Duke Nukem Forever, 10 Years Later – Part II: The DLC That Irked Me

Welcome to the second half of my Duke Nukem Forever retrospective, which is exactly two halves more than most people would want write about this game. Reminder, these articles took fewer years to develop than the game itself.

Did you miss me?

Last time we discussed the game’s single player campaign. A quick refresher: I had been lamenting an overly enthusiastic DNF review I posted a decade ago, but I discovered it’s less the gameplay and more Duke’s cringeworthy attitude that brings Forever down. If you haven’t yet, you might want to read it here.

Now on the 10^th anniversary of the game’s North American debut, what’s left to talk about? Well, what I didn’t do ten years ago was play Duke Nukem Forever’s DLC campaign, The Doctor Who Cloned Me. So in the name of science, I dropped ten bucks and set to work writing a detailed review of this ancient add-on for a blog no one reads. I guess I’m just that kind of guy.

The titular Dr. Proton.

Some reviewers have declared Cloned to be the superior single player offering. I wondered: had I missed the content that would have redeemed Forever? Had this DLC fixed some of the major gameplay issues of the main campaign? Did it finally deliver on some of the game’s potential?

 No. It somehow made it worse.

 

 We meet again, Dr. Proton

The Doctor Who Cloned Me starts with Duke captured by his former nemesis, Dr. Proton, and seconds away from being executed by a gang of Terminator-like robots. You’re shooting the bad guys in minutes, instead of taking a leak or signing some kid’s autograph book. We’re off to a good start!

He's not looking for Sarah Connor, that's for sure.

You’ll quickly notice that the visuals are dull and even more lifeless than the main DNF campaign. Cloned is reminiscent of the bland outer space episode of Duke 3D, with small, metallic corridors punctuated by vast, black skies. Get used to it, because this is what the majority of the DLC looks like. Well, except for the brothel/secret government science lab (of course), which looks like something Tim Allen would have built if he had been given a pallet of used popsicle sticks and plopped down in the middle of The Grapes of Wrath.

Scientist or hooker? Yes.

Anyway, Cloned quickly reintroduces players to the Expander weapon, which made its debut in the fourth episode of Duke Nukem 3D. Despite the name, the Expander doesn’t really expand enemies per se, so much as make them slightly plumper. In this state, they take four times damage, then explode. It’s got a low ammo cap and you’ll dump it the second you come across a shotgun.

New weapons and enemies aside, Cloned doesn’t feel all that different from Forever’s single player offering. There are unfunny jokes, pointless puzzles (menial warehouse labor should be in every action game), and the previously mentioned brothel, which just feels like a cut ‘n’ paste of the strip club from the main campaign with a new paint job.

 

The low point “joke” of this DLC is a short bus joke. (The abbreviation is T.A.R.D.) Not OK.

This time around, Duke occasionally has some help from companions. First up is Gen. Graves, the only likeable character in the entire game. Then, there’s Capt. Dylan of the Earth Defense Force, the walking hemorrhoid who somehow manages to play an even bigger role in Cloned than the main game. I got away with excluding Dylan, who manages to make Duke look like a Ph.D. holding feminist, from my review of the main game. And I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to talk about him here: he was supposed to dead. Duke even made it a point to tell the audience, “I guess he won’t be in the sequel.”

He’s in the sequel.

The only thing worse than Dylan is tiny Dylan. Shrinker sections are already grating at best, and adding Dylan just makes it that much worse. It’s like a midnight run to Walmart for Pepto-Bismol with a drunken Gilbert Gottfried as your copilot.  

Neither Graves nor Dylan are very good in battle. Both are more content to empty a full compliment of shotgun ammo into enemies from 6,000 paces than actually trying to help. They’re mostly there to drive the plot, such as it is, forward.

Heh, heh, what a mess

Duke Nukem Forever had a lot of problems, but bugs weren’t one of them. I’ve played the main campaign three full times in the last decade, and I’ve never encountered any kind of game-breaking glitches.

Meanwhile, The Doctor Who Cloned Me crashed more than once and required a hard reset. Then there was the time that a Duke clone enemy ran out of ammo, rushed and pinned Dylan against some sandbags, then proceeded to beat the hell out of him while the real Duke and Graves just watched. It looked kind of like this:

 

It’s another bug, I’m going to let it slide this time.

After unceremoniously killing Dr. Proton halfway through the game, Cloned decides that we need to go to the moon because who cares why. When Duke’s not running around on the surface of the moon without a space suit (he’s too manly for oxygen I guess), he’s driving a moon buggy. It’s in this vehicle that you’ll take on the final boss, the alien queen.

