How about... a finished game?
That's really the story I think people aren't getting here. The game isn't finished, and it's advertised as being a finished game that's worth $60-$70. I've seen student projects in UDK both more competently put together and more graphically stable. GRAPHICALLY STABLE. This isn't a question of the game looking a little dated, this is a question of terrible artifacts and pop-in all the damn time. Do you know how hard you have to try to make Unreal fuck up like that? My own UDK projects aren't anything to write to the bank about, but cripes, I could say that the lights at least worked.
Say what you will about the original Duke Nukem 3D; it was relatively consistent and well-paced for as simplistic as it was (that being the advantage of abject simplicity--you know what your game is for and give it to the player), and the mechanics and system at hand was fun to game. You did it on a level-by-level basis like Doom, trying to maximize a score by finding secret areas, killing all the monsters, and nabbing all the items in as efficient a way as you could find. Levels weren't quite as dense with cannon fodder as Doom all the time, but the moving setpieces were impressive and heightened the action and it still had a good clip to it; I'd go as far as to say tight mechanics. Not uber-complex mechanics, but tight, well-executed, and not wasteful. And yes, this is having fairly recently played it to give myself a taste for what it was all about. It's open-source now, has been for a few years, you can download it any time and run it through DosBOX.
That's right, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D don't suck by today's standards. They're dated, more like arcade games than immersive, detailed storytelling experiences, but they're consistent, tight, and thoroughly enjoyable. Fuck, so's Pac-Man, so's Super Mario Bros. Simplistic mechanics? Yes, but simple isn't a bad thing a lot of the time as long as you can design around those mechanics carefully and methodically.
This game? No. There's barely any actual content. It's stretched to 17 hours and padded out with irritating, tedious puzzles. Where the first level of Duke Nukem 3D throws you into a quick five-minute running gunfight through a movie theater during an earthquake, the first five levels of Nuke Nukem Forever barely have any gunfights in them at all. Instead, you fumble around in the dark, then DRIVE AN RC CAR over a seemingly endless and repetitive series of ramps for about ten minutes, culminating in a set of puzzles wherein you push boxes around in empty rooms and perform tedious platforming before FINALLY the developers throw you a bone and give you an actual gunfight... in one room, and it goes out with barely a whimper.
Do you get it, now? THAT'S why this is a bad game. It's horribly paced and has ludicrously sparse content. If this were a question of the game being released at about 7 hours and just being watered down to a Halo or Call of Duty knockoff in Duke's clothing, it'd be acceptable and playable, if disappointing, but as long as there was some decent action and humor most old Duke fans would be happy just to have that piece of nostalgia survive and see the legendary un-publishable game get published. If it were just like Duke Nukem 3D, we'd be pleased. It'd be a relic, but at least it'd look good and be consistent and, as I pointed out, have fun, tight gameplay--fun, if dated. We're talking about a game development fuck-up on the level of Sonic 2006, though. It has no idea what it's trying to do, and most of all, it's not finished. It'd be one thing if Gearbox published this for $15 or $30 and admitted it wasn't finished, but they were trying to sell this on us as a $60-70, finished game.
That's the real story of this disappointment here. It isn't just that everybody had the nostalgia goggles on and was blind to the fact that the old games just weren't that good anyhow or something like that, it's not that developers "betrayed" the original spirit of the game by trying to "modernize" it, it's that this game is a spectacularly bad product by every single possible stretch of the imagination.
