Is it fair to review a game that you haven’t completed yet? Is it?

After playing for one hour I ask you, dear reader, is it fair to make man play this dross? Is it?

People might argue that the game has been in the making for 14 years or whatever, so what do you expect it to be like? You have to look at it from the point of view that it comes from a different time… Well, that would be fine if I was expected to pay £40 for it (that’s about $65, conversion fans!) 14 years ago, but I’m not. I’m expected to do it now. Luckily for me my local game store rents 2 games for £5 for 5 days and I got this with Red Faction Armageddon.

I was immediately suspicious when it was released in the UK before it was released in the US. You might call me a crazed conspiracy theorist here, but I think publishers know that if a game is reviewed poorly in Europe and the UK, then people in America IN GENERAL (all caps denotes a non-racist disclaimer) won’t really care. However the GENERALLY more cynical buyers of Europe and the UK would be less likely to buy if Americans reviewed a game poorly. Admittedly, I only have Duke Nukem and Dungeon Siege 3 (one word review – Dull) to base this on because I’m too lazy to do any research, but both games originate in the US but were released here first. Odd.

In a nutshell, the game has poor pacing, bad graphics, terrible voice acting, a script that should make a sane man want to eat his own ears, but you can urinate in the game, so IT MUST BE HILARIOUS!!! If anything, the game is a nice little curio, and to be fair if never released would have become even more of a legend – a sort of martyr. Released at a budget price, or even over Xbox Live for around £14.99 (with a disclaimer that it wasn’t very good), it might have been OK, but people played this before release. Some of the people who MADE it must have played it. I don’t know how this happened…

To raise the tone a little bit, I have condensed my review into the form of a haiku.

Duke Nukem is bad
No fun to be had ‘round here
I’d rather eat pubes

Thank you.

My original review (a few weeks after the game’s release) ended there and was fairly criticised for not discussing my actual issues with the game. Well, my friends, I very recently gave it another crack, on PC this time and I must say that my experience was far better! That’s right! I quit after 30 minutes instead.

Viewing it with a critical rather than vitriolic eye, I would first point out the hideous load times. On Xbox, I had 2-3 minute load times on occasion, including after dying. It doesn’t sound like much, but it saps the game of energy and pace. Surprisingly, PC didn’t fare much better.

It would feel unfair to attack the graphics of a 5 year old game, but I remember being underwhelmed at the time. Things had an odd shimmery feeling that is hard to describe, but that was exacerbated by the detached-feeling controls. It feels more like you are controlling someone who is in turn controlling Duke Nukem. The slight delayed and “jaggy” graphics ended up giving me a mild dose of motion sickness.

The most damning point about the game, however, is how much it feels like a relic of an age best left well behind. I’m not even going to approach the gender politics except to say that I found the unironic portrayal of the airheaded female twins at the start of the game to be entirely cringeworthy.

My main point about the feeling of being trapped in the past lies with the little interactions in the world, such as being able to pick up feces, use the toilets, draw on chalkboards, and play pool. In the original games, these things were wholly unexpected at the time, and as well as being a bit of a novelty, gave the worlds a feeling of depth. However, here they feel like shallow distractions designed to stretch the play time of the game, evidenced by the number of achievements related to interacting with these things, and the fact that they also increase your health pool. Pointing to these things and forcing the interaction in this way robs the player of any feeling of exploration and the cute novelties quickly become annoyances.

The writing itself feels so overly self referential that it can’t escape itself, and the portrayal of Duke Nukem as a genuinely cool, aspirational figure is laughable.

I genuinely feel like I have run out of steam. I have nothing else to say about Duke Nukem Forever, except that it turned out to be well suited to being published by Gearbox… But that is another story for another time.