Space: The fatal frontier

It’s a long fight, and if you’re unlucky like me, the game bugs out one last time. After 10 minutes of wondering why I couldn’t land the final hit and finish her off, Cloned finally decided that it was done with me and played the ending.

 

Game over

The final scene does nothing to wrap up the story, nor is it satisfying in any way. Duke implies that he’s going to open the first-ever strip club in space, and Dylan bangs a chick in a trailer park. Then Dylan gets the last line ever uttered in franchise proper and the game abruptly dumps you back to the main menu. We never find out how Dr. Proton was resurrected in the first place, or what becomes of Duke’s presidential campaign, or even how Dylan managed to survive his scrape with death in the main game.

If Duke Forever was Triptych slapping together a game from 14 years of random assets and ideas, The Doctor Who Cloned Me feels like the scraps of that effort thrown in a blender. It’s like the main game, but shorter. It’s like the main game, but less creative. It’s like the main game, but worse.

At about 3 or 4 hours of playtime, The Doctor Who Cloned Me isn’t long enough to outstay its welcome. But they didn’t learn a thing from the mistakes of the first campaign and instead just made more of it. The same gameplay problems that were present in DNF are here too, as is the same garbage humor.

I have a teeny soft spot for Duke Nukem Forever since sometimes I can see flashes of that old Duke 3D spirit. DNF disappointed me, made me angry, made me cringe. It also made me smile once or twice, made me celebrate little victories in its game design, and, for brief moments, it made me have fun.

The Doctor Who Cloned Me just left me feeling empty. This is probably the last time we’ll ever see a proper Duke game, and the series ended like this.

If Duke Nukem Forever is a 6.5/10, then Cloned is a 5/10. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s just… nothing. After some excitement in the initial levels, the only thing I felt by the time the credits rolled was numb.

But ask me again in 2031. We’ll see how I feel then.

 

No time to play with oneself

And that was almost it for this review. I very nearly switched off the PlayStation and put Duke Nukem Forever back up on my shelf for another 10 years. After all, there’s no way the multiplayer is still working, right?

Wrong!

Shockingly, Duke Nukem Forever’s multiplayer is indeed functional at the time of this writing – at least on PlayStation 3. But not so shockingly, nobody’s playing it anymore.

In Duke 3D, I used to play tons of Duke Match levels in single player mode, walking around and appreciating the weapon placement, architecture, and creative ideas employed by an army of user maps. Even without other players, there was still the joy of exploration and a sense of adventure.

But as I loaded up all 16 multiplayer maps in DNF by myself – because literally no one else in the whole world was playing Duke Nukem Forever – I was confronted with barebones battlefields and smaller, uninteresting versions of existing single player maps. Of note was a recreation of Duke 3D’s first level as a paintball arena. I remember it being reasonably entertaining as a multiplayer level back in 2011, but it pales in comparison to the original.

Near the end, I came across a map based on a popular Halo level; it was included in Hail to the Icons Parody Pack of four multiplayer maps. The level is a giant kids’ sandbox littered with massive toys and a simple set of sand castles that Duke can hide in. Thinking about the work that must have gone into this level and marveling at the design, I felt a touch of that awe that I used to get as a Duke 3D devoté in my teens.

This looks awesome!

As I lollygagged in that oversized sandbox – not once encountering another player – I reflected on my last foray into the world of Duke Nukem Forever. If 3D Realms had released the game as it appeared in the 1998 or 2001 trailer, it would have blown everyone’s minds. But as it stands, DNF is just a shell of what it could have been, like playing a Duke Match by yourself.

The reality is, Duke Nukem Forever was a disappointment 14 years in the making. But getting bogged down in the should and the could haves isn’t going to change anything. Overall, DNF is probably better than you remember. It was fun and frustrating to revisit, and it’s time to put it back and let go. 

Instead, I’d rather think back to the summer of 1996 when Duke Nukem 3D was the hottest PC game around. There were always more adventures to explore, more aliens to take down, more cities to save. That’s the real Duke Nukem and nothing DNF did can take that away.

Hail to the king, baby.

There's only one Duke Nukem!

Duke Nukem Forever, 10 years later

As bad as you remember?

After a staggering 14-year development cycle, numerous engine changes, and even a handful of lawsuits, Duke Nukem Forever finally released worldwide on June 10, 2011 and in North America four days later, on June 14, 2011.

