Game Review: Duke Nukem Forever
I've had a love affair with video games from a very early age; I was the first kid on my block to give away the secret of being able to deal two shots at once on the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders (hold down the reset button as you power the game up, then release), and we've done a lazy, happy dance ever since. My tastes have changed over the years, but there is almost always some electronic diversion which can happily claim an hour or so of my attention at a time.
These days my two favorite genres are the first-person shooter and the sports simulation. Here's my thoughts on 2011's release Duke Nukem Forever, from a qualified expert.
DNF--for short--is a first-person shooter for console and PC by 3D Realm Software. It's the sequel to 1995's Duke Nukem 3-D, which I played at the time of its initial release and enjoyed very much. Buoyed by the success of DN3D, 3D Realms immediately announced the sequel was in production. While the original game ran on two-dimensional sprite graphics, the forthcoming DNF would be a true 3-D polygonal experience like Quake, considered to be the technological gold standard at the time. With the crass sense of humor enjoyed by the title character, Duke Nukem himself (a kind of cross between Bruce Willis and Ash from The Evil Dead featuring a blonde buzzcut and steroid-induced muscles) and sporting a new upgraded graphics engine, how could it possibly go wrong?
Simple. DNF was announced in 1997. Fourteen years later, it finally saw daylight. Oops. Gamers will forgive a lengthy development cycle (id Software, the developer behind Doom and Quake, famously uses "It'll be done when it's done" as their release dates), but id also produces games that have you drooling in your soup when you play them. 3D Realms hdoesn't have that kind of a track record, so things were a little stacked against DNF from the first moment a person opened the shrink-wrapping. When I say, "A little stacked against them" what I mean is, "The development cycle became an industry joke about a decade ago." Mock prizes were invented just so that every year, DNF could be given the "Vaporware of the Year Award" and other similar titles.
However, 3D Realms persevered. And holy mother of God, miracle of miracles, the game was actually released.
So how was it?
In a nutshell, not good, and for a variety of reasons.
Are the dice a little loaded against it from the start? Sure, but you can't say that the wounds weren't self-inflicted. You can make the argument that the God-awful length of the development cycle counted a great deal against it, and I'll listen to that and agree wholeheartedly. Pure and simple, 3D Realms did a horrendous job in development. If I were a betting man, I would guess that I will be done with the six-novel story arc of the Ring Of Fire urban fantasy series in less time than it took 3D Realms to finish DNF. In fact, even if I didn't write a single word for the next two years, I would still be done in a full calendar year under their margin. That in itself is bad enough, but when you hit the media circuit every year or so talking about how it's still being worked on and "it's going to blow your mind when it's released, um, but we don't know when that is even though we've been working on it for half a decade," you're really setting yourself up for failure.
Okay, so let's zero that factor out of the equation. What about the nuts and bolts? Control-wise, the game responds well, so at least there's none of the horrible clusterfucks that torpedoed games like the famously awful Superman for the N64. However, is this really a selling point? Shouldn't we assume that pressing left will result in your character going left without any guesswork, especially given the glacially long development cycle (and we're going to get back to that again, before too long)?
Graphically... well, conventional wisdom would state that a game that has been being worked on fourteen years would have stunning graphics. After all, look at all the time they had to practice, right? Not even close. Given the advancements in graphics technology that take place every year, a developer has to pick their window of opportunity and go with that, or they will end up playing a never-ceasing version of high-resolution texture dynamic lighting catchup as better cards and processors hit the market. Myself, I have an Alienware, which means that my computer eats the modern games and shits out beautiful graphics and stellar performance as a matter of course. DNF, even with all effects turned up to max and trying to wring every drop of performance out of the game, just doesn't measure up. I can think of half a dozen games released within the calendar year that beats DNF in the sparkle department. Hell, I can go five years back and find better-looking games. It's not that it looks horrible, it's just that it looks... well, bland. Hard Reset, a game released the same year with a fraction of the budget and time in development, blows its doors off. Unfortunately that game is quite short...
