It's gonna suffer a lot from Daikatana syndrome, isn't it? No matter how good or bad it might be, most people will already have a preconcieved opinion of it and that's what you're going to hear about more than anything else.

Haven't bought it yet, but I probably will soon enough. Sometime next week maybe. 

Now I've been playing for quite some time and made a lot of progress. I'm way out in the desert and I've done atleast 50 miles in my monster truck. I'm having a great time.

Here's some footage of that:

http://www.gamerfuzion.com/LaserBolt/video/duke-nukem-forever-walkthrough-chapter-15-highway-battle-1-2-720p-hd-full-g/ 

Was boring as hell. Doesn't look like I'm buying dnf. 

It's gonna suffer a lot from Daikatana syndrome, isn't it? No matter how good or bad it might be, most people will already have a preconcieved opinion of it and that's what you're going to hear about more than anything else.

for me, it's definitely the reverse-- it's been so long, i've forgotten any expectations i might have had. 

Duke 3D was meant to be Doom with a sense of humour.
DNF looked like it was going to be Half-Life with a sense of humour. Perhaps this would have been very funny in 2005. Anyhow, this idea got mashed through a CoD/Halo blender and we get this. Seems to have all the annoyances of modern shooters with none of the benefits of old school shooters, and the weapon limit for me is a complete killer, as gimmick weapons loose interest if you can't choose when to fuck around with them.

Also, perhaps I am older but every attempt in DNF to be juvenile just strikes me as desperate, like someone trying way too hard to get attention :p

Is that youtube recorded by the world's most boring man? He has Rocket launchers, railguns and he uses that sodding machine gun for 10 minutes... 

about the weapons and most of the jokes. But will probably get this anyways. 

And enjoyed it a lot so far. Health regen and the two weapon limit barely bother me, seems like any excuse to trash the game based on something so minor in my opinion. That and probably what mh said. Also appears a lot of 'review' sites are hating for the sake of hating it. Kinda sad since it's simply a solid, old school style shooter. 

90% of the gaming press is dogshit.

30% is just wrong, 33% is paid by advertising for the games they 'review' the other 30% is pissed off because its either a) cool to be or b) they hate their job.

Maybe giving them a 10% valid rating is too generous.

Personal opinions are always much more useful. 

 

it started quite a while ago and it's been a downward spiral for reviews ever since.

now it's either all glowing praise with maybe one or two faults or it's barely over the level of flamebait, like the reviewer is trying to make up for all the good reviews by making his 5x worse.

and if the game had a large budget, you shouldn't even bother with reviews.

even if the review was fair and balanced, seems like all reviewers care about these days is graphics anyway. maybe a small blurb about loading times.

the best way to tell these days is to watch youtube gameplay videos, i guess.

that said, i have never been a fan of the halo two-weapon model. it distills the gameplay down too much. there are no options anymore. i noticed in the second part of the monster truck video, the player had the option to pick up a pistol (colt 1911 i think? whatever...). now, with only two weapons, you'd be pretty dumb to give up the firepower of a railgun or ripper. but at this point, it's not even an option because you'd penalize yourself too much.
and recharging health is just a way to avoid having to balance too much.
i don't know if the weirder duke weapons are in there like the freezer or shrinker, but i'd have a hard time justifying using them as opposed to straight up damage weapons like a shotgun or ripper with only two weapons to choose from.
as for recharging health:
you give a guy infinite ammo, recharging health and 1 tiny bit of cover and they can take out an entire army. there's no balancing going on here, it's just giving infinite resources and then the player just has to invest time to killing everything. 

In a note completely unrelated to DNF (other than it gets it wrong); I like recharging health. I just don't like it obviously recharging in combat.

The ideal would be to have your health recharge between fights to avoid the tedious backtracking to the health pack you left two rooms back so that you're full health for the next fight (no-one is honestly going to convince me that that is good gameplay design/fun/challenging. yes, I know, resource management, however, it's a primitive and archaic way to add such things to a game). However, if you have health regen after 2 seconds of not being shot (hi halo) then as necros points out, it just degrades into one man being able to kill an entire army by being a whack-a-mole-esque rodent. The one good thing about old style hp systems was the necessity to effectively manage a finite resource during combat situations.

The perfect balance would be have the player's hp regen to full after 30 or so seconds of not being shot in the face (the exact time would have to be determined through testing, but long enough to avoid the pop in, pop out, repeat style gameplay of a lot of modern shooters but short enough to not cause annoyance waiting between fights) but have an adrenaline/painkillers/whatever usable item that can be collected/horded and used to create a temporary increase in health during fights. Possibly with diminishing returns on repeat usage and a difficulty-variable rate of deteriation/decay. Voila, resource/collectable management, no backtracking, no grinding whack-a-mole gameplay. Oh, and if a player really wants to spend 30 seconds behind a pillar regening mid fight, I'd like to think that they've either (semi-)successfully evaded their opponents or (in these days of semi intelligent AI) the NPCs would flank/close and cause them a whole host more problems for trying to cower behind a crate mid gun fight.


