Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a game by a different developer, that manages to feel exactly the same as Borderlands 2. There are some differences like new characters and so new skill trees. Generally speaking though this game hasn’t innovated, which is fine if you liked Borderlands 2. If you thought Borderlands 2 was pretty boring, then you are in trouble. Which means that I am in trouble. Of course there’s the entirely fair question, as to why I bought this game. The honest answer to that question is that my friend has a lousy PC. So in the search for co-op games we ended up on this one. Is it fun? Nope.

I’ll skim through the rationale for why I didn’t care for the game. Which should be fairly obvious between my last reviews and the TL;DR at the top. Essentially Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a looter shooter with bad loot and bad shooting. The cherries on top are of course; the weird vehicle controls, the annoying dialogue, the poor quest design and the generally tedious nature of the game’s level scaling system. There are some bright spots, like decent variety and the fact that the whole thing works in co-op, but generally speaking this game is a game for idiots. Combat is basic, the jokes fall flat, the game manages to feel extremely repetitive, most of the content is bland, it’s just a mess. Why this series became the series for co-op players is beyond me.

As for what this game adds to the series, well it has some background for the perennial favourite character of Handsome Jack. Who isn’t particularly interesting here, and is basically trying to be a hero but becomes a villain. The way this happens occurs slowly across missions, but essentially he goes from normal person to paranoid dictator in a gradual fashion. Yet it’s not handled very well, and it’s hard not to get the impression that our characters shouldn’t have sided with him once he started randomly executing civilians for the lols. The story also involves the vault hunters from previous games spoiling his plans to take control of the world, but they don’t do much. Honestly if you were a big Borderlands fan then I imagine you’ll find this game to be lacklustre in terms of exploring the characters.

Especially as the game otherwise doesn’t add that much. There are one or two new vehicles you get to use a handful of times. Plus the O2 mechanic, wherein you need oxygen to breathe but can also use this oxygen as a impromptu jetpack. Otherwise I can’t really think of anything outside of the new character classes. These are fine but I’m not playing through the game to max level 6 times. So the only thing I really noticed is that you can play as Claptrap. Which is about as much as fun as you’d expect.

With those new additions out of the way, I’ll just reiterate that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel really is more of the same. Just with Australian accents. The combat is the same, the weapon looting system is the same, the UI is the same, most of the enemies are the same, the mission is the same, the dialogue is of the same quality and so on. There really isn’t a lot that’s new. To the point that the O2 system which is arguably one of the biggest additions doesn’t do much. It gives you a new character item slot and it introduces some risk/reward to the game. As you need to breathe (albeit not if you play as Claptrap), you need O2. You can spend it to jump slightly further or revive your companions faster however. Outside of this though, it just makes the outdoor areas a bit tedious. As you need to camp near the O2 stations every now and then. The game does at least still have an appealing art-style. Outside of that though I can’t think of anything it does particularly well.

I mean for goodness sake, this game has missions where you need to hunt for audio logs that are hidden in an office, and then have to listen to them. There are missions where you need to guard a box as it slowly trundles along a conveyor belt while it’s under attack. Even finding these stupid missions can be a pest as they’re scattered around the world, and once you are a few levels above them they give you no XP. So if you need to keep up with the game’s level curve (lest you be punished by health sponge enemies), then you’ll need to quick travel to an area. Then possibly go to a new area from there. Then run to a bulletin board. So that you can pick up a quest that sucks. It’s just not a very well paced game, and even for a mindless shooter there’s so much downtime.

There are some design decisions that are questionable, like co-op making the game harder but these can be hand-waved away or at least justified. Yet the moment to moment gameplay feels at odds with itself. You want to shoot the dudes, but then you need to loot the dudes. So you need to open the inventory screen and faff around there. Then you need to slowly trundle towards the next objective. So that the game can give you another objective. Then another one. So that you can complete a quest that doesn’t give you enough XP. Meaning you need to run to a fast travel station and then fast travel to somewhere near another quest. That will involve shooting dudes, and looting the dudes, and looking at your inventory… and so on. It’s just a tedious game and I have to give credit to Borderlands 3 for improving on it.

