Duke Nukem Forever Preview

Last PAX - PAX Prime if you will - I posted about the imminent release of Duke Nukem Forever. You may not have believed then but surely you must believe it now - it comes out May 3rd... OF THIS YEAR! At PAX Prime everyone there had the opportunity to play the demo of Duke Nukem Forever and all attendees of PAX East 2011 had that same opportunity. At some point I made a joke to myself that my next post on this blog was going to be a post about playing Duke Nukem (because I obviously have not been concentrated on this blog at all) so here it is.

After waiting on line for almost two hours I finally wrapped my hand around the controller.


I selected the medium difficulty because I didn't want to appear to be a chicken to all of those watching me play. I inverted the Y-axis and began to play.

The demo starts where I imagine the beginning of the game is: with rock music and no explanation of what's going on. You run around a football stadium trying to kill a giant alien. The gun you pick up is a missile launcher of sorts (I don't remember the name) and you are given 69 rounds (giggle). It takes little effort to take down this big sonofabitch, ammo being dropped as needed, and eventually you kick a field goal with what looks like the aliens giant tonsil. The screen pulls back and you are Duke playing Duke. How meta.

If you do not already know the dialogue I'm not going to spoil it for you here but let's just say it is very... Duke.

The next part of the demo seems to fast forward in the game a little bit as you are now driving Duke's truck. The controls of that, to me, felt a little wonky but eventually (after two deaths by giant rock) I persevered. The truck runs out of gas you shoot a few pig cops and then are assaulted by a spaceship. Conveniently there is an RPG under the shelter that you take and after a few salvos of missiles the ship disintegrates. Not going to lie, it would have been cooler had it crashed into the ground.

I then took a trip into a cave that I didn't have time to figure out how to get out of. My demo time was up.

The demo seemed like an old build and was a tad bit laggy at times but I'll wait until the final product to reserve judgement.

It may sound like I didn't totally love it but I assure you I did. It was Duke Nukem - prettified. I think it will be worth the wait but I also think that I won't do anything new for shooters.

I also neglected to mention that my wife was standing next to me as I played and grimaced when I shrunk a pig cop and stepped on it. That made my day.