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They say you should never meet your heroes, as you'll only ever be disappointed. I think the same thing can be said for videogames that have accrued over a decade of expectations and hype. If you never play it, at least in your mind it will always be everything you ever wanted.
If you play Duke Nukem Forever, you'll be slapped in the face by reality. The reality of Duke Nukem as a character, as an IP, and as a highly anticipated videogame is in stark contrast to the idea of a charming, cool, and hilarious series that years of delusion and marketing have concocted.
The reality of Duke Nukem Forever is that it's absolute garbage that should have stayed confined to the bowels of Development Hell.
Duke Nukem Forever (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [reviewed])
Developer: 3D Realms, Triptych Games, Gearbox Software, Piranha Games
Publisher: 2K Games
Released: June 14, 2011
MSRP: $59.99
You know the story by now. It's been over ten years since talk first started of Duke Nukem Forever. Long considered the epitome of vaporware, this game has survived in the social consciousness through developer layoffs, studio closures, and bitter legal struggles. It was Gearbox Software that finally got its hands on the Duke Nukem Forever license and committed to finally releasing it. Now the day many never thought possible has come, and we're all supposed to be grateful.
Duke Nukem Forever's history is a lengthy and notorious one, and one that we cannot help but remember when talking about the game. The game itself goes to great lengths to remind you of it at every turn with an overdose of self-referential sight gags. However, when looking at the game as it exists today, one must divorce one's self from that history and examine what, exactly, 2K Games is giving us for our sixty dollars.
That's when you realize that 2K is trying to pull a fast one.
Duke Nukem Forever is an ugly game, both in terms of visuals and gameplay. It's hardly surprising that software over a decade past its due date plays like an artifact from a past age. In fact, under certain conditions, that could almost be considered charming. Some may defend the game for 'deliberately' evoking an early nineties charm, but here's the thing -- even for a game from the nineties, Duke Nukem Forever isn't very good. It's simply not fun and that's the cold, hard truth.
For a game that prides itself on being a big, dumb shooter, you'll be surprised to note that the game features comparatively little shooting. A huge portion of the game is given over to awkward, badly designed first-person platforming and physics puzzles ripped straight out of Half-Life 2, with not even a fraction of the ingenuity found in Valve's games. After the rehash of the Duke Nukem 3D boss fight at the start of the game, it'll take thirty minutes before you're even given a gun.
If you're expecting a non-stop rollercoaster of violence, then prepare to be disappointed. Instead, look forward to making Duke jump around with horrible controls that see him sliding off and bouncing from surfaces more often than not. Look forward to mind-numbing sections in which you find barrels to weigh down cranes. Look forward to an entire level where you have no weapons or combat, and instead need to find three random items to give to somebody for no good reason whatsoever, before being rewarded with ten seconds of unnervingly animated lap dancing.
There's also a ton of mini games to play. Interactive objects often give Duke a permanent Ego (health) boost, so it's worth playing with everything. Slot machines, frisbees, and pinball machines are all in attendance, providing minutes of humdrum busywork to get in the way of the combat.
The sad thing is that these boring sequences are among the game's highlights. When it comes time to finally pick up one of the many dull guns and fight the many dull enemies, it doesn't take long to conclude that shooting leaves a lot to be desired. It's a sad fact that even by the standards of ten years ago, this is a pretty mediocre experience. Combat creeps along at a sluggish pace and the lazy attempt at challenge consists solely of the huge amount of damage that opponents dish out compared to the ludicrous volume of ammo it requires to kill any of them.
The game features a number of weapons, but strangely for a game so proud of its nineties roots, you're stuck to the modern contrivance of carrying two guns at a time. This wouldn't be a big deal if enemies weren't such bullet sponges and the weapons had any semblance of accuracy to them. This is not the case. Weapons feel fairly ineffectual, and the melee attack only occasionally connects with enemies. Duke himself is an incapable fighter. I'd go as far as to call him a pussy.
From regular fights to boss encounters, the whole experience is a listless affair with little incentive for the player to feel invested in any way. This extends to the game's so-called humor as well, which will rightly be viewed as tasteless at best and downright disturbing at worst. For the most part, DNF's comedy is the same tawdry laundry list of outdated memes and nonsensical pop culture references that we've come to expect, but at times, the game's attempts to be funny come off as downright horrific.
One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth's women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they're getting raped. In fact, they are. That's the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies. Now, I'm a fan of offensive humor, but the 'joke' in this level is so morbidly presented, so dark and downright unsettling, that I simply do not know if Gearbox intends for us to laugh or to throw up. I certainly found I was in danger of doing the latter over the former.
By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a "You're fucked," joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.
It's not impossible to make an alien rape joke amusing if you're clever enough, but the fact that nobody making this game actually bothered to try is what really concerns me. According to Gearbox, seeing women tortured was funny enough. According to common sense, it really, really wasn't.