In conclusion, I’ve run out of things to say and ways to re-iterate the main point. Namely the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a pretty boring game. It doesn’t change much, and essentially feels like Borderlands 2 again. Which will be great for some people. I shudder to imagine who those people are, but they must exist. As for everyone else, if you want a co-op game look elsewhere. At the very least grab Borderlands 3 or Tiny Tina’s D&D styled mini-campaign before picking up Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

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XCOM: Chimera Squad was always destined to be a black-sheep in the overall XCOM family, as not only did it release at a budget release price-point but it also lacked a lot of the depth that the series is known for. Instead of needing to create and nurture your squad while the spectre of permanent death lingered over them constantly, here your squad is largely pre-defined and it’s impossible for them to permanently die. This is because XCOM: Chimera Squad is taking a more narrative approach to the game’s story, with each character being deliberately designed and balanced to ensure that you always have a balanced assortment of squaddies. While you can’t recruit all 11 agents on a single playthrough, you can have a maximum of 8 of them at a time and can take 4 with you on each mission. Each of these characters fits a specific role and while there is an upgrade tree, 3 of the 5 choices for each character are mandatory and so you only have to make 2 decisions as to how they’re going to develop. Again this was done deliberately so that the developers could spend time fleshing out each squad mate and generally speaking they’ve done an admirable job, as while the writing isn’t stellar they were able to give each squaddie their own flavour and plenty of opportunities for them to insert their own quips. These characters also have their own interactions both during battles peaceful police operations and while at home in the base, so that they feel like a somewhat natural and cohesive squad. Perhaps one of the biggest selling point of XCOM: Chimera Squad is the fact that you get to control multiple alien squaddies, specifically a Muton, a Snek, a Sectoid and two half-man half-alien hybrids. These alien squaddies have some of the abilities that their counterparts had in the previous games, with the Sectoid acting as a Psi-capable unit and the Muton and Viper having melee rage attacks and binding attacks respectively. As for the hybrids, one is a melee combatant while the other has an energy shield and mainly functions as a defensive buff provider with a focus on close range attacks.

The reason for this disparate group to come together is that you’re the new XCOM commander Reclamation Squad commander and this rogue’s gallery is your sci-fi SWAT team with which to keep order in a post-XCOM 2 world. In this setting humanity won and now humans and various sentient alien species have to live together amidst the remaining cities of Earth, one of which is City 31 where the game’s story takes place. Perhaps unsurprisingly the alien occupation has left myriad pieces of devastating equipment lying around, and it’s the job of you and your squad to reclaim them and keep them out of the hands of those who would cause further damage to a reeling world. Unfortunately for you and your team, there are three gangs/cults operating within City 31 and you’ll need to investigate and cauterize each one before they can wreak havoc on the city. In spite of how it sounds, these investigations don’t require much in the way of investigating, as essentially you’ll have a series of timers which obscure main-story missions and that give you time to engage in multiple randomly generated missions so you can build up your squad. While you’re galivanting around saving the day, you’ll of course have to develop new tech (although the research system is massively simplified) and are encouraged to rotate through your team so that individual squad members can engage in training. This training system necessitates squad members being out of action for a few days, in exchange for them developing some skills such as additional actions and bonuses to max HP, their dodge skill and so on. Unfortunately you can only train one squad member at a time, and if a squad member takes too much damage in a mission there’s a chance that they’ll get a “scar” which reduces one of their stats. The only way to remove this scar is to have them spend 2 days in training, and for context I finished the whole game in just over 70 in-game days so removing scars eats up a lot of your training time. Of course you could leave your scarred members be, but most of the debuffs are pretty significant such as -3 movement per turn, -30% chance to hit, -3 max HP and so on. Further encouraging you to rotate your squad is the fact that the more powerful training options are only unlocked once your squad member has reached a certain level, so if you keep one on the bench they’ll be relatively weak and if you keep a unit on active duty they’ll always fall short of their max potential.

