Is Duke Nukem forever really that bad?

[pablogonzalez]

Is Duke Nukem Forever really that bad? sure ive seen the gameplay footage and i dont think the graphics are special or the gampleay unique but its not that its terrible. Are we just cruciyfying it because it was a dissapointing wait or is it really that bad?

Answer

 

[Signa]

The 13 years of hype have lead to proportional disappointment. Nothing more. DNF is nothing spectacular, but it's far from abysmal.

 

[Lucyfer86]

I don't really get why ppl keep whining about DNF, sure it's not perfect, it's not what people expect it to be, graphics are somewhat bad, but i still liked it tho, it's still Duke.

I still think it's worth to buy at least lower price / used for everyone who enjoyed playing Duke years ago.

 

[Lazy Kitty]

No, it's really good.
People are just grumpy about having to wait so long.

It's one of the most fun games I've played in a while.

 

[Zhukov]

*shrug*

At the end of the day it's all relative. If someone enjoyed it then, well... they enjoyed it. It's not like someone else can come along and say, "No, you did not enjoy that game! Your experience is invalid because it differs from mine!"

That said, I thought the game was a giant, reeking pile of turd.

The level design was boring, the visuals muddy and uninteresting and the gameplay repetitive and monotonous. Oh, and the humour was basically non-existent. This is a game that thinks that having a soldier called Leeroy Jenkins run ahead and get killed is the height of comedy.

People keep saying that the negative reaction was a result of the 12 year wait. I say that's bullshit. I was not waiting for this game. I bought it out of curiosity. I still thought it was a piece of crap.

If you really want to play it, my advice is to wait until it hits the bargain bin. You probably won't have to wait long.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

No it isn't that bad. It's not great and it can get quite immature and even banal at times, but it looks and plays quite well and is a reasonably good shooter, albeit a touch repetitive and too long. About a 5/6 out of 10. Average to a bit above. Worth waiting for a lower price on, not a great deal of replay value, fun and amusing for a time for at least one playthru.

The worst thing it did was use Halo type mechanics (regenerating health and two weapon limit) with old-skool gameplay. The "cover" mechanic was very well implemented but the above mechanics simply aren't fun with old-skool Duke Nukem type gameplay. You should have lots of weapons and hordes of aliens and health packs instead of this duck-and-cover half-arsed thing.

 

[mikey7339]

Yes, unfortunately it really is. This is also coming from someone who played and loved the original when I was a kid. I'm talking about both the original 2D side scroller and Duke 3D. I kept trying to force myself to like it and even got about 50% of the achievements before I said, fuck it I'm out...

 

[Luis Magalhaes]

Pig-faced monsters jump at you, you shoot them on the face with a shotgun, and they fly across the room. It's not cerebral, it's not original and it's not even very pretty, but it's fun (to me).

Rather that than mow down another nazi / eastern Europe terrorist. But again, that's just me.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

It wasn't bad it was mediocre which is so much worse.

 

[Layzor]

It did get panned a bit harder than it perhaps deserves but give the demo a try, it's pretty lame.

 

[Wuggy]

People are just grumpy about having to wait so long.

Or maybe... they just didn't like it. I mean, it's not a particularly bad thing to like stuff others don't. As far as I can see it's just more power to ya. That line just seems like some sort of an justification for something you really don't need to justify. I liked Dragon Age 2, majority of the people in this forum didn't, I don't care since I got more enjoyement out of it than they did. It's not a bad thing.

Anyway, I played the demo and thought it was just... lame. I concluded that there's far better games I can spend my money on.

 

[Frybird]

It's far better than Superman 64 or the Charlie's Angels Videogame.

In (purely) technical terms, it's better than Deadly Premonition.

But it's basically like Prey, released in 2011, minus the Portals, the Gravity Shifts, and minus most of the Fun weapons.

...That's still bad in my book.

 

[surg3n]

The problem I have with it is that it offers nothing new, and critisizes games that have offered new gameplay mechanics. It's not the worst game ever, but it should have been a lot better. It's predictable, childish, Dukes voice is just annoying, and the humour, as everyone says is redundant. It's like the developers attended a conference on level design, then left after 10 minutes to get back to work. Ohh, a hole in the roof for enemies to jump down. Ohh, enemies teleport behind me. Ohh, enemies open locked doors at set intervals. There's nothing dynamic about DNF at all.

If you think back to DukeNukem3D, the things I liked about that game were it's dynamics, pulling levers to squash enemies, setting traps, that sort of thing. But there's very little of that.

People who want a new and improved DN games should look elsewhere, like Serious Sam. If people want a laugh, then Fallout3/NV is hilarious if you play it right. There are simply much better options out there for the things that made Duke special.

 

[w9496]

If you do what I did and ignore all the years of hype, it's actually a really fun experience. The only downside I can think of is that the game drags on towards the end.

 

[Arehexes]

It was more or less another Halo clone.

 

[Yassen]

Sadly I just didn't think it was bad, it was downright awful. But no, it had nothing to do with the wait. I didn't give a shit about Duke until about a year ago. No I could spend hours talking about the boring level design, shitty guns and combat, or that imprecise "ego bar" but you've heard it all before.

I'll just say this, DNF had to be one of the worst games I've ever played.

 

[Quellan Thyde]

It's not so much bad as it is tedious and poorly designed and poorly implemented and generally uninspired. The last Leisure Suit Larry was bad, but at least it had a perverse kind of charm to it. DNF can't even manage that much.

So I guess I'm saying that DNF is worse than LSL:MCL. Yikes.

 

[LausDeoSemper]

I like it a lot but it's not a game I would buy

 

[Ironic Pirate]

I will admit to only playing the demo... but if that was any indication it's quite possibly the worst professional game I've ever played. Absolutely everything was lackluster, from the mind-blowingly shitty boss to the terrible attempts at set-pieces. Even the gun-play, the core upon which an FPS is built, was terrible. Enemies barely reacted to shooting, the weapons felt weak, and the animations were laughably bad.

The game even tried to introduce driving mechanics, but they were so pitiful I almost feel bad for the developers. It's like it was designed by reading about driving games, and not actually playing them.

Even the humor fell flat. The one or two jokes that could have been mildly amusing were completely ruined by how shitty the rest of it was- I was too busy laughing at the horrible combat to even smile at anything the game said.

 

[Thamous]

I seems like it was designed for 12 year olds in my honest opinion. The humor, which has always been the staple of the Duke Nukem series, just seems crude and immature. Boob and poop jokes don't really appeal to me. It wasn't even done in a tongue-in-cheek way, it seemed like the game honestly thought all this stuff was funny. That's not to mention the bland generic gameplay and pitiful storyline that the worst budget bin titles would be ashamed to play host to.