Your average games takes around 2-3 years to make yeah? Well Duke Nukem Forever took 12 years! After 12 years you would expect to have the most kick ass perfected game in the world right? I’m afraid that if you ask this question regarding Duke Nukem Forever, the answer sadly is no.  Gearbox and 2K seemed like the right choice to make this supposed monumental game as they made one of my personal favourite games Borderlands, but if the team behind Duke Nukem Forever still have a job at 2K and Gearbox, I sincerely wonder why.

I used to love playing the old Duke Nukem games and have recently been battling away on Duke Nukem 3D in excitement for this game. So finally the last day in the 12 year wait came, I brought the game, popped it in my PlayStation and expecting to be hit with a kick ass, awesome game I was hit with nothing but sheer disappointment as to what 2K and Gearbox had done to a franchise that had one of the most epic characters in the world.  If you haven’t already figured it out, you play as egotistical womaniser Duke Nukem who is famous for his red vest, sunglasses and inappropriate punch lines. Hearing Duke saying “I’ve Got Balls of Steel” again was possibly one of the only enjoyable moments in the game.

The game opens as any game does, with a short tutorial. After this we go to Duke’s apartment where Duke is receiving some thankfully off screen…oral relief shall we say? Oh and yeah, the girls providing the relief are twins…hot. Jokes aside though after Duke has been refreshed the game starts with you having to head downstairs. One of the most fun aspects of Duke Nukem Forever is environment activity. Almost everything is useable and will increase your ‘Ego’, which is health to you and me. You can do some genuinely awesome things that you don’t really expect to be in any game such as urinate in the toilets, make popcorn in the microwave, play pinball and many other regular seeming activities. These are small details, and I can’t help but think these are there to stop you from getting mind numbingly bored by the game.

The graphics are not Duke Nukem Forever’s high point, nor is weapon aim, or weapon use, or picking up weapons, or much else actually. The Square button is used for far to many things. It is used as the action button, the pick up button and the execute button which seems only a few things, but clashes regularly occur, for example when trying to execute an enemy you may accidentally pick up their dropped weapon. The game starts out pretty fun as I’ve previously described, but the gameplay gets very repetitive. The game plays out pretty much like this: Kick open doors, shoot aliens, steal aliens gun, execute alien, go into mini duke mode, (Duke shrinks to the size of a rat, yes it get very boring) come out of mini duke mode, fight aliens, open door, fight boss with RPG, end level. That’s literally the game when you get stuck in.

There are one or two driving stages that get very tiresome. One in an RC car when you play as Mini Duke, and one in a Monster truck which needs fuel every 2 minutes. They feel as if they were thrown in at the last minute to stop people going ‘ah no driving in Duke Nukem!’ Did I mention that driving also sucks? Its like keeping control of a fish out of water, it doesn’t happen until it dies. Enemies are just thrown in there to and feel like there is no sense of direction as to where they come from. I also managed to encounter countless glitches in the game, one time I finally got past a wave of aliens I was trying to kill, so I ran down this pipe, there was literally nothing there that could have killed me, and I just died. That’s bull ****.  The game also has some perilously long loading times and can take up to 2 minutes to load a single level! The screen will suddenly sink to black and a loading screen with some badly composed rock music will start up. This also happens EVERY SINGLE TIME you die, which really gave me a physical headache on some of the harder levels.

I don’t even want to try playing online on this game, as the weapon aiming is so poor. None of the weapons perform like they should. If your shot isn’t dead on target, your going to miss. Enemies also take about a million shots to kill even on the easiest difficulty. These two problems combined make the game an absolute nightmare to play. This game felt like more of a chore to play than a form of entertainment. I honestly couldn’t wait to finish it so I would never have to play it again. Before I make my next point, I want to make it perfectly clear that I have never taken a game back to a game store in my life unless it was faulty to get a replacement. Round about the last 3 levels when you encounter a perilous water stage which really grinds my gears, I though to myself “screw this game, I’m getting my 40 bucks back” and that’s what I intend to do when I finish this review.

The game also has a bunch of extra abilities Duke finds thought out the game such as beer that makes him tougher, Steroids that make him go mad, Duke vision which Duke uses to see in the dark (which by the way cause worse eye strain than a 3DS) and the HoloDuke which turns Duke invisible and creates a fake duke for the aliens to shoot at. Honestly though who cares about that stuff? The game is so poor that the details that make it fun become meaningless. If you love Duke Nukem, download Duke Nukem 3D for your PC/Mac and play that, I would never waste my money on this game and hope that the whole team behind this game realise that the game took 12 years to long to make and should have been scrapped years ago! This game can be described in a single Duke Quote…”Get that crap outta here!”