hedwards: The parody aspect is pretty obvious. I mean, I'm not sure how one can't see and appreciate that, I mean Duke's riding around in a frickin RC car at one point. Which was an absolute blast, I might add.
The RC car is a pretty good example of why I didn't like the game.
For humor/parody, you've got a goldmine here. Duke, a quintessential 80s action hero, gets shrunk down into what is essentially his own action figure, the quintessential 80s toy. If there's ever a time for making fun of 80s action heroes it's gotta be that, right? But instead we get Duke acknowledging the connection to a kid, a woman saying she knows where she'd like to put him (which doesn't really play into the parody aspect of anything and is just a dumb sex joke, again), and... that's about it. It's a rough sketch of an idea, not even a first draft. It's why I think this version of Duke is an expansion of the one from Duke 3D rather than actually being a parody of anything this time around, because it seems like Broussard and crew pass up every opportunity for actual parody in favor of shit and tit jokes.
But that'd be fine if the gameplay worked, and you know what? It does... for a little while. The RC car, like a lot of the gimmicks in Duke Nukem Forever, just lasts too damn long. There's really only one thing to it (find ramps, boost over them) and there's pretty much no danger, so it's just driving down what amounts to a long corridor for
so long that it actually needs to load halfway through. Which, granted, leads to the part where you have to open the gate, one of the few clever bits of level design in the game (if still cribbed directly from the vehicle sections in Half-Life 2), but then we get right back to the driving, which hasn't gotten any more difficult or more interesting. Drive down path, boost over ramps.
Maybe if it had some more chaos going on (you know, more than a single babe being kidnapped by a single alien onscreen at once) or some actual danger (the casino's being blown to hell by aliens, surely some flying debris could have been scripted in) it might have worked better. And maybe if something more had been done with the writing then it might have allowed for some one liners that actually poke fun at the nature of 80s heroes being reduced to action figures, rather than just referencing it and using the rest of the time for sex jokes.
As it is, there's the germ of a great idea there, both for humor and for action. Action hero becomes his own action figure and drives around his own casino as it's being attacked by aliens who are stealing Earth's babes right in front of him as he's powerless to do anything about it! But this is pretty much the dullest possible implementation of that concept. Like a lot of the game, there's a solid idea betrayed by a completely botched execution.
Also, just so I'm not CONSTANTLY complaining, the parts of the game I liked:
-It has a damn good shotgun, which is a rarity these days.
-Pipebombs are still fun.
-Execution moves are a solid way to keep action moving.
-Duke using his ego as a shield, and increasing it through doing manly things, is a hell of a lot more clever than anything else in the game.
-Ghost Town was actually a good firefight. The game needed a LOT more stuff like that.
And that's about it for the list of things I can say I enjoyed without extreme qualifications.
