Duke Nukem Forever

Its very generic with a bit of crude humour, funny in places but not really justifying its price tag. I would wait till the price comes down a bit before you purchase it. Some of the mini games are fun but the overall game is very lacking. The bosses are easy and the AI is very simple. If you think about a game about 12x better than COD Black Opps you are about there (By which I mean its allot better looking and you actually get to play rather than watch videos of the action in the single player) Compared to CODBO price this game is the bargain of the century.

This game does use Steam so if you dont like Steam i wouldnt bother you should wait for a game with nasty DRM instead which wont run. Steam does not require you to download the game it will install from the Disk if you use the disks installer not just enter the key in steam.

Graphics wise:

Despite what other reviews say its graphics are better than HL2 and BF2. It does use the poor old UT3 engine so isn't the most amazing graphics however. The movement engine is also pretty rubbish and you do get hung up quite a bit. Personally i suffered no issues at all with the game running. A couple of brief jumps in odd parts of the game but nothing major (AMD 955BE, 8GB DDR3, ATI 6870, Windows 7 64).

Conclusion?

Wait for it to enter a bargain bin and you wont be disappointed as full price is way more than its worth.

Games ok, creative levels, classic guns, graphics are different and pretty decent, funny and original at times. The only problem I have with this game is It's WAY TOO linear! what happened to good old open area duke nukem where you need keys to open up different sections of a large map?!?! Comapred to the old game This is like you're running down a tunnel from start to end...

I've been eagerly awaiting DNF since it was annouced in 1997 having loved the previous version. Given the hype and record time the game has been in development I couldn't wait to sit down and play this, and was really expecting to like it.

Unfortunately - there isn't much, if anything to like. DNF does not really seem to be a direct comparison to Duke 3d which was a first person action shooter; - DNF seems more puzzle orientated (the main one being how it got released) and has a much slower pace in most parts. After the intro which replays the final minutes of 3d, DNF starts very slowly indeed, and in fact its at least ten minutes before you even pick up a gun. You just end up wandering around a casino talking to people, followed by a search for energy cells to restart a reactor. The puzzles are reminiscent of Half Life, but vastly inferior, and the whole game feels very old fashioned (which is perhaps to be expected given how long it was in development). This is made worse by the fact that the game is so linear; - and you end up plodding through the levels one after the other. From time to time you will encounter a Boss - one section where you have to defeat a mothership is almost laughable for a modern game - you cannot even move off the spot and just have to fire at it repeatedly until it is destroyed. Also - you can only carry two guns.

By far the worst thing however is the loading time which you seem to spend more time waiting for than playing the game. I don't know how a game that has its origins in the late nineties could possibly load so slowly on a modern high spec PC. Levels can take minutes to load, and you are left staring at a static screen. The maps also seem quite small and the game frequently has to pause to load a new section. My PC is powerful enough to run the game at full detail settings across the board - so it is not a question of spec. The game also seems to crash occasionally as well, which again means you have to reload :( Perhaps this is why they called it Duke Nukem Forever?

I would advise all but the most diehard fans of Duke to give this a miss. Given the wait, you may be tempted to buy the game out of morbid curiosity just to see what it is like (surely it can't be that bad?) Trust me don't bother. For what I got I wasn't happy having spent £27 quid on the PC version. If I'd bought the Balls of Steel special edition version for £65 I'd feel like I had been robbed.

Prospective purchasers of DNF for the PC should look at downloading Eduke32 and the high resolution pack which is a free enhanced version of the original Duke Nukem 3d. This is a vastly superior game to DNF in every way, although you will need to copy the GRP files from an original Duke 3d CD in order to run the game.

Hopefully Gearbox Software, having finished off the original 3d Realms DNF, can now start on a new, worthy successor to Duke 3d.