Duke Nukem Forever Xbox 360 review

Was vaporware no more. The longest development cycle in videogame history was finally at an end. An actual copy of the game was in my hands. My expectations were high, but they were also tempered with the knowledge that a game with a history such as this would never live up to them. All that was left was to play it and find out for myself if it was worth the decade-and-a-half wait.

Blonde-haired, cigar-smoking, musclebound Duke Nukem has been in retirement for many years since defeating alien invaders in 1996. Women love him. Men want to be him. He lives in a massive suite in a Las Vegas casino-hotel named after him. All of this inflates his already enormous ego (which is why it’s appropriate that Duke’s health bar in the upper left of the screen measures his ego instead of his health). Now ETs known as the Cycloids have laid siege to Earth. The President is attempting to negotiate a peaceful solution with the Cycloid Emperor, and has ordered Duke not to get involved. But Duke doesn’t know the meaning of the word “negotiate” (probably can’t spell it, either), so he works his way through the battered City of Sin to put an end to the Cycloid scourge.

Old-school gamers will feel right at home with DNF . All you do is move from Point A to Point B, eliminating everything non-human in your way. You can carry up to two weapons at a time. These include the standard handgun and shotgun, plus more creative choices such as a shrink ray that reduces enemies to a more manageable size, and a freeze ray that encases them in ice. Your maximum ego (health) can be increased by interacting with various items you find in the world (mirrors, magazines, etc.), and you get brief buffs of your melee prowess and toughness by taking steroids or drinking beer. You learn the basic movement and weapon controls in a fight with a boss alien, which ends with a quick-time event; all of the game’s boss battles end in a similar fashion. But DNF is retro gaming with a modern look. It’s a throwback to the days when games were tough by default; difficulty (and the resulting level of controller-chucking frustration) is high, even when playing at normal. Ammo can sometimes be hard to find, and the two-weapon limit makes you think carefully about which ones you want to take with you at any given time. The graphics are nothing special by today’s standards; they’re 1990s visuals with a fresh coat of digital paint. And progression through the stages is solidly linear, with the possible exception of a level that has you exploring a dark underground cave system, where it’s easy to get turned around, forcing you to retrace your steps to get back on the right track. But the highlights of the game are the variety in the level design (there’s a nice mix of combat, puzzle solving and other activities to keep things interesting) and the adult-oriented, gleefully silly script, which features little jabs at movies and other games, as well as the voice talents of Jon St. John, the original voice of Duke Nukem. It also earns its Mature rating in the first few seconds, in which you can choose to have Duke relieve himself in a stadium locker room urinal. Check out the ESRB icon for this game—they ran out of room for rating descriptors. Definitely not appropriate for children, impressionable or otherwise.