Then to make things even more of an exercise in plate-spinning, you’ve got the Assembly which functions as your research lab and SPEC OPS which is basically a designated beach-warmers slot. To keep it quick, the Assembly is where you can research and unlock new gear, but fortunately all you need to do once it’s been researched is to buy it so there’s no waiting for something to be researched, then waiting again for it to be produced. Some unlocks are purchased 1-by-1 (for example grenades and medkits) while others only need to be purchased once and then upgrade is applied to all applicable squaddies (such as the weapon upgrades and the armour upgrades). As for the Spec Ops, these are essentially bonuses that can be attained by having squad members busy themselves for a few days. Initially you can only get basic bonuses such as +60 intel or +$80, but as your team gets more developed and as you build up “field teams” across the city more interesting Spec Ops unlock. Two of the more useful late(r) game Spec Ops are to receive a free Field Team, which saves you a bunch of the intel resource, or to reduce unrest in every single one of the city’s 9 districts at once. Speaking of which, City 31 is split into 9 pieces and in each part you have a separate unrest bar alongside the ability to build one of three Field Teams. These field teams are split between Security, Technology and Finance and each type provides a bonus to the applicable resources (Intel, Etherium and Credits respectively) once per week and also increases the unrest reduction of operations in their respective district. You can then upgrade these Field Teams using the intel resource (or farm the applicable Spec Op) with these upgrades increasing the bonuses / unrest reduction provided. There are also “situations” that occur, and these are basically non-missions that involve sending out your squad but no enemies or fighting occurs. Generally the cadence of XCOM: Chimera Squad is mission -> situation -> mission and so on, but the main story missions can interrupt this as they unlock after a certain amount of in-game days have passed.

Once the main quest missions are unlocked, they’re not mandatory (with a handful of exceptions) but as you can only do one mission at a time and they always spawn in batches you’ll generally want to do main missions as soon as they become available. Failing to respond to a mission will cause the unrest in that district to increase and once the unrest in a district reaches the maximum level of 5, it gradually begins increasing the overall City Anarchy at a rate of +1 anarchy per max unrest district per day. Fortunately you do gain some abilities as you build and upgrade your field teams, which let you reduce unrest in a district, auto-complete a situation, freeze unrest in a district (to prevent it going up for failing to respond) and one that reduces the City Anarchy level which is important. Why is that important? Well once the City Anarchy hits a score of 14, you instantly receive a game-over and lose the game. On the plus side once a district hits the max unrest level, a new mission is automatically created for that district which you can complete to reduce that district’s unrest. The caveat is that if you don’t complete this mission you’ll lose your field team and it’s worth noting that these missions tend to be quite difficult. They’re not impossible of course, especially as you get infinite retries but they’re noticeably harder than the normal missions which generally aren’t too bad.

On that subject, missions now have multiple phases and always start with a Breach phase. This is another one of the major changes that have been made to the formula, as you’ll be able to decide in what order your team enters the mission and what entrance you’ll be taking. Sometimes you’ll need an item (equipped in your breach slot) to be able to use different entrances, and each entrance will provide pros and cons. Once your squad bursts into the room the enemies will have a varied reaction time, with some being surprised, some being alert and others being aggressive. These reactions dictate whether they’ll do nothing (and have a bonus for shots fired at them), get a free non-aggressive reaction such as Hunker Down or fire at your squad during the breach action. Fortunately your squad members each get a free shot during this breach action, so you generally want to prioritise summoners and physic enemies alongside the ones that are going to shoot at you.

Some missions have multiple of these phases, with the final mission having 4 of them, and during each phase you’ll enter a room filled with baddies and either have to take them out or complete an objective such as escorting a civilian to an evac zone. One of the most difficult parts of XCOM: Chimera Squad is actually these escort missions, as they always make aggressive use of the game’s reinforcement system which causes new enemies to spawn in. The twist is that often these new enemies are able to get a turn in before most of your squad, so depending on your positioning and what abilities the enemies have this can be a significant barrier to quickly wrapping up a mission. To make matters worse, often these reinforcements continue to respawn at the end of a turn so a simple escort mission can involve 3 enemies spawning per round, and for most of the game you can only have each character fire once per round.

