Duke Nukem Forever definitely has some fun parts and interesting ideas to play with, like the vehicle sections and the shrinking mechanics, but none of that matters if the game handles like a break dancer 50 years past his prime. I actually kind of liked some of the humor and could get over the poor audio and visual fidelity, but the game really descends into atrocity when we get to the core gameplay.
I would like to praise the heavy metal soundtrack, because I thought it was pretty good, but the more of it I heard, the more generic and bland it sounded. The voice acting is tolerable as long as you're only paying attention to the jokes and not the audio quality itself. In fact, it's so bad that the game appears to freeze for a few seconds any time there's too much action on screen. To make things worse, the frame rate is so bad that playing the game is a persistently jerky affair, and not in any pleasant way. Every character - even the stripper - moves with the fluidity of a robot that hasn't had the pleasure of oil for the better part of a decade and has about as much facial expression as the front of a buick.
The graphics themselves are pretty subpar to begin with, but it's the animation which stands out as particularly bad. The first of which was how ugly the game is. Within only a few hours of gameplay, I'd already hit a streak of red flags long enough to land a 747. While the story and humor was pretty much what you'd want out of Duke Nukem, the game really falls apart in every other category. Early in the game, you're offered a suit of power armour that looks an awful lot like Master Chief's, to which Duke replies: “power armour is for pussies.” There were a few moments of genuine laughs like that, but they were few and far between, and punching massive beasts in the balls is only funny the first few times, but keep your eyes out for a 'silicone based life form'. Though I do say that the one part of the game that made me laugh out loud was a reference to Halo. and I'm all out of bubblegum), he was just rehashing them wholesale (Epic fail, Tonight you dine in hell, etc).
I did find that, instead of creating memes (I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I won't lie, I got more than a few genuine chuckles out of the game, but there was just as much humour that felt recycled or forced. Making constant references to just how long fans have been waiting to see you again is funny, painting the walls with poop is not. It's pretty much exactly what you expect out of a Duke Nukem story, and in that respect I give it an unenthusiastic thumbs up.Īs for the humor, it mostly works, but some of it does not. Naturally, the aliens return to wreak havoc on human kind, and Duke is the only one who can stop them. It's been 12 years since Duke Nukem saved the world from the aliens, and he's basking in the everlasting glory of being a global champion and role model for everyone in the world. The story is about as simple and basic as they come. Sadly, this didn't last and before long I was ripping my hair out. For this reason, I spent the first six hours of game time thinking to myself that it wasn't so bad it's about as mediocre as I'd expected, no reason to be disappointed.
After a decade and a half of development time and countless false starts, it was easy to think, “15 years? This must be the best game ever”, even though the actual development time for the finished product was only a few years, much like any other normal game. Seriously, is this a joke? I know all about Duke Nukem Forever's infamous development and it would be remarkably unfair to judge the game based on that, especially since the game has been made and remade and started from scratch a dozen times or so, but even if you judge the game entirely on its own merits, it's a sloppy mess and I honestly can't help but think this was just some sort of cruel joke meant to poke fun at the expectations of the fanbase that's been waiting so long.īefore I ever even got to play the game, I knew I had to keep my expectations in check. By Gordon Bryant, posted on 23 June 2011 / 12,800 Views
0 kommentar(er)
