Duke Nukem Forever review
Randy Pitchford is thinking of me. “I would not want to be a journalist on this one,” the Gearbox studio boss told Mr Minkley in our Duke Nukem Forever launch day interview. “I would not want to be a critic. It’s going to be tough.”
His concern, presumably, is that Duke Nukem Forever is such a monumental event, such a literally game-changing, epoch-shaking moment, that the pressure to accommodate its many facets in a single review – to boil down 14 years of expectation into a fair critical summary – is too terrible a burden for any writer to bear. Duke Nukem Forever! It’s here! How can things ever be the same again?
I certainly felt that pressure. Do you let the game’s famously troubled gestation – which looked like it would never come to term, until Gearbox stepped in at the eleventh hour – affect the score? Do you try to filter its off-colour humour through a modern lens, or accept the adolescent scatology as part of the Duke experience? Do you review for middle-aged fans from 1996, when Duke last appeared in a first-person shooter, or do you review for a generation of gamers that was still in infant school when our flat-top hero first asked pixellated strippers to “Shake it, baby”? So much to consider. Randy’s right. It’s going to be tough.
Except, with joypad in hand, reviewing Duke Nukem Forever actually proves incredibly simple. Everything else becomes a sideshow when the main event is so obviously, heart-breakingly disappointing on almost every level. The toughest part is deciding where to begin.
The visuals that jump out at you first. This is an ugly game, committing practically every graphical sin imaginable. Textures are crude and blurry when they bother to load in at all. Jagged edges turn every diagonal into ziggurat steps while the frame rate chugs up and down. Lumpen and stuttering, Forever does not look like a game that has benefited from millions of hours of development time.
