Duke's Big Flop: Forever's Big Misstep
Duke's 2011 outing is a complete mess of a game from a gameplay standpoint. It tries so hard to call back to the 90's and Duke Nukem 3D but ultimately becomes so full of differing shooter game tropes that it loses its own identity. Starting with the basics, Duke now has a regenerating health bar, or "Ego" meter, and slowly recovers health when taking cover behind objects. This is a thing started by games like Halo and Gears of War. Master Chief had a similar refilling shield bar, and Gears of War featured a cover based system to protect from danger. Duke's version of these things pales, having a slower regeneration that breaks the pace of combat and forcing players to stop combat in order to hide and heal.
This cover system can be seen at its worst when players get to the fight with the Battle Lord on top of the Hoover Dam. The Battle Lord wields a mini gun that tracks the player, and because bosses can only be hurt by turrets and explosives, the player is left to fight it with a Rocket Launcher that carries just 5 rockets and several ammo replenishing boxes. The Hoover dam features a few scattered cars and pieces of debris as cover, but as the boss takes damage, he'll start kicking the cars around, negating most of the cover on the stage and leading to a quick death for the player. The cover based recovery system completely fails here when the enemy can just remove the cover.
We then get to another thing bosses have that spelled doom for the game. In the older games, all players needed to do was dodge and pump the bosses full of ammo, but here, the developers made the questionable decision to make bosses immune to traditional weaponry. Bosses here, as mentioned earlier, are only damaged by explosives and turrets, so the fights become more difficult, padded out, and rely on gimmicks. The Alien Queen is a great example for this because she uses her arms as a shield. Players need to use nearby bounce pads to hurl grenades past the shield, detonate it to stun her, and then unload rockets at her. While this happens, the Queen will begin spawning enemies to stop you from attacking her, meaning players will either need to multitask the fight or stop to take down enemies before continuing. The biggest threat here is the Octabrains she spawns, which can hurl your rockets back at you and kill you instantly.
Duke's own humor lends a hand in his downfall too. Duke's a pure 90's character, based on the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, and his snarky one liner references to movies and other games is what endeared the character to people back then. The game may have moved in a modern direction, but Duke has not. All of Duke's references to other games have become insulting, such as the game's Halo reference, where Duke is offered power armor similar to Chief's, but insists that a macho guy like him wouldn't need such dumb things. The humor feels like the game is trying to make fun of the things that did what it wants to do much better than it, and it does not work in it's favor.
The whole game ends up feeling like a slog, with the player probably laughing when Duke tries insulting games that did much better than his did, as with the Halo joke and his "I hate Valve puzzles" line later. The game wants to be two things at once, a retro shooter and a modern shooter, and because of that, it fails at both. Duke ends up feeling outdated, as if the world passed him by while he was gone, and he just hasn't realized it yet. Duke's final line in the game is one I know many fans felt upon finishing it, and his quip of, "What kind of a sh*t ending is that," ends up feeling directed towards the game itself. Duke Nukem Forever wanted to be too many things at once, and ultimately, that right there is the biggest mistake that was made with it.
This article was one i'd been holding for a while, so I do hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you next time for more retro thoughts!
SweetSailorRosalina
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