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.