...and that's another department where DNF disappoints. I realize that it's quite the trend these days to have most first-person shooters focused on the multiplayer experience and therefore the single-player campaign is given short shrift, but I actively hate this school of thought. Hate it, hate it, hate it. If you can blown through a game in a little under two days, that's a bad sign. Hard Reset is, disappointingly, only about five hours long but the visuals are truly excellent. DNF's running time is about twice that, and in no way does the pallor of its dated graphics engine make up for that fact. I didn't try the multiplayer, but since the next time I hear of a game having a crappy single-player campaign but being truly bitching on Net play will be the first one, I'll go ahead and assume DNF's mutiplayer experience is similarly disappointing.
In terms of content, DNF ranges from moderately engaging to annoying. The original DN3D was a breezy, fun ride with wry one-liners from the hero and plenty of gore and firefights. In the fourteen years between games, Serious Sam came along and not only did the graphics better, but also had a more likeable protagonist. There's some instances of run-and-gun fighting which get the blood flowing (not to mention splattering on the screen), but for every cheerful Yin in the game, there are three boring/annoying Yangs waiting in the wings. Driving the Dukemobile, a specially designed monster truck, is boring. The jumping puzzles are dull. It's like the game can't decide whether it wants to be a smart trip down the rabbit hole (Half-Life), or a grunting run-and-gun gorefest beatdown (Serious Sam). Trying to straddle both sides of the aisle is ambitious, true, but results in a deeply flawed game.
The main sin that DNF commits is that despite all its attempts to deliver good play, aesthetically pleasing graphics and interesting content, there isn't a single thing this game does that another title hasn't already delivered with superior results. If you like mindlessly blowing away large amounts of foes, Serious Sam and Painkiller are already available for your pleasure. If pretty graphics are your game, the series takes benchmarking to a whole new level in Far Cry/Crysis. Moody, atmospheric horror? Take a swipe at Doom 3. Over-the-top sheer sadism, killing enemies in new and inventive ways as they beg for mercy? Load up Bulletstorm and have at the enemy. And the real kicker is that all these titles (with the exception of Bulletstorm) are a few years old, meaning that all of them can be had for the price of DNF by itself.
Bear in mind, these are also my thoughts on the game after paying a deeply discounted rate on Steam, having bought in for less than ten bucks. Had I been one of the people who plunked down half a hundred on release day, I can't imagine how irate I would have been. Then again, it's not like I would have been completely surprised. I went into it not expecting a lot out of Duke Nukem Forever, and 3D Realms surely didn't let me down.
Too bad. Duke Nukem deserved better.
These days my two favorite genres are the first-person shooter and the sports simulation. Here's my thoughts on 2011's release Duke Nukem Forever, from a qualified expert.
DNF--for short--is a first-person shooter for console and PC by 3D Realm Software. It's the sequel to 1995's Duke Nukem 3-D, which I played at the time of its initial release and enjoyed very much. Buoyed by the success of DN3D, 3D Realms immediately announced the sequel was in production. While the original game ran on two-dimensional sprite graphics, the forthcoming DNF would be a true 3-D polygonal experience like Quake, considered to be the technological gold standard at the time. With the crass sense of humor enjoyed by the title character, Duke Nukem himself (a kind of cross between Bruce Willis and Ash from The Evil Dead featuring a blonde buzzcut and steroid-induced muscles) and sporting a new upgraded graphics engine, how could it possibly go wrong?
Simple. DNF was announced in 1997. Fourteen years later, it finally saw daylight. Oops. Gamers will forgive a lengthy development cycle (id Software, the developer behind Doom and Quake, famously uses "It'll be done when it's done" as their release dates), but id also produces games that have you drooling in your soup when you play them. 3D Realms hdoesn't have that kind of a track record, so things were a little stacked against DNF from the first moment a person opened the shrink-wrapping. When I say, "A little stacked against them" what I mean is, "The development cycle became an industry joke about a decade ago." Mock prizes were invented just so that every year, DNF could be given the "Vaporware of the Year Award" and other similar titles.
However, 3D Realms persevered. And holy mother of God, miracle of miracles, the game was actually released.
So how was it?
In a nutshell, not good, and for a variety of reasons.
