Duke nukem game review. Overview of the game Duke Nukem Forever. Minority Report - XTR

As this tall blond man in size 46 black boots walked down the street, the pigmen and octabrans cowered in fear in anticipation of a kick in the muzzle with their boots. “Time to kick ass and chew gum!” - he declared in a loud voice, only his chewing gum quickly ended. Despite this, he did not get lost and always found something to his liking - he played pinball, pawed girls, watched porn, in between saving the world from aliens, and even making jokes about it! Suddenly he disappeared, but promised to return. As the years went by, the occasional vows of Duke's imminent return looked more and more like the pink bubbles of the same chewing gum. Therefore, up to the final date, Duke releases Nukem Forever we were afraid that our dream would burst at the last moment, spreading disappointment over the face. But now we are already clicking on the black and yellow label of the game and we hear such a familiar voice that makes us believe that after so many years everything will be as great as before.

And at first, that's exactly what it looks like! It is unlikely that anyone will refuse to draw with a marker on the board all sorts of obscenities that convince EDF soldiers of Duke's tactical genius. Or score a goal with the only eye of the alien emperor, after you have properly beaten his owner in the football stadium from the famous “destroyer”. A familiar pinball machine, jokes about steroids and the attention of girls - the very first minutes of the game are literally stuffed with Duke's signature humor, not a bit spoiled for so many years. Deja Vu will continue further, but the starting enthusiasm will slowly begin to be replaced by a slight bewilderment. One side, Duke Nukem Forever is a kind of bulkhead of original ideas on new way. Elements of the old school are visible at every step, but the game does not allow us to reveal their potential to its full potential.

Yes, with such weapons on hand, you can demolish mountains worse than in the recent red faction: Armageddon! It wasn't there. Not only is Duke, pumped up by steroids, now weakened to please current trends industry and cannot carry all the weapons found at once, as before, so the outside world turned out to be almost completely immune to the action of murderous barrels! There is no destruction model. At all. You can blow up barrels, fire extinguishers, and break glass, but you can't damage walls. In the best case, they will collapse in the places strictly designated by the game, but otherwise you will have to be content with just a hint of bullet holes. Sadly, the vast majority of scenery in the game is completely static. And if at first you will be willingly entertained by playing billiards and pinball, drawing doodles and exercising in the gym, then soon all the mini-games will come to naught, without distracting Duke from his main occupation - saving the Earth.

She will have to be saved from the same pigs, octabreins and a dozen other painfully familiar opponents. For most of the game, you will only be kicking off their muzzles, crushing smaller aliens with your boot, shooting them with a shotgun ... Beauty! If it wasn't amazingly boring. The standard shootout in the game is as follows. Main character finds himself in a hall studded with columns, where several waves of stupid opponents land on him. Deal with the first three, get ready to land the second ... and then the third and fourth, until you are finally released from the locked location. It doesn't matter that sometimes battles take place in the open. You are always limited to a rectangular area with several shelters, where new portions of enemies fall down over and over again. We understand that in the original Duke Nukem 3D everything was exactly the same, but since then these combat mechanics no longer feel insanely original!

Moreover, the game has become lighter than the original thanks to another trend that has leaked into Duke's world. We are talking about the notorious restoration of health, referred to here as “ego”. Fortunately, despite the narrow-mindedness of opponents, they are strong enough to periodically force us to admire Duke's broken glasses until his conceit returns to normal. Yes, and the idea of ​​​​using beer and steroids looks, although not new, but quite curious. From alcohol, Duke begins to swim before his eyes, but he becomes more tenacious to the attacks of enemies. And throwing a handful of steroids on his cheek, our pumped hero smashes ordinary opponents to pieces with one blow of his fist, increasing the value of hand-to-hand combat in the game beyond the limits.

But Duke didn’t have enough doping for the whole game, so the developers often offer us a break from shooting, turning the brightest shooter hero into a kind of arcade Mario. A couple of good ideas, embodied in trips on a toy car and remote control of its counterpart, are lost against the backdrop of entire levels, during which you will have to jump through boxes, climb pipes and walk along dark corridors. Due to the archaic level design already noted above, it all looks very boring and will rather drive you into a nap than relieve tension after the shootouts.

Although some of them are capable of sending you to the realm of Morpheus better than any sleeping pill. This is because developers overuse the game in a virtual shooting range. Machine guns are placed every couple of episodes, and firing from them is implemented much more primitively than in any other modern shooter. So you make your way to the final fights with the bosses of the stages (whose action algorithm remains at the level of the original game) fighting boredom, and only Duke's greasy humor can make you move on.

