The legacy of Duke Nukem Forever is a long one. Originally announced over a decade ago, 3D Realms would showcase the software regularly for the first few years of its development, but then it would seem the endless delays began to become something of a joke. The studio would insist the game was still being worked on tirelessly, but stopped giving it a public airing. Then, disaster strikes, as 3D Realms runs out of finance and is forced to close. Fears were that the long awaited Duke Nukem Forever would never see a retail release, confined to the confederation of ‘what could have been’ like so many other promising titles cut down before their prime. Instead however, it took the growing respect of a studio lead by a designer who cut his teeth on Duke Nukem 3D to bring Duke Nukem Forever to it’s audience, promising to keep the game as close to it’s original vision as possible.
Unsurprisingly, piecing the puzzle of 3D Realms’ unfinished content together, that’s exactly what Gearbox Studio has done. Duke Nukem Forever feels like an evolution of the Duke Nukem 3D formula, having ignored the mainstream direction the First-Person Shooter (FPS) genre has been pulled towards over the last decade. It’s a game 
not just for Duke Nukem fans but for any gamers who witnessed the 90’s console revolution of FPS games. It’s a game that says so much about how games have changed over the years, and yet still feels just as relevant as it would have done more than a decade ago.
Right from the start it’s apparent that Duke Nukem Forever is a game built for players that know what they’re doing. Though the game does offer a tutorial section, it’s very light on the tutoring: there’s no ‘left stick move, right stick look’ instructions, it’s simply ‘have a play for ten minutes, see some of the things you can do’. And of course, anyone who has ever played Duke Nukem 3D will already know much of what they can do.
Duke Nukem Forever plays to the strengths of its predecessor for the majority of its playtime. There’s been a great deal of progress made in it’s delivery, but Duke Nukem Forever retains the same balance between exploration, puzzle solving, Platform challenges and combat as Duke Nukem 3D. The aspect that has received much of the renovation work is the exploration, as in-keeping with the modern tradition, Duke Nukem Forever is a linear arrangement as opposed to Duke Nukem 3D’s wide-open level design.
The two-weapon limit seems at odds with the recreation of the classic Duke Nukem combat at first, that is until you begin to understand how well the game is designed around this simple restriction. Phases of combat against specific enemy types will lead to the availability of a select assortment of weapons – Shotguns and Rippers
are generally available most of the time, RPGs a little less frequently, and so on – with better weapons remaining out of reach until the end of the fight. With a more powerful weapon at your disposal for the beginning of the next bout, and ammo generally being offered as a set amount per unit, players will have to improvise when losing that weapon in the time between acquiring another high powered armament.
The combat is generally well presented: still comparable in satisfaction to more modern, intricately detailed set-pieces despite the obviously lacking quality of its tech. Suggesting that the enemy artificial intelligence (AI) is basic would be doing the developers a disservice. It’s true that the capacity for the opponents to improvise is limited throughout the single-player campaign, but only those proficient in FPS tactics would recognise this. Enemies have a set pattern of assaults, readily flanking you or charging head-on with sheer brute force, and once these patterns of attacks are learnt players will know how to prepare for such strikes in any given environment throughout the rest of the game.
The most frequently overlooked aspects of Duke Nukem 3D was also one of its most important: puzzle solving. Duke Nukem Forever keeps the flame alive, providing plenty of mental trials along with the dexterity challenges. 
Gamers who have played Duke Nukem 3D extensively will find Duke Nukem Forever much more straightforward and forgiving than it’s predecessor simply due to it’s linear level design; spending hours attempting to find a narrow path leading to the required keycard throughout a series of very similar looking cliffs is not on the agenda at any point.
Duke Nukem Forever is an almost limitlessly detailed game, with a stunning amount of incidental interactions available in almost every area. Be it destructible pieces of the environment or the famous amount of reactive objects, the playful creativity on display is inspiring. However, while it’s clearly a genre leading in terms of alternative areas of interest, there’s no denying that much of it has dated quite poorly in terms of visuals. Despite that which Gearbox Studio’s Randy Pitchford might insist, the visual quality doesn’t stand up well next to the big name titles of today. Far too many textures are visibly low resolution, Duke’s animations have 
no variation for distances and lip-synching is frequently poor. That’s not to say it’s a bad looking game in any respect, but the quality of many locations and sequences is notably less convincing than even some of Gearbox Studio’s own work on current-generation hardware.
Duke Nukem Forever is a product developed out of love for an audience, rather than an industry. While it may try to appeal to a more mainstream demographic than it’s predecessor, with the size of the market expanding so has the need to meet their demands, and there are many fans of modern FPS titles that’ll feel like a fish out of water in Duke Nukem Forever’s cocktail of logical puzzles and pathfinding. For gamers getting a bit long in the tooth Duke Nukem Forever will be one of the starts of 2011 so far, evoking emotions that until now had been confined to reminiscing about the stop-start nature of software from the Nintendo 64 era, but there’s a whole new world of gamers out there likely to find Duke Nukem Forever’s less conditioned ride somewhat anachronistic.
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