Are the dice a little loaded against it from the start? Sure, but you can't say that the wounds weren't self-inflicted. You can make the argument that the God-awful length of the development cycle counted a great deal against it, and I'll listen to that and agree wholeheartedly. Pure and simple, 3D Realms did a horrendous job in development. If I were a betting man, I would guess that I will be done with the six-novel story arc of the Ring Of Fire urban fantasy series in less time than it took 3D Realms to finish DNF. In fact, even if I didn't write a single word for the next two years, I would still be done in a full calendar year under their margin. That in itself is bad enough, but when you hit the media circuit every year or so talking about how it's still being worked on and "it's going to blow your mind when it's released, um, but we don't know when that is even though we've been working on it for half a decade," you're really setting yourself up for failure.
Okay, so let's zero that factor out of the equation. What about the nuts and bolts? Control-wise, the game responds well, so at least there's none of the horrible clusterfucks that torpedoed games like the famously awful Superman for the N64. However, is this really a selling point? Shouldn't we assume that pressing left will result in your character going left without any guesswork, especially given the glacially long development cycle (and we're going to get back to that again, before too long)?
Graphically... well, conventional wisdom would state that a game that has been being worked on fourteen years would have stunning graphics. After all, look at all the time they had to practice, right? Not even close. Given the advancements in graphics technology that take place every year, a developer has to pick their window of opportunity and go with that, or they will end up playing a never-ceasing version of high-resolution texture dynamic lighting catchup as better cards and processors hit the market. Myself, I have an Alienware, which means that my computer eats the modern games and shits out beautiful graphics and stellar performance as a matter of course. DNF, even with all effects turned up to max and trying to wring every drop of performance out of the game, just doesn't measure up. I can think of half a dozen games released within the calendar year that beats DNF in the sparkle department. Hell, I can go five years back and find better-looking games. It's not that it looks horrible, it's just that it looks... well, bland. Hard Reset, a game released the same year with a fraction of the budget and time in development, blows its doors off. Unfortunately that game is quite short...
...and that's another department where DNF disappoints. I realize that it's quite the trend these days to have most first-person shooters focused on the multiplayer experience and therefore the single-player campaign is given short shrift, but I actively hate this school of thought. Hate it, hate it, hate it. If you can blown through a game in a little under two days, that's a bad sign. Hard Reset is, disappointingly, only about five hours long but the visuals are truly excellent. DNF's running time is about twice that, and in no way does the pallor of its dated graphics engine make up for that fact. I didn't try the multiplayer, but since the next time I hear of a game having a crappy single-player campaign but being truly bitching on Net play will be the first one, I'll go ahead and assume DNF's mutiplayer experience is similarly disappointing.
In terms of content, DNF ranges from moderately engaging to annoying. The original DN3D was a breezy, fun ride with wry one-liners from the hero and plenty of gore and firefights. In the fourteen years between games, Serious Sam came along and not only did the graphics better, but also had a more likeable protagonist. There's some instances of run-and-gun fighting which get the blood flowing (not to mention splattering on the screen), but for every cheerful Yin in the game, there are three boring/annoying Yangs waiting in the wings. Driving the Dukemobile, a specially designed monster truck, is boring. The jumping puzzles are dull. It's like the game can't decide whether it wants to be a smart trip down the rabbit hole (Half-Life), or a grunting run-and-gun gorefest beatdown (Serious Sam). Trying to straddle both sides of the aisle is ambitious, true, but results in a deeply flawed game.
The main sin that DNF commits is that despite all its attempts to deliver good play, aesthetically pleasing graphics and interesting content, there isn't a single thing this game does that another title hasn't already delivered with superior results. If you like mindlessly blowing away large amounts of foes, Serious Sam and Painkiller are already available for your pleasure. If pretty graphics are your game, the series takes benchmarking to a whole new level in Far Cry/Crysis. Moody, atmospheric horror? Take a swipe at Doom 3. Over-the-top sheer sadism, killing enemies in new and inventive ways as they beg for mercy? Load up Bulletstorm and have at the enemy. And the real kicker is that all these titles (with the exception of Bulletstorm) are a few years old, meaning that all of them can be had for the price of DNF by itself.
Bear in mind, these are also my thoughts on the game after paying a deeply discounted rate on Steam, having bought in for less than ten bucks. Had I been one of the people who plunked down half a hundred on release day, I can't imagine how irate I would have been. Then again, it's not like I would have been completely surprised. I went into it not expecting a lot out of Duke Nukem Forever, and 3D Realms surely didn't let me down.
Too bad. Duke Nukem deserved better.