Hail to the king, baby! This saying fits perfectly Duke Nukem Forever. But not at all because the game was able to approach the success of the original project, at least at the distance of the flight of the eye of a cyclops after hitting him with Duke's boot. Just because of the presence of the king of brutal shooters of all time, it is worth your attention. Otherwise, this is a very, very mediocre project, traveling exclusively on the legendary brand.

There is regeneration in shelters, you can carry only two guns with you at a time and large boring "platform" sections. That's pretty much everything you need to know when deciding whether to buy (or not buy) a game. If you are still more or less satisfied with everything, then:

The DNF starts kind of briskly - they give us a powerful rocket launcher, then they joke funny about the notorious 14 years, and then, then, then some nonsense begins. Instead of hurricane shooter™ the first couple of tens of minutes (how many of them actually pass there - it’s not clear, I don’t want to detect it in a new way, it feels like a very long time) I leafed through the collection of jokes that had accumulated during the development of the game. For the most part, of course, vulgar.

For the production period of DNF recorded even by the Guinness Book of Records, the game could easily be started five to ten times from scratch, but the feeling that the gameplay of the new Duke did come to us from somewhere in the forgotten past does not leave us for a second. AT bad sense. While the peculiar, but striking features of old-school shooters, such as a crazy arsenal of weapons with a total weight of a hundred or two kilograms in the protagonist’s backpack or restoring health with rare first-aid kits, almost everything was cut out, many trash elements of old games and this mood of “wow, yes I’m here I can just take the popcorn in my hands and cook it in the microwave” for some reason were carefully preserved. Like staff surgeons gear box confused the patient's appendicitis with his heart, it's hard to say.

DNF remains true to its style of endless farce to the very end, and it must be admitted that sometimes one can guess various references to the mass media, including gaming culture(strippers are not what they seem) and watching Duke's "ego" grow from watching porn magazines ("ego" is the maximum health bar; anyway) is really fun. Such episodes, in theory, were supposed to give the player a respite from the mad meat that is happening on the screen, but they can’t play this role, because there is no partner, the very action from which one would have to rest at least sometimes.

Skirmishes as such in DNF are interesting and dynamic, but: well, they are very easy - once, somehow it rarely happens for a shooter - two, and you can’t immediately use at least half of the game arsenal in them - three. All this is very disappointing, since the process of exterminating enemies is furnished very tolerably. If you are lucky enough to get to a relatively large-scale battle in a location with a bottomless box of ammunition, and at the same time with your favorite barrel at the ready, then you will certainly get your portion of simple pleasure.

The problem with the principle “we don’t give more than two guns in one hand” pops up in this text so often, because unlike many other FPS, in Duke it’s impossible to accept and it’s impossible to get used to it. The Quake-like assortment of weapons present in the game cannot be stuffed into such a format, this is a crime against the gamer. I want a "rail", and a rocket launcher, and a "shaft", and a minigun, I want to have them with me all the time. I don't play call of duty and not even in Team Fortress , give me back my ten guns, I want them all back. However, this is not important, since half of the game still has to jump on platforms, rocks, cornices and ride an inflatable rubber big foot.

Having removed the heart instead of the appendix, Gearbox added a second appendicitis to DNF instead of the new heart. All these regen-shelters-two-cannons were so numb with their lack of alternatives, a potential breath of pure air ozonated by the railgun turned out to be poisoned by the same poison, from which it would be so good to escape at least for a few hours. From Duke Nukem I wanted to get exactly Duke Nukem, even though the project came to the shelves literally from the past, but it didn’t grow together.

I remember that at one time on PC and consoles (it definitely was on the Dreamcast) a clone of the first Quake called Kiss Psycho Circus. The feeling of playing DNF in this shooter is very similar: with mediocre graphics combined with a terribly chosen color palette of both, you can put up with it, and segments of “why the developers are doing this to me” are barely, but still interrupted by the pleasure received from the extermination of all and all in its path and overcome level after level. But no one ever expected anything outstanding from KPC, but DNF was positioned as an at least ambitious project for all 14 years of development. Gamers were promised "the very thing", and they believed (which is confirmed by the sales charts). As a result, the public received something indistinct, a product capable of somehow pleasing and entertaining the player only “in the absence of fish”.

