Level design isn't much better, with few of the locations inspiring the sort of exploration and excitement that made Duke 3D such a memorable experience. There's an air hockey game with such skittish animation that you'd swear it was a Flash file being streamed over a dial-up modem. Basketball hoops repel balls with forcefields apparently six inches away from the net. Pinball tables offer perhaps the worst ball physics in living memory. This is most obvious when you try some of the environmental interactions scattered throughout the game. Both jumping and running feel sluggish, with Duke's grunts suggesting that he probably should have put some more gym time in before his big comeback.
Movement is heavy and sticky, frequently leaving you snagged on scenery or bumping up against invisible walls. Aiming is jerky and imprecise, even after tinkering with the sensitivity. It's the gameplay that's important, of course, but beneath the glitchy surface things aren't much better. Lumpen and stuttering, Forever does not look like a game that has benefited from millions of hours of development time. Jagged edges turn every diagonal into ziggurat steps while the frame rate chugs up and down. Textures are crude and blurry when they bother to load in at all.
This is an ugly game, committing practically every graphical sin imaginable. The toughest part is deciding where to begin.Ĭommando and Robocop join the list of movies that Duke pillages for random one-liners. Everything else becomes a sideshow when the main event is so obviously, heart-breakingly disappointing on almost every level. It's going to be tough.Įxcept, with joypad in hand, reviewing Duke Nukem Forever actually proves incredibly simple. Do you let the game's famously troubled gestation - which looked like it would never come to term, until Gearbox stepped in at the eleventh hour - affect the score? Do you try to filter its off-colour humour through a modern lens, or accept the adolescent scatology as part of the Duke experience? Do you review for middle-aged fans from 1996, when Duke last appeared in a first-person shooter, or do you review for a generation of gamers that was still in infant school when our flat-top hero first asked pixellated strippers to "Shake it, baby"? So much to consider. Duke Nukem Forever! It's here! How can things ever be the same again? His concern, presumably, is that Duke Nukem Forever is such a monumental event, such a literally game-changing, epoch-shaking moment, that the pressure to accommodate its many facets in a single review - to boil down 14 years of expectation into a fair critical summary - is too terrible a burden for any writer to bear. "I would not want to be a journalist on this one," the Gearbox studio boss told Mr Minkley in our Duke Nukem Forever launch day interview.
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