I’ve been a giant fan of Duke Nukem 3D fan since 1996, when my buddy Tom installed the shareware version on my family’s brand new, first-ever Windows machine. As one of the Duke faithful, I got my copy of DNF on release day, and I didn’t go in halfheartedly, either.

As you can see, I’ve still got Balls of Steel.

$100 in 2011 money is like $50,000 today. Always bet on Duke!

As soon as I could, I posted a review of the game on this blog, which you can read here. I didn’t give it a rating per se, but on GameFAQs, I awarded Duke Nukem Forever a 7/10.

Here’s the final paragraph of that review:

“Occasionally Forever goes beyond self-awareness and reaches the point of unintentional self-parody, but I’m pleased to report that much of that old Duke magic has managed to survive three engine changes, 14 years and the efforts of countless programmers and artists. Even though it took forever, everybody’s favorite foulmouthed alien asskicker has once again delivered a dandy dose of old school, irreverent entertainment.”

If you’re reading this, you probably know that happened next: Duke Forever was slammed with a ton of 1-star reviews and has become known as one of the worst games of all time. Over the last decade, I’ve found myself wondering: was my original review too enthusiastic? Is Duke Nukem Forever as bad as everyone says?

With DNF’s 10^th anniversary upon us, there’s no better time for me to finally find out. So I fired up DNF on my aging PlayStation 3 with the goal of not only re-reviewing the game, but also reviewing my original review.

That’s pretty meta. The Duke would approve.

 

Damn, I’m looking mediocre

From the opening level to the ending credits, I was consistently underwhelmed by Duke Forever’s graphics. It looks fine for a PS3/Xbox 360-era game I guess, but sometimes DNF starts to feel like a GameCube and a PS3 had some kind of unholy lovechild and this game is the missing link between the generations. Everyone aside from Duke looks distinctly low-poly, a fact my younger self noted in the original review as well. Even the Dukester himself has some issues, particularly his stiff jumping animation where his legs move, but his arms stay put. Thankfully, the monsters all look pretty good. The environments, like Duke’s casino and the war-ravaged streets of Las Vegas, are nothing to write home about, but get the job done.

I'm so great I don't need to move my arms to take out the alien scum!

The controls are good for the most part. Moving around, shooting, driving, and switching between a whopping two guns are all easy enough. But some of the minigames don’t control all that well, though. You like air hockey? You won’t here, as Duke’s arm flails wildly, knocking the puck into his own goal more often that his opponent’s.

As for the audio, the music and sound do an excellent job of bringing the world of Duke Nukem Forever to life. Duke’s vocals are great quality, though what he’s actually saying is often a different story. (We’ll get to that.) The rockin’ music gets you pumped to kick alien butt, and explosions and gunfire are all rich and on-point. It’s nothing memorable to be sure, but it all sounds professional and gave my speakers a good workout.

Ready for more action…?

If you’re looking to dust off DNF and give it another shot, or if you just want to check out a trainwreck from the past, take my advice: Play this on easy. It’s not that DNF is hard, but the more frustrated you get with this game, the less likely you are to come back to it.

From stopping a freefalling elevator (with no indication of how) to long sections where Duke is shrunk to the size of an action figure and solving boring puzzles, Duke Forever is littered with a ton of stuff that just doesn’t belong in a shooter. Sometimes it feels like you’re getting a good rhythm going, finally taking out the bad guys like in Duke 3D. Then you get stopped in your tracks by a walking simulator level or the god-awful platforming sections. More than once, I found myself screaming, “I just want to shoot something!”

But then it dawns on you about half-way though the game: Duke Nukem Forever is absolutely frontloaded with trash. When Duke takes control of the Mighty Foot monster truck and fights through the ghost town to the top of the dam, Duke Nukem Forever becomes a fairly fun game. Blasting the bad guys in the old west and running over pig cops in a mine cart harkens back to the bombastic DNF trailers of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Despite some pointless puzzles in the last quarter of the game, Duke Forever really picks up in the second half.

Oh my God, they killed David Boreanaz!

So what happened? As the story goes, whenever Duke creator George Broussard saw something cool in another video game, he’d demand that it be put into Duke Nukem Forever. DNF is so bogged down with 14 years of feature creep and mismanagement, it’s a miracle that the team at Gearbox Software was able to piece this into anything remotely cohesive.

What we wound up with is massively uneven game that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a first-person shooter or some kind of bizarre puzzle-action-walking sim. Frankly, if DNF had been half as long and dumped the all the strip clubs and interactive background garbage, it would have been a much more enjoyable experience.

But unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t the worst part of Duke Nukem Forever. What is? Well… it’s Duke himself.

Fail to the king, baby

The humor that punctuated Duke Nukem 3D so perfectly was apparently stored next to radioactive waste for the years they were developing Forever, and Duke has mutated into a grotesque parody of himself. It’s like the writers ran the original wit and charm of the character though Google Translate to Wingdings, then back to English again. The atmosphere that was Duke 3D’s greatest strength has gone from seedy to slutty, from gritty to crass.

Near the beginning of the game, while the aliens are just beginning their attack, the player is huddled in the “Duke Cave” speaking with Gen. Graves and the President of the United States. The president angrily barks, “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era!”

That’s how a lot of people feel about Duke Nukem as a character, but I have to I disagree. Duke could have transitioned gracefully from DN3D to Forever. There could still be critically acclaimed Duke Nukem games coming out to this day. But this game right here is what made him obsolete. Duke wasn’t a detestable character in 1996, he was an ‘80s action hero homage who liked women, beer, and killing alien scumbags. He was a little full of himself, cocky, and a tad on the misogynistic side. But instead of toning down Duke’s outdated qualities, the writers turned the worst parts of Duke’s attitude up to an 11. Now he’s now he’s self-obsessed and vile. In DN3D, Duke asked strippers to dance. In Forever, he owns an entire strip club and nearly every woman in the game is falling all over herself to sleep with him. In DN3D, Duke was out to save women from the evil aliens. In Forever, he tells captive women – his girlfriends nonetheless – “Looks like you’re f*cked.”

The subtitle reads, "Duke, We'll get the weight off in like a week... we swear!"

A lot of reviews have said that the true low point of the game is “The Hive,” wherein captured, impregnated women cry out for their parents and die slowly while Duke slaps “wall boobs,” makes sodomy jokes, and walks though doors that resemble buttholes. But for me, the rock bottom of Duke Forever is far more subtle. Scattered throughout the game are cigarette machines filled with various gag brands of smokes. One of these is “F*ggs” brand cigarettes, with an illustration of a stereotypical male leather fetishist on the package. It crossed the line from bad taste to hateful, and the Duke I grew up with wouldn’t have stood for it.

With the proper attitude adjustment, Duke could have been updated for the 2010s – a wisecracking antithesis to the bland Halo or Call of Duty offerings of the time. Instead, Duke is no longer the cool uncle with the corvette and the sunglasses, but the fat, sexist uncle who ruins Christmas by passing out drunk under the tree and farting by all the presents. The Duke Nukem series might have been able to recover from a late, mediocre, old-fashioned game. But people are much less forgiving of the toxic, reprehensible idiot that Duke has become.

All Outta Gum

So, to answer the question I posed at the start, is DNF as bad as everyone says?

Do me a favor. For just a minute, forget the delays, forget Duke’s cringy attitude, and forget the disappointment. Look at the game with an open mind. When it gets the hell out of its own way, Duke Nukem Forever can be a competent if unimpressive shooter with glimmers of what made Duke Nukem 3D so special. But at its worst, DNF is a painful chore that’s attitude is far more embarrassing than is ho-hum gameplay.

In all honestly, DNF gets much more crap than it deserves. And that’s because its biggest sin isn’t even in the game. It’s the fact that Duke Forever took so long to get released and was so underwhelming. Duke said it himself: “After 12…years, it should be” a good game. It’s not.

So yes – to answer the question that’s lived rent-free in my head for the last decade, my Duke Nukem Forever review from 10 years ago was indeed too forgiving. But even with a glut of flowery language and the excitement of a playing a new Duke game after 14 long years, my original review doesn’t deny that DNF as “serious issues.” A rating of 7/10 wasn’t that far off the mark. After 1,800 words and ten years to ponder it, I’m rerating DNF a 6.5/10.

I’m not really sure why I tortured myself for a decade over what amounts to a half-point score adjustment and a bit too much enthusiasm, but I guess that’s just the kind of guy I am.

And that’s really all there is to say about Duke Forever… or is it? What about multiplayer, you ask? And how about the game’s DLC campaign, The Doctor Who Cloned Me? Isn’t that supposed to be better than the main game?

Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered: Tune in on Monday, June 14 – DNF’s North American anniversary – for part 2 of Duke Nukem Forever, 10 Years Later!

The ending is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 2016 election.