Duke Nukem 3D Review

 It has.... aged

A classic of pop culture and boomer shooters alike. Duke Nukem 3D is a build engine shooter that exploded in popularity back in the day, but is now best known for it's memes and legacy. A mismanaged legacy at that, and one well beyond the scope of my usual summary reviews. The game has been re-released in multiple forms, unfortunately leaving the most widely available as the not-so-good 20th anniversary edition. I played using the Megaton Edition I had lying around, and would recommend trying to find a key for that over the newest source port due to issues I've heard about.

The story and atmosphere is... well it's certainly of the time, to some degree. Duke being the archetypical 80s action movie hero, womanizing and 'cooler than cool' while the game world is filled with adult signs, strippers, porno, and all surrounded by bog standard evil and gross aliens. No, of course it's not meant to be taken seriously, and ignoring those who took the wrong lesson from the game there's nothing wrong with a bit of shlocky cheesecake. But even taken as a purely mindless romp there's some things that to this day remain uncomfortable, mostly relating to the games treatment of actual, living women in spaces with the aliens. Coupled with some incredibly dark implications about what the aliens are actually doing. The game keeps reminding you of some rather uncomfortable things in a manner that hampers ones ability to enjoy the game 'for the meme' as it were.

The gameplay, at least, remains solid. Playing more akin to Wolfenstein than doom where combat is inevitably super lethal, Duke for all his machismo is unable to take more than a few hits before falling over dead. Add in a shitload of hitscan and high damage enemies and you find yourself peeking around corners, tossing pipe bombs, and raining hellfire from a distance over going in guns blazing. It does work well with the Build Engine however, full 3D environments and movement coupled with good explosions and physics mean you can take advantage of the space around you. While your arsenal gives you plenty of tools to play with, alongside the occasional 'lol funny' weapon.

I don't know if I'd recommend Duke 3D on it's own today, but if you're a fan of gaming history and development it's probably worth a playthrough. At least for the first 3 episodes, the expansion episode took a nosedive in quality and I personally bailed and called it a day after that. But yeah, it's aged, be warned going in and if you're not able to brush off some more troubling aspects you may want to look elsewhere.

Thank god Duke's used as a shitpost machine more than anything these days

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