The release of Duke Nukem Forever is like a joke for its people who are able to appreciate the performance, with the condition that everyone wants to be their own. That's where Gearbox caught us, you can't argue. The continuation of Duke's story came out when the players no longer expected any innovations from him, but on the contrary, they wanted to try the classic orthodox gameplay and its best incarnation. Flirting with nostalgic (in some cases alien) past gamers, Gearbox tried to cajole and not looking for good from modern FPS buyers. It did not work either the first or the second. The developers simply failed to make a good game without reservations, alas.

Summing up the impressions of the Duke Nukem Forever single, we come to the disappointing conclusion that it was essentially "glued together" by Gearbox Software from the previous developments of 3D Realms - the hand of the new license holders is felt only at the last stages, which please much more than others. At the same time, there are enough anachronisms and software errors everywhere, which indicates the insufficient quality of the beta testing of the project. After a short run through the level, we are greeted by loading screens, the game reacts badly to "folding", increasing the loading time of levels, and the "happy" owners of dual-core Intel processors are completely forced to delve into the configuration files for optimization gameplay. Yes, Duke's retirement seemed completely different to us ...

In an attempt to find a new gaming experience"You can pay attention to the multiplayer, for which the Piranha Games studio was responsible. There are not enough stars from the sky in the Duke Nukem Forever multiplayer mode, but it may well be a good alternative to passing a single on Insane difficulty. The developers have prepared only four modes for players: every man for himself, a team death match, a variation on capturing the flag - Capture the Baby and something like point control called Hail to the King. In principle, these modes are played quite fun - dragging girls from each other, multi-colored dukes furiously pour fire on opponents, actively “strafe” and even fly on jetpacks.

The atmosphere corresponds to the perception of Duke Nukem Forever - the girls, called "chicks" in the localization, kick, whisper all sorts of vulgarities to the Dukes and kick - to pacify them, you should slap the burden on the "ass". But there are at least a couple of complaints. Firstly, the maps are too small - sometimes there is simply nowhere to turn around on them, which is why online battles turn into a natural pile-small. Secondly, and this is nothing more than a consequence of the first problem, the number of players is limited to only eight participants - criminally few, especially considering that in some Battlefield: Bad Company 2, brawls between three dozen players have long become the standard. Finally, not the least important claim - not too balanced weapon. In the Duke Nukem Forever multiplayer, in most cases, a double-barreled grenade launcher "decides" that does not require a special skill and "aim" from the player - he gasped at the heap and forgot. Much more interesting in circulation "reducers" and "railguns" impose much more severe requirements on the players, but they are of little interest to anyone - almost crowds of people line up at the place of the "spawn" of the grenade launcher. But how nice it is to get into some kind of "reptile" with such a "gun" from the "reducer" and then slam it with a boot - words cannot express.

What has been talked about for so long has come true! Grandpa Duke shook off the age-old dust from his muscular carcass and seemed to us, mere mortals. For those long 14 years, while we were spoon-fed, that Duke Nukem Forever is about to come out and show everyone that he is cooler than the “kung fu panda”, another generation of gamers has grown up, and the old guard has approached the line beyond which it is already turning into an ancient one.

Duke Nukem Forever takes us some time ahead of Duke's latest adventures. This muscular loafer sits in his huge penthouse, plays games named after himself and enjoys the actions that 2 young and very pretty young ladies perform. Bored at one fine moment, our uncle decides to warm up a bit by taking a short walk around his property. While Duke is doing his exercise, some incomprehensible and inexplicable crap begins to happen in the world. Remarkably, our old, familiar from the last century, characters are involved in the case, and in particular, alien bastards of various stripes and sizes, including the big and arrogant pigs loved by many.

So, old Duke, having seen enough of all this garbage, goes down to his personal command post, where very influential personalities in the country have a very serious conversation with him. After the conversation, our uncle is finally convinced that it is time to remember his youth and culinary lessons from Ukrainian cuisine. Therefore, Nyukem turns around and heads towards the exit, where he encounters the most nimble (or simply the most stupid) representatives of the alien race. Well, what can you do, someone should have been unlucky.

A little about the gameplay

We have a long and difficult journey from our home to the big alien boss, and you don’t think that we will go through it empty-handed? Especially such a character as Duke Nyukem.

The main and most important weapon of our hero are obscene jokes and remarks with which he breaks through the consciousness of all the characters around him. And to consolidate the material, there are large and not very guns, well known from previous games. Passage scheme Duke Nukem Forever from level to level is sustained in best traditions Duke Nukem, i.e. exciting adventures from point "A" to point "B" with obstacles and non-trivial overcoming of them, shooting alien assholes, as well as swearing. What is nice, there are tasks that require additional devices to complete. Such as, for example, a toy car on the remote control. From time to time, we encounter various bosses that are destroyed by using heavy artillery and tearing off body parts from their carrier, followed by humiliation of the latter.

