Duke Nukem Forever attempts to turn back the clock, but can't even get that right. Even within his own narrow niche, Bulletstorm and Gearbox's own Borderlands have taken Duke's irreverent shooter crown and made it their own, and it seems that after a decade and a half on the shelf, the self-proclaimed king no longer has the muscle to claim it back. In the time since his last outing, the likes of Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto have all gone from nothing to world-conquering, genre-defining juggernauts. Duke's long-awaited comeback has turned him from genre innovator to wheezing has-been. He's supposed to be cheesy and dumb and shallow. Skool Daze did it better.Īnd it's here that the game plays its solitary trump card. Writing on whiteboards is a lot like using a broken Etch-a-Sketch. This is far more coarse than Duke 3D ever was, the humour uniformly witless, a parade of blunt profanity, childish poo and wee jokes and obvious innuendo that makes it feel more of a piece with Duke ripoffs like Redneck Rampage and Postal 2: similarly weak games which failed to mask their lack of polish and ideas under a stained duvet of juvenile outrage. He's more Jeremy Clarkson than Frankie Boyle, so toothless and desperate in his attempts to seem risqué and reactionary that the only sane response is to roll your eyes. As it is, these moments feel like the lazy humour of recognition, the Meet the Spartans of video games.Īs for Duke's offensiveness, it's barely even worth considering. "I hate valve puzzles," he jokes as you embark on an incredibly uninspired puzzle involving steam pipes, but the double meaning would work so much better if Duke could offer anything to rival Portal's genius, or even the basic physics puzzles of Half-Life 2. Given that Forever is so painfully behind the times, similar jibes at the expense of Halo and Gears of War fall awkwardly flat today. The Duke of 1996 could poke fun at a "doomed space marine" because his game was pushing boundaries that Doom had yet to reach. Since the gameplay no longer backs up his boasts, the half-hearted digs at rival franchises feel very ill-advised. In 2011, he's a parody of something that no longer exists, the gaming equivalent of an embarrassing uncle who still says "Whaaaaassup?" and pretends to breakdance at wedding receptions. In 1996, Stallone and Schwarzenegger were on the wane, so Duke's beefcake eighties action movie clichés carried some satirical weight. That's what he's always done, of course, but the world has moved on and Duke's relevance has dimmed. Despite failing so badly in so many areas, Duke keeps quipping away, masking the gaping holes in his gameplay with lunk-headed bon mots and politically incorrect prattle.
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