![]() I don't like the writing, which is tortured and turgid and bland and banal. I don't fall neatly into either camp, and have no particular feelings about the Duke character or IP one way or another, but my take on DNF is probably best summed up as "I don't like it." It's not the absolute catastrophe some have painted it as, but I don't like it. The reception to the game seems to consist either of either concentrated bile or aggressively defensive praise centred less on the game's accomplishments and more on why those who don't love it must surely be humourless cynics determined to punish DNF for taking so long. It's a smash and grab raid on the shiniest features of its de facto peers, successors and rivals, stitched together into a chaotic mess of mini-games and sudden gear-shifts. All those inspirations - all of which it attempts to sneer at with meatless gags such as a dead soldier in a Dead Space mask, a crowbar reference, a pile of Master Chief armour - yet no real sense that it understands why they should be inspirations. It can't be the first at any of its ideas and features, but it damned well tries to have the most. It's a grab bag of trends and ideas from the last decade of action games, a severely delayed reaction to Half-Life, Half-life 2, Halo, Gears of War and most of the id catalogue from Quake onwards. The tale of its making, if it's ever released, will be a fascinating one, but the game itself is a telling document of those 12 years of development. Sure, Duke Nukem Forever reeks of an arrogance and self-obsession that it resolutely fails to earn, but at the same time it's forever searching for new ways to divert its player: there's a clear sense that it wants to be bigger, bolder, wilder, stupider than any game before or since, to become an impossible accomplishment of pomposity and spectacle. ![]() Is it worth a look and some of your money? Let's see. It stars one Duke Nukem, a man of ACTION, BABES, BICEPS and MILLIONS OF MINI-GAMES. After a short wait and a bit of help from Gearbox, the new shooter from 3D Realms has quietly arrived on PC and console.
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