One of the best old-school FPS games.
Duke Nukem 3D is the third game in the Duke Nukem series, and the first first-person-shooter in the series. In the game, you once again play as the muscle-bound line-spouting Duke Nukem, ready to “kick ass and chew bubblegum”, and the three episodes involve Duke going through parts of Los Angeles and on an alien spaceship to kill those damn aliens.
Since the game’s a first-person shooter, it plays pretty simple: kill enemies, find switches and keycards, open doors, find exit, repeat. Sounds boring, yes, but it’s fun when you don’t speed through and take your time observing everything. Because almost every map has an easter egg, secret areas and little quirks that make each level fun. Although I prefer the first and third episodes as opposed to the second, because in those episodes, they make the levels resemble actual real-life places. The game makes fun of stuff like the O.J. Simpson trial and even bashes their competitor id Software at times.
The game has an interesting form of interactivity. In addition to finding switches and being on lifts, which work differently than Doom: you can start and stop most lifts on your own will, instead of having to wait. In addition, there are security cameras, which give you a little edge on the opposition, water fountains to drink and toilets to restore health, and infamously be able to give money to women around the levels, even hookers. This is pretty cool, especially for 1996 technology.
You have 9 weapons in your arsenal, with a standard pistol and shotgun, and strange weapons such as the freezethrower, the shrinker and the devastator, which shoots small rockets in rapid succession. It even has laser tripbombs, predating Half-Life’s tripwire weapon by two years. In addition, you have your foot for melee attacks, and you can even use a “mighty foot” to do a quick kick while you’re holding another weapon.
There are also items that one can obtain and use anytime, such as a portable medkit, scuba gear, protective boots, a “Holoduke”, which gives the enemies a fake Duke to attack; and steroids which make you move faster for a short period of time. Accessing these items are similar to games like Quake II or Soldier of Fortune, using the bracket keys and enter to access them. If you use a WSAD keyboard configuration, this may before a bit cumbersome, but it’s not that much of a problem.
The graphics themselves look alright for a 1996 game, as mentioned, they at least try to make the levels look like real places in episodes one and three, but since this is not technically a 3D engine, looking up and down looks extremely weird since it has the skew the graphics, making it look real weird.
From a sound point of view, every weapon sounds generally as it should sound, however you’re gonna hear a lot of repetition because there’s not very many enemies in the game (about 7-8 that I counted), and there’s one thing that bothers me is that once you get down to a certain amount of health, Duke starts yelling in pain. It’s not something you can easily ignore.
Duke himself is full of one-liners, stealing Ash Williams’s lines from Evil Dead (specifically lines like “Come get some!”) and They Live, but also having some witty lines of his own. These only appear during scripted events or when you’re on a massacre and blowing stuff up with a lot of explosives, so there isn’t that much “Duke talk”.
The game’s music is a hit-or-miss affair: the music’s a collaboration with Lee Jackson and Bobby Prince, and I prefer most of Bobby’s music than I do Lee’s, although Lee has a few good tracks, particularly Duke’s theme, Grabbag. The music isn’t that bad, it’s just some of the tracks aren’t particularly memorable.
The multiplayer is simple deathmatch (called “Dukematch” here), and co-op. Dukematch can also have monsters, so feel free to duke it out with aliens and your buddies.
All in all, if you’re a first-person shooter fan, I would definitely pick up Duke Nukem 3D. It’s got a lot of good stuff, and even though it’s been ten years, it’s still fun. Hail to the king, baby.
Pros: Quirky weapons, levels have a good amount of detail, lots of hidden secrets and easter eggs, some music
Cons: Looking up and down is extremely weird, little variety of enemies, sounds repeat a lot, some music