So yeh. Nothing to do with DNF. (Haven't played it, don't want to play it, the joy of DN3D was the non-linearity, environmental interactivity and exciting gameplay/weapons. DNF seems to lack or undermine most of those. Even as a 14 year old, the appeal was not Duke Nukem. Duke Nukem is an arse.)

Oh, and the RPS review seems pretty fair. 

"have your health recharge between fights"

Just have check points like Painkiller then :E

Although in painkiller they didn't heal on trauma difficulty :p 

A risk system. As you take hits your risk bar increases - if it maxes out then you've taken a critical hit and are killed.

To lower your risk you must do awesome stuff, like killing enemies. The more awesome the feats you perform the more your risk is reduced.

So, scoring more points reduces your risk further.

Its similar to vampirism, but scoring a massive combo reduces your risk to empty almost immediately, even if you took a lot of damage doing it. 

Heard that there were rape jokes in this, how bad are they? 

Half-way through the game Duke enters the alien hive where all the kidnapped women are held and impregnated (raped) by aliens. He finds the twins that give him a blowjob in the beginning of the game and they apologize for being fat. (apologize for being pregnant (apologize for being raped)) Duke tells them they are fucked (by aliens). Then they explode into gibs and baby octabrains.
NSFW youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Yh4Aq54ek

The first part of the game is full of misogynistic, dumb, juvenile shit like that. Women prance around with their breasts in full view all over the place. Faggs cigarettes. Absolutely every brand name or name or actually any text at all in the entire game is some sort of pun on either shit, piss or genitals. In the alien hive there are for no reason clusters of breasts hanging from the wall, you can slap these and gain a health bonus. After defeating the alien hive queen (who also has three giant tits) Duke passes out. Then begins a dream sequence where Duke is in a strip club and has to go on a fetch quest to find popcorn, condoms and a dildo. It comes completely out of nowhere, I wish I was making this up.

Everything about the Duke character has become unlikeable trash. He used to be some goofy muscle dude who spouted lame one-liners and gave cash to strippers. Now he's some gross ego-trip of a teenage, objectivist fantasy; Endlessly narcissistic, everyone in the game world adores him and literally wants to suck his cock. He just comes off as such an amazingly repulsive person.



Then the actual game:
Two weapon limit is straight out dumb. It is only there for consoles that easily could have gotten around it with some other weapon selection system.
The vehicle sections are passable, but could have used a lot more polish. The turret scenarios are boring and should have been removed.
Regenerating health is very boring and leads to a lot of just sitting behind cover when you really want to just run up to some monster and shoot it in the face.

But you know?
Besides all this shit?

I think the gameplay was actually good. It is old-school. You circle-strafe aliens and kill them. The weapons are good. (Except the shrinkray and freezer and a lack of ammo at times.)
Enemy variety is good, and only one of them (pig cops) have a hitscan weapon. That's right, you can dodge incoming projectiles! It owns!
There are a couple of underwater levels! That is awesome!
Some of the leveldesign is interesting. Some. Not all.
There are the cool levels where you are shrunken and you get to run around fighting on shelves and stuff, like those gimmick Q3A levels someone made.
There are jumping puzzles. I know I am in the minority, but I love jumping puzzles.
Some areas look really good. (Others look really bad, but not offensively so.)

I took a bunch of screenshots and annotated them while playing: http://steamcommunity.com/id/czg/screenshots/?tab=&showdate=0&filter=shortcut_32790

I played this on a PC with every setting on max, post-processing OFF (because it looks like shit, though I usually love stuff like that).
Installed it on an SSD, so load times were 3-4 secs per level, I hear consoles have really bad load times, upwards of 40-50 secs.

So in conclusion, is this a good game?
No.

It starts horrible, gets better as it goes but keeps inserting amazingly bad low points throughout, the ending sucks, and the subject matter of the game is horrific garbage that no reasonable person above the age of 13 would enjoy.

It is a terrible game. Nobody should spend money on this.


Everybody should play it though... so please go ahead and warez it. 

CZG FTW. 

At the top of the Duke Burger Tower I found two frisbees lying about. I threw one, a generic green one, and it sailed out far, far across the Las Vegas skyline, and I got a health boost.
Then I threw the other one, labeled with the 3DRealms logo, and it fell like a rock.

In hindsight, it was probably just a physics bug, but I laughed at that. 