Which brings us neatly to another part of the game that’s undergone a change, as now squaddies and enemies take turns one-after-another with the overall order being determined at the start of each round and being impacted by the order your characters entered the room during the breach phase. This means that you’ll need to be strategic with your breach order, as you’ll often want shotgunners to go first and more accurate squaddies to go in last, but this then means that you’ll have to wait for multiple enemies to have their turn before the guys at the back of your breach option can do anything. Generally this isn’t a big deal, but occasionally your squad members put themselves in bad positions after the breach or are otherwise unable to prevent themselves from getting disabled, mind-controlled or charged by a Berserker. I quite liked this tweak as it makes the firefights feel much more intense and forces you to react quickly to the more threatening enemies, although as you don’t have the ability to command your entire squad at once those missed shots can quickly cause things to spiral out of control.

Another slight change that’s related is that enemy grenades, and some types of the grenades that you use (such as Claymore’s satchel charge) are given a spot in the turn order before they detonate – which means that you can often avoid them if you’re lucky with the enemy targeting… or miss the ones you’ve thrown if you’re a FOOL. One last thing to mention with regards to the breaching system is that your squaddies occasionally have other abilities that can be used, or can equip some items which enable them to take other actions, but generally these are limited to one per mission. As missions can have up to 4 breaches, this requires a bit of patience on the players part lest they blow through all of their good abilities during the first part of a mission. Similarly your squaddies have abilities that they can use, some of which have a general cool-down on the basis of combat rounds, but others are only usable once per mission. A good example of the former is that you can now use a “team up” ability to make a squaddie on your team take their turn next, which is very powerful. Squaddies also have the ability to use certain equipped items during combat, although these don’t count as an action and include things like grenades, medkits and the like.

My general feeling is therefore that all of the tweaks have been included to make a faster paced XCOM experience that still manages to be a challenge without ever feeling cheap. Abilities are quick, the breach system ensures that you always know where enemies are (so no more stumbling into a pod of enemies) and the turn ordering system makes moment-to-moment decision making more important. That’s not to say that you can’t take your time on each turn of course, but generally it’s a question of whether you can tank a few shots or need to pop an item/ability you were trying to save for later. Overall the game is relatively short and while the campaign has 3 investigations plus one or two boss missions after the last investigation is wrapped up, the whole thing never overstays it’s welcome. I will confess that some of the mission types felt repetitive, especially the escort/rescue missions which seemed to keep popping up but fortunately the inclusion of the situations means you’re still able to press ahead without getting bogged down. The only time the game felt silly was with the miss system, because I found that unless I put a squad member in danger with an exceptionally aggressive flank, most of my shots had already an 80% chance to hit. Which is often enough, but man oh man did those occasional misses feel spiteful. Of course this is a) entirely true to the series and b) a reminder that any good strategy isn’t dependent on a single shot hitting. Still, I had a few close calls as missing an 85% shot caused enemy A to take their turn where they crippled squad member B with an ability who then missed their turn so enemies B and C got some shots off and so on. With that being said, I played on “Challenging” and I’d say that the game was challenging without being overwhelming, especially as it’s almost impossible to softlock yourself by getting all of your best squad members killed. Indeed it can sometimes be beneficial to restart a mission as otherwise you’ll run the risk of having scars impact your squaddies for the next few in-game days. Don’t be tempted to savescum however, as on Challenging and Impossible you are dependent on the game’s autosave feature as you can’t make any manual saves!

In conclusion then XCOM: Chimera Squad is a great game and a solid entry for both the series and a good starting point for TBS noobs. While it has some quirks to it, generally these serve to create a fast paced XCOM experience that’s faithful enough to the rest of the reboot series while still being familiar. I enjoyed the setting, which some people hated as it gave a good justification for the Breach mechanic which is a lot of fun. Plus the inter-character reactions can be amusing, as was some of the NPC background chatter referring to alien conspiracies and news bulletins which made light of the political aspect of the post-XCOM 2 world. While XCOM: Chimera Squad is a budget release in terms of price it isn’t a budget release in terms of polish or content, as it’ll take you around 20 hours to beat and there are relatively few bugs to be found. I did encounter some animation glitches, but never had the game crash or encounter a significant bug which shows that the QA department did a good job. Overall I’d say that XCOM: Chimera Squad is well worth the modest asking price and I’d highly recommend it for anyone looking to try out XCOM or TBS games more broadly, although I would recommend the higher difficulties for more experienced players.