This is the real core problem with Duke Nukem Forever. It's not a funny game. It's a disgusting one, and this is coming from someone who has laughed at jokes concerning every social taboo and tragedy imaginable. The issue stems from the fact that there's no irony or punchline. There's no attempt to make the "jokes" ridiculous -- in fact, there are barely any appreciable jokes at all. We simply have Duke Nukem, with his disembodied and dispassionate voice, regurgitating out-of-place movie quotes and sounding bored to be there. Such a flat and humorless performance just doesn't work when set against the grisly concepts DNF attempts to make fun of.
I struggled to raise a smile once during my playthrough. There's one slightly cute joke aimed at Halo, but that gag is overshadowed by my predominant thought that Duke Nukem Forever has no right to make fun of other videogames. That one moment aside, I was unable to attain any kind of emotion from the game at all, except utter boredom and a desire to play something far superior, like Painkiller or Serious Sam -- two games that are also pretty damn old but manage to provide exhilarating, fast-paced combat and plenty of weapons. Concepts DNF knows nothing of.
Certain players may kid themselves into thinking the game will get better. The fact that it's so inconsistent in quality will help this self delusion to propagate. Some levels are clearly of higher quality than others, leading to a game that feels stitched together from random bits of code found on the floor. Occasionally, a level looks graphically superior and features smoother gameplay. The next level may look like crap and play just as badly.
The only thing consistent about Duke Nukem Forever is how tiresome it is. Whether you're engaged in another droll turret sequence, or trying to stop Duke sticking to bits of random debris on the floor, or attempting to get him through a door that's too small for him in a miserable underwater level before he drowns, or taking part in an uninspired vehicular section, you can always bet on Duke to deliver the very best examples of thorough mediocrity.
There is a multiplayer offering and this is where it's really fair to talk about how dated the game is. The three modes -- Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Babe (like Capture the Flag, but with women dressed as schoolgirls), can be described as 'rough' by only the very kindest of humans. The less kind can call it complete shite.
With its dreary maps, piss-poor targeting and sloppy run-and-gun combat, Duke's multiplayer somehow manages to be even less compelling than the dire campaign. A few modern concessions have been made -- you earn Experience points to level up and acquire new items for an interactive mansion -- but for the most part, this is the kind of gameplay you can still get by booting up Quake. Except of course, Quake is better.
We briefly touched on the graphics, but let it be known that you can expect a hideous looking creatures to assault your eyes. You can tell where token efforts were made to bring DNF up to par, but such efforts were wasted. Of particular note are the various non-player characters, some of which aren't even animated and simply stand like terrifying statues. Those that are animated walk like they're trying not to shit themselves. When it comes time to see Duke's "Babes" attempt to get sexy and pose seductively for you, the whole affair becomes rather nightmarish. The only people who could get off to this game are the criminally insane.
To say Duke Nukem Forever is a relic is redundant. Many people have come to accept this and some are ready to forgive the archaic design and nasty visuals simply based on the game's history. History, however, is no excuse for creative poverty. The game is simply bad by any standard, and if nobody was able to make it good enough, then it should have stayed unfinished and unreleased. The fact DNF demands $60 for such an ugly, boring, malodorous experience is the final insult.
Duke Nukem Forever is a festering irrelevance with nothing to offer the world. It's a game with an odious personality, one that could only endear itself to the sociopathic and mentally maladjusted. There may be life in Duke yet, but not his current incarnation. Not while his developers legitimately think he's cool and hilarious, rather than creepy and nauseating, and not while he's starring in games that can't even compete with budget titles, let alone the AAA experiences that Duke Nukem Forever arrogantly launches alongside.
The game will sell well based on pure hype and audacity, but history will not look favorably upon this game. Nor should it. Nobody should think kindly of such a miserable, lifeless, grotesque little game.
Set to be a huge action title
It might seem strange to complain that a game that sold over one million copies and has a Metacritic score of 85% never had the sales or the acclaim that it deserved, but when that game is inFamous, it’s a valid point. Why? Well, if you’d played it for any length of time, you’d know that Sucker Punch’s open-world superhero epic is one of the unsung heroes of the current console generation; a richer, deeper and more enjoyable game than rivals like Prototype or Crackdown, and packed with brilliant ideas. Original ideas? Maybe not, but not every game can steal ideas from GTA, Prince of Persia, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Gears of War and make them all work together. inFamous could, and inFamous 2 does it even better.
