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!