Gameplay Today - Because You're Always Gaming

There is an old saying about meeting your idol. The basic premise is that you never want to do so because they can’t live up to the image you’ve created in your head. The same thing can be said for the once infamous vaporware title Duke Nukem Forever. After being kicked around by different developers, built on different engines and appearing in more court cases than Michael Vick, Duke finally met his fans this generation. The reality of what Duke Nukem Forever is doesn’t come anywhere close to the hype we’ve built up for over a decade. Like the former California Governor that Duke so closely resembles, 2011 is not a good year for the beefed up blonde tough guy. We've built him up, and reality is here to tear him down.

The first thing you’ll notice about DNF are the horrible load times involved. With a game that has mechanics this simple and levels that don’t look good at all, there shouldn’t be any load times at all. Sometimes the game has you waiting so long, you’d think the game was downloading the entire contents of the disc to the HDD. Once the game does load up, you think that it might be okay. The typical Duke humor is there from the very beginning, but starts to wear on the player just as fast. Distractions like writing on walls, urinating in restrooms and more are all there. The horrible attempt at bringing Duke into this Jackass era of potty-humor media becomes evident with gags like flinging poop against the wall. I’m pretty sure that even Daniel Tosh would find this game’s “jokes” to be immature.

The actual combat in DNF is the game’s strongest attribute. That’s not a good thing since it feels like a shooter from the 1990s. The most confusing thing about the combat is the lack of enemies and things to kill. Without the plethora of juvenile potty humor, DNF is barely capable of being called a XBLA or PSN shooter. There’s just no meat to the actual shooter part of this game. The multiplayer is equally stripped down and offers a whopping three types of gameplay. You can choose King of the Hill, a very bland deathmatch or a variant of Capture the Flag. None of these will have players coming back for more. DNF’s multiplayer is about the most unbalanced of any shooter released in the last decade which isn’t a surprise considering the rest of the game’s design. It all comes down to a race to the most powerful weapon rather than any real strategy.

The visuals in this game are some of the worst seen this generation. Glitches can be seen everywhere. There is draw-in practically everywhere you look and in some cases clipping that makes entire walls pointless because you can see the other side. Animations of Duke, NPCs and enemies are all atrocious. Much like the gameplay itself in Duke Nukem Forever, the visuals in this game are simply broken from the ground up which isn’t something we’re accustomed to from Gearbox titles. The audio is nothing more than bad jokes that rarely, if ever, hit their mark.

We’d love to provide Gearbox with a list of excuses as to why Duke Nukem Forever turned out so bad. Gearbox didn’t want to be the developer that pushed the release of DNF beyond fifteen years. They gave the public what they had wanted for fourteen years by delivering a game that is everything Duke was back in 1997. The problem is that it’s not 1997 and gamers expect something that at least delivers an idea or two from the last decade of video games. We expected Duke to look good on screen and not be glitch ridden and bugged to all hell. Gearbox might have thought they were delivering a game we wanted after a long wait, but instead they pushed out a rough title that has no business on retail shelves. The industry and the fans that follow it would prefer to have the “what if” question in their minds regarding DNF instead of the reality that is a very bad Duke Nukem game. Maybe Duke should stop calling himself the King until he can at least match Serious Sam.