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Quick Note – If you own the Remasters or the Bioshock Collection – which are now the only versions available for sale on PC and modern consoles, then you already own Minerva’s Den. It’s entirely separate from the main game and is buried away in the main menu behind Downloadable Content.

I’ll be honest when I say that Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den is a game (well, DLC) that I’ve been meaning to play for a very long time. Most of the discourse around this modest DLC for the game is overwhelmingly positive and as someone who really enjoyed both BS1 and BS2, I knew that I would play it one of these days but that day never came. So here I am around a decade later finally stumbling into what is arguably the best part of the entire Bioshock saga, which is definitely not what I expected to write when I first started playing it. In fact the initial impressions I had for Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den weren’t particularly positive, as it seemed to just chuck Subject Sigma (your character) into a new area for no particular reason and the gameplay was… pretty much identical. Sure there are new areas which look nice and I appreciate the attention to detail that some of the splicers have received, with their new models that have a distinctly lab-tech/researcher appearance. Yet it initially all just felt like a somewhat random addition of more content. Almost as if the publishers at 2K cracked the whip and forced the various development studios to cobble together a DLC that could be sold to fans quickly, on the back of BS2’s positive reception. Now I’m not certain as to what the context was for the creation of this DLC behind-the-scenes, but without wishing to spoil anything I’ll just say that these fears were put to rest by the DLC’s conclusion and that the developers have done a surprisingly good job of integrating this short little expansion into the narrative of the base game.

But I guess that sort of narrative nuance is about what you’d expect from the Bioshock games, at least from that moment in time. Bioshock 1 had received exceedingly good reviews after all and the criticism of Bioshock 2 was essentially “it’s good but too similar” which basically means it was a great game that just lacked the same impact as it’s predecessor due to being less of a novelty. Now if you were of a critical mind, you could also make the same criticism of Minerva’s Den as it really is good but exceptionally similar to the base game. When you start Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den you are back at square one, because this is an entirely separate section of content which means that you don’t have the plasmids, tonics or even weapons that you’ve been accustomed too. This means that you have the same progression as you do in the base game, as you go from lighting bolt and drill through to the same end-game loadouts that you had towards the end of Bioshock 2, just without nearly as much time to get acclimatised. As a consequence the gameplay can feel a little rushed, as you have access to all of the same weapons, ammo, plasmids etc but you have a fraction of the stages. This means that you end up with levels that have 6 little sisters with their big daddies wandering around, alongside an almost constant trickle of new weapons or upgraded weapons of your existing ones. Things can therefore feel a little overwhelming, as you’ll get an upgraded weapon, then there’s a little sister around the corner, then within 10 minutes you’ve also found a new weapon and two new tonics before you could even consider spending that new Adam you’ve acquired. But considering the limitations that the guys working on this DLC had due to the low price and corresponding shorter duration of content on offer, I still think the pacing is perfectly fine. If anything I’m impressed that they were able to squeeze everything from the base game into this expansion, especially considering that there are some new toys of Delta to mess around with.

And these new toys are mostly pretty enjoyable, including that snazzy little laser gun you can see in that screenshot above. While none of them are overpowered and there aren’t too many of them, they’re enjoyable to use and most of them are good enough that you’ll be using them as much as your favourites from the base game. The Ion Laser itself is one of the first weapons you find in the DLC and it deals a healthy stream of constant damage, with cheap ammo that lets you keep that death beam blazing for plenty of time between reloads while being much more accurate than the machine-gun. There’s also the Gravity Well plasmid which is essentially a throwable black hole that sucks in the bad guys and then causes a large explosion, which is incredibly useful for the myriad situations in the DLC where you’re getting rushed by a group of angry splicers. Last and admittedly least there are two “new” tonics that are introduced in Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den, firstly you’ve got the Drill Dash tonic which effectively acts the same as the research bonus from the base game as you can’t use the research camera in this DLC. Secondly there’s the “Master Protector” tonic, which increases the duration of each little sister gathering section but also increases the amount of Adam you receive per gathering session. The catch with this latter tonic is that you also need to have the Protector Trials and have received every star within that DLC mode. So if you don’t have it (which is unlikely unless you’re playing the PS3/360 versions) or more pertinently haven’t got 100% completion in it, then you can’t access this tonic. In hindsight only getting 1 weapon, 1 plasmid and (maybe) 1 tonic isn’t a huge selection, but two out of three are nice additions to the game and so it’d be churlish to complain.

