Now, I really hate to bag and abuse someone else’s work because as a developer myself I know how much work goes into creating a game. This Article is for when you are having an argument with anyone about Duke Nukem Forever and they use any of these phrases “It’s not so bad”, “Well it was never going to live up to the hype was it?” “It’s an ok game” “I had fun playing it”
With companies producing average to poor games, it just lowers the bar of what makes an acceptable game. Less quantity more quality so below you will see my breakdown of DNF and why it is a terrible game, This is from both a developers point of view (I worked in UDK for 3 years) and a gamers point of view, I’ve played games for as long as I can remember from the Atari to the DS.
1) Enemies: very few variation throughout the game, possibly 5 different models at the most
2) level design: it’s never clear on any level what you are suppose to be doing, where you are going or why you are going in this general direction I’m not talking about hand holding, I like to know what my objective is.
3) Humour: The humour is just dated seems like the target audience is for 5 years olds
4)Hype: I don’t give a shit about the “hype” I played it as a stand alone game and will judge it on it’s own merit.
5) Physics: A lot of the physic puzzles really don’t make sense for instance there is one where you have to load up the barrels onto the crane, there isn’t any real reason why I’m doing this. The only reason you would do it is if you knew that it was going to trigger the next series of events.
6) game triggers: A lot of these are miss placed and only really work if you are stood directly on top of them, before that part ^ it’s not clear that you need to walk into the wall for it to explode and enemies come out? Why would that be clear that doesn’t make any logical sense.
7) The graphics: yeah graphics don’t make a good game, but considering it was from the developers of borderlands you would expect ps3 graphics not late ps2, in addition to this alot of the time you could sit behind a wall and watch the character animations get stuck as they try and leap at you
8) The difficulty: I love difficult games, catherine, MGS2 on european extreme, ikaruga, The orignal Prince of Persia. But DNF difficult is just unfair, there is a part where you climb stairs as barrels fly towards you, there is no sequence to the barrels it’s random chance if you get hit or not
9) More level Design: Far too many linear corridors or backtracking through the same levels or even reusing the same levels which no real explanation.
10) Mechanics: Every mechanic feels horse shoed into the game, the rc bit, the driving section, the tiny section, the walking through grates section there is no flow to gameplay at all.
11) Loading Times: THE LOADING TIMES, yeah most games have loading times, but when compared to borderlands why are the respawns so slow? it takes 2 seconds to respawn in UDK.
12) Game-play length: Length it should be a short game and I forced myself to play through it for 13 pain staking hours. The whole game is filler. Walk through one corridor kill waves of enemies and repeat. There is no sense of achievement or progression.
TLDR it’s badly made from start to finish. Please don’t waste your time or money on this game I wrote this to save people the effort.
13 hours of my life I will never get back. The best thing about this game is in the extras you can see a time line of the development, the game they had in 1993 That’s the game I want to play.
A.Byrom
"Go To Hell Dave": Rants, Design Process, marketing advice, reviews and other funny stuff 