In the process of passing the game, there will often be "reminders" of how glorious Duke's past was, and in addition to this, various Easter eggs will come across.

We will now take a closer look at some of the aspects Duke Nukem Forever.

As mentioned before, we have at our disposal the entire set of well-known guns. The trouble is that over time, Duke has aged a lot and can no longer carry such a hefty arsenal with him. Apparently, therefore, the developers took pity on him and allowed him not to take more than two trunks at a time. Farther. There are allied NPCs, but their role in the game is not that minimal, it has generally reached the micro level. At best, they will praise you, swear a couple of times, and even several times during the game they will portray some actions that look like help. As for the enemies, here is what is called "Hello tree!". These guys do not shine with intelligence, but in principle this is not their forte in this game.

As an innovation, Duke's "Ego" became the main indicator of health. Now the health of our brave guy measures coolness. An excellent implementation of Duke's care in "attachments". Well, well done developers, they were able to make Nyukem one step closer to consoles and further from PC users.

There is no "Jetpack" in the game, it is jetpack for flights. More precisely, it is, but we are destined to fly on it only in multiplayer.

As for graphics and sound. Frankly, the graphics component does not shine with something interesting. Looking at the screen, you get the feeling that you have returned 5 years ago. Musical accompaniment nothing special stands out either. Yes, there are melodies that touch the string of nostalgia in the soul, but no more.

And for a snack "Russification" by Duke. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, from the subtitles company "1C" refused. Therefore, all the characters, including Nukem, speak Russian. Yes, the localizers did a good literary translation. Yes, the actor worked professionally and voiced the main character. But! The text, a significant part of which is made up of obscene statements, turns into one big “Pi-i-i-i-i-ip” and part of the meaning of the original phrases was lost during translation. Although not everything is so bad - Duke learned several original phrases of the great and mighty, upon hearing which, his mouth involuntarily stretches into a smile from ear to ear.

Oddly enough, but Duke Nukem Forever there is a multiplayer. True, he made a depressing impression on us personally. There is a feeling that he was screwed into the game "whatever it was." Game modes are standard and time-tested: fights every man for himself, team fights, capturing the flag (in the game it works like capturing heifers), holding control points etc.

In order for the dull multiplayer to somehow attract people, the developers made a system of achievements and achievements in the form of levels. They lie in the fact that you have your own penthouse and your own wardrobe. By participating in battles with other players, you get points and thereby pump your level. After leveling up, you can unlock a new piece of furniture in your penthouse and new items for Duke. So if you want a new T-shirt for Nukem or a new monument to your loved one somewhere in the lobby of your penthouse, then welcome to multiplayer. The question is, how long will you last in this realm of boredom?

So, let's sum up. Pro storyline We will not talk, because there is nothing to talk about. The gameplay, in general, is designed in the style of this series: we snoop around the levels, shoot at enemies and comment on it all with vulgar and obscene jokes, thanks to which we keep in good shape and grin throughout the game. If not for the jokes, then half of the game could be overslept. Opponents are not distinguished by either intelligence or ingenuity. This is probably why one of the main weapons in the game will be a shotgun. A rather weakened Duke Nukem can carry no more than two units with him small arms. Graphics stopped at the level of 2006-2007. The sound is nothing special either. Localization for enough high level, but for this game it looks like some kind of perversion, invented by an unknown sick mind.

The health of the character began to be characterized by his coolness. Thus, the developers came to the conclusion that health itself is restored, you just have to hide behind some bedside table. There, Nyukem apparently persuades himself that he is as cool as space eggs, after which he continues his warlike campaign. To a large extent, Duke has become a console character, which cannot but drive into sadness.

On the this moment the game is a shooter with a level slightly below average, but very much promoted. Unfortunately, myself main character changed, and not for the better. Yes, his lines remained at the same level, but on some lines, even if they are spoken by the great and terrible Duke Nyukem himself, you won’t go far.

