Duke Nukem Forever – Demo Impressions

Duke Nukem Forever is a game that has gone through a lot of crap, 12 years in the making, 4 game developers had worked on it, gone through more than one game engine, cancellation, firing of the first development team and it’s revival in 2010 by Gearbox. After a long time, we finally get a demo to try out and see how the game plays.

The way you get the demo as far as I understand is basically registering your copy of Borderlands on the gearbox, depending on what platform you’re playing it on (PC borderlands gets you PC demo). The demo starts with the same level we saw in several events, the one where you start in a bathroom pissing in a urinal then ending up in an American football field, fighting a giant alien. That we already seen before, and yes that giant turd in the toilet that you can throw around is there too.

But what I haven’t seen before is one extra level after that football field, you start out in a monster truck driving through a Grand Canyon like desert and eventually run out of gas, you walk your way into a cave to get more gas and head on. Of course you will have to fight your way through it, pig men are all over the place and killing them will leave a large amount of weapons for you to use. I understand that this is a demo but throwing that amount of weapons at you when you can only carry 2 weapons (the pistol and one other side arm) leaves me questioning what kind of game design (if any) went through the last 12 years making this game.

I’m not expecting any over fluffed introduction of any sort for the weapons, it’s just that why throw so much, in one stretch of a level when you’ll end up carrying one more? As if that’s not bad enough monsters almost hold no threat but to themselves. You will encounter a flying ship that that you can’t destroy without a rocket launcher, rather than sweeping the area to look for you, it literally stands in place waiting to be killed. I’m not complaining about the lack of good AI in the game, I’m complaining about the lack of a functioning AI.

It’s pretty everything we’ve seen from from footages and, some tell me this is the exact demo that was up at Pax this year, why did the demo take that long? I’m not going to judge the game over this bad demo, I’ll still be waiting for the final game, but if this is how the game will look like graphically, I will be worried about the final release. I wasn’t expecting the game to be a breakthrough, but I was expecting much more than this.

Putting that note aside, I really miss the days when Shareware gave you a portion of the game to try out rather than a 10 minute demo.

Mohammad AlHuraiz

Founder, editor and host of Lochal Archade. Mohammad has been running Lochal Archade for years and working hard in bringing video game-related content to the UAE and the Middle East as a whole.

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