If you didn't play it, inFamous took place in the fictionalised New York of Empire City, and featured a rebellious young courier, Cole, who finds himself hired to transport a mysterious device which promptly explodes, resulting in the catastrophic near-destruction of his hometown. Instead of dying, however, Cole becomes imbued with a range of electrical super powers, enabling him to blast foes with lightning bolts, survive huge drops, knock enemies flying with shockwaves and grind along electric cables. Combine these with Cole’s existing climbing and parkour skills - now supercharged - and you have a hero capable of battling the various gangs and mutants now at loose on the streets. But Cole doesn’t have to be a hero. His new abilities can lead him to the dark side, preying on the weak and slaying anything and anyone that gets in the way of greater power. Take heed of your conscience, however, and Cole become the champion of the oppressed, bringing justice against evil, healing the sick and rescuing those in direst need. Famous or infamous - it’s your choice.
Now inFamous 2 continues in exactly the same vein. The action takes Cole to a new location - a fictionalised New Orleans called New Marais - with our hero on a mission to build up the powers he needs to confront a demonic being - the Beast - that is on his trail, ravaging the East coast as it goes. Cole’s efforts are complicated, however, by the activities of a brutal, gun-toting militia that has taken power in New Marais, and by growing numbers of monstrous mutants attacking the swamplands and graveyards that surround the city. There’s a solid core of story-based missions to pull you through the plot, some with good or evil options that will hasten your movement towards guardianship or notoriety, These are backed up by a range of achievements, collectible and side-quests, all of which work to boost your powers and unlock whole new ones.
The pleasures of inFamous 2 are very much those of inFamous 1: the thrilling display of super-powers in combat, and the joy of travelling through and over the city using a combination of sprinting, gliding, clambering and grinding. The fighting itself is much improved, with improved melee combat based around “the amp” - an electrified club - and a strong selection of lightning bolt, kinesis and shockwave moves that gets more powerful and more exciting as you unlock new powers. It’s hard to think of another open-world game that covers close combat, high-speed skirmishing and Gears-style, cover-based shooting with such skill, and as you reach the halfway stage, blasting scores of militia one minute, hurling impressively destructive mini typhoons the next, it’s a fabulous super-powered spectacle. Thanks goodness, too, that inFamous 2 doesn’t do the traditional sequel thing of removing all your powers from the original game and forcing you to start from scratch. Instead, you start with a great working base level, and just build and build from there.
The sequel also benefits from a more varied, more consistent and simply more playful world. With its decay, its old-world architecture, its heady atmosphere, its swamplands, shacks and flooded streets, New Marais is a brilliant setting for an open world game and one that feels, in its own comic-book way, alive. With more cables and tram-lines and some new, vertical conduits that send you flying up the sides of buildings, it’s also an even greater joy to get around. The whole thing has that classic Southern gothic feel, and after years where open world games have felt constrained to either Los Angeles, Miami or New York, it’s great to see a different urban world unfurl before your eyes.
Yet what really makes inFamous 2 such an improvement on the original is the approach it takes to structure and story. In a way, it’s much like the approach Ubisoft took with Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood after Assassin’s Creed 1, making the core more narrative-led and more linear, but reducing the game’s reliance on boring, repetitive tasks. It’s an approach that works wonders for inFamous 2 as well, with more interesting missions and bigger set-pieces, but still enough weird incidental side-quests, collectables and ad-hoc opportunities for do-gooding and evil-doing to keep you busy when you stray from the main path. There’s a well-judged balance between freedom and cinematic story-telling, and while the characters and plotlines aren’t the most original or dynamic you’ve ever come across, it’s enough to get and keep you hooked. Sure, there’s potential for the action to get repetitive - and at times it does - but in general the constant drip-feed of new enemies, new areas and new powers helps keep any boredom at bay.?
All this is only helped by a reworked graphics engine which allows for better lighting and much richer levels of detail, but also some fantastic interactive or destructible scenery. This isn’t the kind of game where buildings can be ripped apart wholesale, but you’ll have plenty of fun hurling cars around, trashing towers and wooden terraces with energy grenades or vortexes and causing mayhem with exploding barrels. Plus, when the view zooms in for some cinematics, the character modelling and animation is more refined. From Cole to his chubby, 50s throwback sidekick, Zeke, some new super-powered allies and a genuinely creepy arch-villain, the cast look and feel more believable. If inFamous 2 isn’t quite as stunning a PS3 showcase as Uncharted 2, it’s still leagues ahead of mode open-world games out there.?
Some might be sniffy about the lack of any multiplayer option, though we’d always rather have a great single-player game with no multiplayer than a mediocre one with a half-decent co-op mode. However, inFamous 2 does have something unique to make up for it: a mission editor which can be used to create new content for other players to enjoy in the game. There’s a steep learning curve, but it’s possible to create some quite sophisticated results. Provided you opt-in to user-generated content, amateur missions can be enjoyed just like those built into the game, and there’s hope that a supply of user-generated missions will spice up a second playthrough. As this is a good-sized game with the opportunity to try things from both a good and evil perspective, there’s certainly plenty of reason to come back for more.
