Duke Nukem Forever Review (Finally)

Hey guys, I've taken some time off from blogging as I was doing two things. 1. Doing stuff related to post secondary school, as some of you know from a previous post, I will be attending University of Toronto in September! Yay, and there is much preparation, such as course selection. 2. DUKE NUKEM FOREVER (on PC)!

You'll be seeing this a lot,
loading screens that is

Yes, I've been spending the past week playing it out and so far, it has been a fair experience. The following will be my rant/review on DNF. I believe my opinion of it is a bit different from other people as I have not played previous versions of Duke Nukem so I have no idea what to expect in terms of the quality of gameplay, I simply judge what I played.

Well, in DNF, you start off immediately fighting a "boss" monster, only to find out that "you" are actually Duke Nukem, playing DNF (confusing?), and a joke immediate follows. Throughout the game, you'll encounter many odd jokes, some that are actually funny, some that are just lame.
Another thing that you'll encounter are loading screens, and the amount of them. When playing through the first few chapters, you'll be doing nothing more than just navigating through the DNF world, and probably after 5-9 mins of walking around, you'll be faced with a long ass loading screen. And within the loading screen (as you can see above) various tips will be displayed and I'm not sure if these tips are just jokes, or serious tips (see above). "When being shot, try to avoid bullets"...oh really?

That aside, the game really picks up when you get further into the chapters and it really plays out like HL2, in terms of being a puzzle game and a first person shooter at the same time. Your main arsenal consists of a rpg, shotgun, pistol, 2-3 alien guns, shrink ray, freeze ray; a good variety overall. (I've heard though, that these weapons aren't new, as they existed in previous versions, but again, I'm not considering this). The shrink ray is especially fun, as you can shrink your enemies and walk over them, thus squashing them.

Now I'm not sure what DNF is rated (in terms of, pg13, pg18+, adult...etc) but I'll have to give the game an adult rating. There is a chapter in DNF where you start out in Duke's stripper joint and you have to find various items such as a condom, popcorn and well, to keep this more friendly, a female massager toy. And as you navigate throughout the joint, you'll encounter many moments of full female frontal nudity, and scenes that are sexually suggestive.
The adult "moments" not only exists within this chapter though, in one of the starting chapters, (again, trying to make this more friendly), you can go into a bathroom stall, and explore a "hole" which is in the wall separating the two stalls. You can probably  guess what that "hole" is for, and it's not for peeping.

Overall, the game is decent as a fps, but many other things detract from the overall experience such as massive amounts of time spent on puzzles, loading screens with nonsensical tips. I will look forward in completing the game.

Also just a fun little fact about how I play any first person shooter's single player campaign. I like to play on the hardest setting available, because there is no reason to play it on easy modes. Reason being is that you'll probably finish the game in a flash on easy, and you won't replay it because it has no replay value anyways, so I rather play it on harder difficulties and spend more time on it.

I do not own or take credit for all of the above images, if you would like them to be taken down, please message me.


For the people that played DNF, how did you find it? What do you think of the harsh critiques of DNF?