Graphic arts: 3.0
Sound and music: 3.5
Gameplay: 3.5
Plot: 3.2
Multiplayer: 3.0

Vanity Festival and Disneyland for the mentally ill, Las Vegas has become the first symbol of everything that stands behind the word "America" ​​today. Vegas with its casinos in the form of huge castles, pyramids, Renaissance palaces and even the Eiffel Tower looks like the final spit in the face of the United States of the rest of the world: they say, thank you, dear Europe and Asia, but we will somehow go on without you. Vegas is an ode to the narcissistic, arrogant and patriotic, and therefore our dear friend Duke Nukem is the right place here. It was in this city that we visited the first big press show Duke Nukem Forever.

The demonstration took place in an institution with the telling name Titty City, but we met the first strippers at the reception in the hotel - there were metal poles right in front of the doors, and they did not hesitate to use them for their intended purpose. Welcome to Vegas, that's how it is here. The presentation itself was moderately innocent, so don't think of anything - our opinion is not clouded at all.

In Titty City, we and a couple of dozen other journalists from all over the world were met by Duke's new owners - the Gearbox team - and rows of Xbox 360 consoles with a long demo of the project. We've been through the first three hours of Forever's single player campaign, and now we can honestly say - damn it, Duke, we miss you. When getting to know Forever, the first and most important step is to turn a blind eye to outdated graphics. Yes, the textures are sometimes blurred in the most indecent way, the decoration of the levels is rather poor, and Duke's jump animation is no better than that of the anonymous hero of the first Quake. Everything is so, but that's not the main thing - it's interesting to play here, the rest is not important. It is worth making a reservation: we watched the console version, and the picture is guaranteed to come out better on the PC - but it will still be far from the level of Crysis 2 or at least Call of Duty. Having overcome the starting barrier and spitting on the graphics, you will find out that in "Duke" there is, it turns out, a plot. More than ten years have passed since the first game (Duke Nukem 30, I mean) according to the script, and all this time Duke (although he did not look a bit older) rested on his laurels, basked in the glory and lived like a star. Since he saved humanity, our hero has earned a lot of money and has become the center of everyone's attention: books have been written about him, films have been made, he is now the idol of the whole country. Successful and wealthy Duke lives in Vegas, where he has his own huge casino - this is where the game begins.

IUE GOT BALLS OF STEEL
Duke is sitting on his couch, being pleasured (behind the camera lens) by blonde twins, and he himself is playing new shooter, created based on his adventures in his youth. Meanwhile, we are already in full control of what is happening, going through the “game within the game” and shooting rockets at the huge boss there (in fact, the scene at the football stadium from the Duke Nukem 3D final is repeated, only on the new engine). “Damn, it's been twelve years, I hope it's worth it,” Duke says, putting down the controller. This is how the authors are ready to be ironic not only over themselves, but also over competitors - in certain moment, for example, Duke will be offered the Master Chief armor from Halo, to which our hero will respond: “ power armor- for suckers "and will go further in a T-shirt. The first level is made according to the model Half Life: there are no enemies, we just walk around the upper floors of the casino and eat the plot. Although the location looks pale, it, like all the others in Forever, is saved by the level of interactivity: as in old game, every nonsense here can be lifted and twisted. Here is the board on which the battle plan is drawn.
We approach, take a marker, draw some lines, and the soldier nearby comments: “Brilliant! Duke, of course, I didn’t understand anything drawn, but the plan is magnificent! And there are hundreds of such small and funny episodes, and sometimes they give good bonuses for finding them: they either replenish health (which is called “Ego” here), or slightly increase its strip. As a result, you look for interactive elements like an idiot, you even forget about your opponents. You can turn off the light, in microwaves - heat up food, open taps, flush water in the toilet, take excrement from the same toilet (“We thought about making Duke’s Ego strip decrease for this,” they comment developers). We saw a billiard table - be sure, you can come up and play; met with a pinball - get ready to spend twenty minutes hitting a steel ball and listening to Duke's comments in the spirit of what is in the subtitle; went to the basketball court - try to throw the ball into the ring. By the way, throwing objects is Duke's unobvious useful skill: the local barrels of fuel, for example, explode damn well and throwing them into crowds of enemies is sometimes very convenient.

This is because "Duke" has become a legend - in a press release, the developers call the game "the most anticipated of all times and peoples" and at the same time they do not even prevaricate. It has been in development for 12 years, and the reasons for the delay are still terribly mysterious - Gearbox employees, even today, do not say what the problem was. And while new developers try to keep their unfortunate predecessors quiet, the current Duke was built for the most part in 3D Realms, and Gearbox just completed the work and now hold the future of the entire series in their hands. About the sequels, of course, no word yet, but the time for a new dawn of "Duke" seems to be about to come.