Verdict:
inFamous was the best of the open-world superhero games, and inFamous 2 does more than enough to continue the good work. Good-looking, entertaining and massively rewarding, it gives you a great selection of powers and a superbly-realised world in which to use them, with more interesting missions and bigger set-pieces on top. Sony and Sucker Punch should be proud - this deserves to be one of the biggest action games of the summer, if not the whole year.
Tags:
Gaming PS3 Sony inFamous 2
inFamous 2 originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:11:20 +0100
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Great weapons, but what else?
Say what you will about Red Faction: Armageddon, but Volition's third-person shooter packs some truly fantastic toys. Sure, it has all the usual shotguns, assault rifles and rocket launchers, but alongside them you'll find mighty hammers that can smash whole buildings apart, hulking, heavily-armed exoskeletons, nano-guns that disintegrate creatures and objects into their constituent atoms, and nano-units that can build them back up again.
We get grenades, remote grenades and energy beams, and - best of all - a magnet gun where you fire at point A, fire again at point B, and a beam of energy drags the two together. Allied with the series' signature Geo-Mod technology, which pioneered the idea of making all the scenery destructible, this armoury makes for a brilliant toolkit for creative destruction. Creature over there giving you trouble? Why not literally bring the house down on him? Or why not knock heads together by wiring two vicious critters together with the magnet gun, and watch them accelerate towards each other at deadly speed.
In theory, this should be great fun, but the thing about a brilliant toolkit is that it needs a brilliant world in which to work, or all that ingenuity gets pretty dull, pretty quickly. This, sadly, is where the latest Red Faction falls apart.
This is a shame. The previous effort, Red Faction: Guerilla, wasn't entirely successful, but its marriage of first-person-shooter, open-world and mega-destruction was reasonably innovative and enjoyable. Armageddon, by contrast, seems to settle for being a by-the-numbers action game with only its exotic weaponry to recommend it. It's an old story - space marine meets hostile inhabitants of planet - with the only real twist being that this marine is an engineer, the action takes place on a colonised Mars, and that it's sort-of his fault that those particular hostile inhabitants have been set loose. It's little more than a basic premise for a linear series of missions designed to put your hero in close proximity with horde after horde of insectoid Martian varmints.
There's nothing wrong with that if the game still works, but Armageddon starts off dull, steadily gets fun, then goes back to its default setting of, erm, dull. You've seen it. You've done it. You stopped wearing the T-Shirt several years ago and it's lurking at the bottom of your wardrobe. While Volition has made an effort to create a varied roster of baddies, each with their own moves, attacks and quirks, very few encounters are staged with much panache, and it's really only the weapon set that keeps the combat interesting. Soon one samey mission blends into another, whatever pretext there is to keep you moving from one place to another, and as the game progresses, the principal idea seems to be to up the numbers or just throw more of the more tricky Martian critters into the mix. Unless you think frustration is better than boredom, this isn't the way to go.
Armageddon also looks drab. Arguably, Volition's biggest mistake has been to set the whole game underground (a previous disaster, also caused by our hapless hero, has taken Mars's terraforming tech offline). You'd have to go back to the days of Quake II to see a game so uniformly brown, grey and unspectacular, packed with industrial decor and enlivened with only the occasional touch of scenic grandeur. The aliens themselves are spectacularly generic, as if the team had spent weeks researching what aliens look like in other games in order to come up with a collection that look just the same. Honestly, Armageddon couldn't be any less distinctive if it tried.
Of course there are good things to say, and we really should mention them. Obviously, all those cool weapons count for something, and the destructible scenery is fun. The music is consistently good, and some decent voice actors do their best to make the cinematic cutscenes dramatic (though there's only so much you can do with this stuff). We're also going to dish out a whole extra point - maybe two - for the Infection multiplayer mode. It might just be another spin on the classic “four-men against a mass of nasties” theme, as seen in Gears of War's Horde mode or Halo: Reach's Firefight, but it's a good spin, made frantic and hilarious by all those weapons and all the chunks of scenery flying around. The secondary Ruin mode, where you have a time limit to smash things up in, is a nice showcase for the game's destruction, but nothing more.
Verdict:
Look, it's 2011 now. Do you really need another unremarkable shooter in your collection? Have you exhausted all the other sci-fi action epics to the extent that you really must have something new? Well, Red Faction is a perfectly acceptable genre effort with a great set of weapons, but one that that still gets stale with time. While it has its moments and the multiplayer is fun, so many other games have done this so much better, and with so much more drama and excitement.?
Tags:
Gaming PS3 Red Faction Armageddon THQ Xbox 360
Red Faction: Armageddon originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:41:57 +0100
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