I didnt find this to be a problem at all. Pipe-bombs make a welcome return, and there are always plenty of them lying around. They get their own button. (so now we have three weapons, not two). Also trip-mines get their own button too, so now we have four weapons. After you have unloaded your weapons into a bunch of aliens, there are always weapons lying on the ground. So it really was not a problem. 

Well the arena based combat now makes trip mines actually look fucking useful for a change :p 

entertaining and informative. 

Watched the Giant Bomb Quick Look. Oh lord it looks quite pathetic really...
Should be able to play it myself later since a housemate has a copy. 

And sounds like czg is dead on about the horrible tone and 'humour'. 

It's that bad? Wow. 

Avoiding talking about the style element, and purely looking at mechanics, it feels like a fairly tepid shooter here with irritating nods to modern shooters and a horribly excessive amount of fluff placed on top. This to me makes it actually quite a fascinating design study, in the way it 'spans the eras' of shooters.

You move slowly, you have a tiny FoV, and lowish ammo counts. So avoiding damage without cover is frustrating. The pig-cops with guns can't be dodged at all. The big guys with cluster rockets are bloody annoying as they home in a slow drunken path so again, just dodging round is irritating. And the Octabrains now have splash damage, so again, given how limited space often is, you just keep taking chip damage all the time.

At this point, recharging health is essentially because you are just expected to tank damage a lot of the time.

The weapon limit is utterly retarded, leaving no room for having giggles with gimmicks when YOU want to, and left to wait until the developers have made a little play pen for you to have your silly fun. You also have low ammo counts, and I sodding hate having to constantly run around looking for guns on the floor to pick up or running back to that ammo cache and then using it. Let me just focus on pumping lead into shit and avoiding damage. Oh and I hate sprint buttons too.


Most of all though, the game wants to be Half-Life 2. It's full of puzzles and areas that are completely ripped from Half-Life 2. It's kinda embarressing really. Vehicles were okay though. Turret sequences should be fired into the sun.

Pacing wise I think it really shows how much better Valve are at this sort of thing. DNF feels like it has two modes: No enemies, hopping around trying to find where the hell to go. Or, all out combat with enemy spawning. There's barely any monsters just placed around as you explore, so the pacing just flip-flops constantly. Furthermore, these non-combat sections would be okay but they are soooo long and sooooo many of them and oooooh god it's not so clever that entire levels should be given over to jumping around on kitchen shelves.

Also the digs at other games are just embarressing :p

Weapons:
The Ripper: made a lot of noise, did okay damage and had annoying spread. basically a clone of HL2's SMG.
Shotgun: Probably the most satisfying weapon overall, but has awful damage fall off, meaning the boring ripper wins out in efficiency.
Shrink-ray: I only found this once whilst playing through. Whatever, same as the original really.
Rocket Launcher: Five limit meant blowing up normal enemies a lot isn't much of an option. Feels kind of sluggish, lock on is boring, Half-Life guiding = much better.
Freeze-Ray: Not as powerful as it once was, thought it was arse really.
Devastator: They nerfed it pretty badly really. It used to gib pretty much any enemy with two shots. Now you end up pumping more rockets in just to kill normal enemies. They're slow, has a lower ammo count, yea, really unsatisfying for me.

Trip Mines/Pipe Bombs: Credit where it is due, these work well, and arena based fighting means trip mines are very useful

The holoduke was actually useful, but the steroids were annoying. Several times I activated them by accident in a fight and I'm stuck with my damns fists out for a tedious amount of time.

Finally though, the real cracker is that this game feels like it has nothing really new over Duke 3D. Hell it could pretty much just be a remake. Barely any new weapons, barely any new enemies save headcrabs and those drunken rocket gits. The alien style levels were in Duke 3D, Duke burger was in Duke 3D... fucks sake didn't you think of more weapons more monsters or anything over 12 years? The final boss is the same as the start which is the same as the end of Duke 3D anyway. 

It isn't a good game by all means. But it's not as bad as some review sites put it. If it had been released in its current form some six years earlier, if would have been more acceptable/accepted. At least it's better than FEAR.
Fairly mediocre graphics, but I guess you can't really blame them.

The similarities to HL2 are there, but then again, I'm pretty sure Valve stole the ideas from the DNF team! At least they tried to add some variation to the otherwise generic FPS gameplay. I thought the miniature shrunk jumping sections were a refreshing change.

Story and characters are stupid and pointless at best, and the levels feel kind of random and disconnected. Part of the reason for this might be the fadeout levelchanges. Often I thought "how and why did I get here".
It has a "shit ending" indeed. Please no sequel or DLC.

Oh well, at least it's out. The end of an era. Though you won't miss anything at all if you don't play it.

the real cracker is that this game feels like it has nothing really new over Duke 3D
Unlike Doom 3, or Quake 4, or AvP, or most other 'sequels'? :P