on a piece of level geometry and thus the swarm of them (a whole dozen) will become a trickle as they gradually unstuck themselves, or sometimes an Assault Trooper Captain will teleport behind you while the next two spawn in. Generally it means that the only challenge these enemies pose is the fact that they have messed up spawn patterns, making it hard to tell when an encounter is over or has at least entered the next phase. When you combine this fact with the Pigcops amazing ability to utilise hit-scan weapons, which then make Duke flinch and thus waste a limited shot on his Shotgun or Railgun which has limited ammo as it is (and long reload animations because who doesn’t love reloading and iron-sights???), while making the screen flash red most of these combat encounters are just… kind of annoying. I can count the amount of times I died in normal combat encounters across the entire game on one hand, but counting the amount of times I was annoyed at the sheer bitchiness of the AI would be near impossible.
To break up the monotony of these fights, the game does at least have a few sections which don’t involve slowly plodding through brown-and-grey environments so that you can gun down the latest triad of the same enemies you’ve been fighting for the rest of the game. Sometimes it livens things up with a… TURRET SECTION!!! I’m not really sure where Gearbox got their enthusiasm for these from, but there are more of them than different types of enemies in this game so I hope you enjoy them. Sometimes you’re shooting space ships, sometimes you’re shooting pigcops and sometimes you’re shooting both, but either way you had best be prepared for them. Fortunately to prevent things from getting too exciting, they always have a cool-down mechanic in which if you shoot too much your gun overheats. Sadly this cool-down bar is pretty aggressive and as such you need to be quite careful with your shooting lest you become a sitting duck.
Aside from boss fights, farting around with the environment and the occasional frequent turret sections the last major way that the game breaks up the sluggish combat encounters is with a big-ass monster truck. This is exactly the sort of thing that the game needs to be more enjoyable, but unfortunately these sections are flawed. Now don’t get me wrong, running over those lame enemies in my big truck was amusing but sadly there are a few issues with them. First and foremost is the fact that they are kinda short, all clustered together within the story and are frequently handicapped by a recurring gag that Duke’s monster truck has poor gas mileage, so you need to hop out of your kickass monster truck and go back to shooting the bad guys on foot. The second issue is that the physics are kind of janky (a fact that is unlikely to surprise Borderlands fans) and so I found myself needing to reposition myself and by extension my truck more often than I would’ve expected. Lastly the truck suffers from having a really, really annoying engine noise when you’re at max speed which I won’t be able to illustrate fully with my limited verbiage, but suffice it to say that it sounds like they cut 2 seconds of revving a moped and put it on a loop.
One last thing that the game seems to really, really enjoy doing is introducing shrinking sections wherein Duke is made to be tiny and must navigate an otherwise unremarkable level albeit with the handicap of being made tiny. Now I’d be willing to count these sections as being an attempt to break up the monotony of the rest of the game, where it not for the fact that they play exactly like the rest of the game. In fact the only way they differ is that you now get attacked by rats, which made me hate the furry little bastards while playing as regular sized Duke. Oh and that now regular enemies are considerably more dangerous as you deal way less damage and they can stomp you, but these encounters are fairly rare (I think they happen like twice) and so most of the tiny duke sections basically function as platforming puzzle sections. I wish I could say more about these parts of the game, but they’re just kinda… meh and so I don’t have anything to add.
With all that being said, Duke Nukem Forever isn’t a terrible game. In fact it’s not even the worst I’ve reviewed thus far (a dubious honour that belongs to Legendary, at least for now). It does have it’s charms and while the enemies are limited in both quantity and AI it is still a functional FPS game that is smart enough to try and keep things from getting stale. You’ll blast through some combat encounters, then hit a turret section, then hit an abrupt platforming section before having to deal with a mini-boss or normal boss. Then you’ll start moving forwards, only to need to interact with the environment in a certain way to proceed before a combat encounter begins, which then leads to a vehicle section. The game is perfectly capable of keeping itself moving along and at introducing new abilities, enemies or weapons. It even gives you Steroids and lets you punch the enemy NPCs so hard that they explode into meaty chunks! But even writing about this while attempting to remain balanced can’t help me deal with the fact that while these are all cool ideas, they aren’t implemented very well. It’s all serviceable, but even those Steroids are quite rare and as you’re stuck in melee-mode while using them they obviously suck for encounters dealing with enemies that are out of reach (or the vehicle sections, or the turret sections, or the boss sections…)
As such Duke Nukem Forever is a game that’s hard to recommend in spite of the fact that it’s arguably the peak of the bargain-bin FPS “genre”. It’s a game that really does a good job of capturing the essence of the Duke, largely thanks to a great performance by Jon St John, but even with plenty of variety and good voice-acting the game itself is just so mediocre in the areas where it matters most. The FPS combat isn’t good and no amount of quipping can distract from this. Normally I’d complain when a game is short, but much like with Legendary the brevity of the campaign is a blessing as it ensures that only the memories of the game’s highlights really remain. Therefore my final recommendation relies on a simple question, do you already like Duke Nukem? If the answer is yes, then suffer through a mediocre FPS campaign to spend some quality time with the Duke. If you haven’t played any other Duke Nukem games, then start with Duke Nukem 3D and then consider playing through some of his earlier PC and PS1 appearances before even considering this one.