But perhaps you’d be forgiven for complaining about the new enemy types, as there are a handful of them and they almost all function as upgraded versions of existing enemies. You’ve got a new type of Brute Splicer, who is on fire and is thus immune to flame damage and who unleashes a burst of flame around him when he takes melee damage. Then you’ve got three new types of security bots, a melee bot with a cattle prod, a variant with the Ion Laser that you were enjoying so much and finally a variant that makes effective use of a grenade launcher to injure you, itself and pretty much everything in between. You’ve also got the return of the Winter Houdini splicers from the first game, who have learned a new little trick which causes them to disable any friendly bots you’ve hacked until you manually re-activate them. Finally there’s a new type of Big Daddy in the former of the lancer, which is a beastly tank to deal with and can dish out as much damage as he can take. Fortunately he’s dependent on consistently dishing out the damage without any big surges in lethality or abrupt melee charges, meaning that you can abuse the terrain and/or use multiple mini-turrets and security bots to whittle him down. The “new” design for this enemy is also great and it’s nice to see that the DLC made use of the concept art that was included with the collector’s edition art book for the base game.

And that’s about all you get, to be honest. While the three new levels are each fairly lengthy and packed with audio logs, safes and various enemies the whole experience isn’t much of a revolution. You still have the same tendency to end up backtracking through areas you’ve just cleared but where the enemies have respawned and you won’t be able to access weapon upgrade stations or research bonuses. You’ve still got the same Adam gathering “activity”, the same Big Sister fights if you engage in that Adam gathering, mostly the same enemies to deal with and largely the same weapons, plasmids and tonics with which to deal with them. I guess there are also some Vacuum bots that you can smash for loot, but this is basically more Bioshock 2 with a sprinkling of new content (including a little quasi-asteroids mini-game that you can play in the second level). The main drawn of Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den is the new narrative, centred around Subject Sigma who turns out to be a key figure in the story of at least one character from the base game and who has his own engaging little plot-line. I will say the villain of this DLC is pretty fun and even if he is a total wankstain, he is an engaging antagonist even if he doesn’t have the same depth as Ryan, Fontaine or even Lamb. But then again, he is spliced up to the eyeballs so it’s not entirely his fault – plus he continues the series tradition of slightly weird and out of place boss fights.

In summary Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den is a nice little slice of Bioshock 2 that has it’s own well written storyline with some links to the campaign of the main game, alongside just enough new enemies and equipment to keep things from feeling like a total retread. The new stages are a pleasant continuation of the base game and offer a reasonable amount of hidden treasures without being excessively long or overly short. The pacing is handled well and while some features are missing, they’re not hugely missed and I feel like adding in research requirements and weapon upgrades would have made this DLC feel too bloated. Instead it’s the goldilocks of DLC, just enough to feel fresh without having so much that if feels alien. Just long enough to fit a self-contained story without being so long that it stretches itself short, and just tied enough to the main game to feel like an extension of the narrative without being so connected to the base game that it wouldn’t fit into the overall story. It’s a great little chunk of extra Bioshock 2 and it doesn’t fall for either the Bioshock 1 trap of having the engaging villain step aside halfway through or the Bioshock 2 trap of erring too much to the first game. Instead Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den is in a sweet spot between all of the ways it could have gone wrong, making it a great example of restrained game design and one experience that I would recommend to anyone who has enjoyed any of the Bioshock games (or even just games in general).

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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.

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