Sun Jun 12, 2011 3:41 pm
I had tried the demo on the PC, so here's my several cents:
* Load-time complaints are entirely warranted. This is atrocious. In fact, I had an incident where the demo botched itself, and loading wouldn't work at all temporarily, unless I started the executable again in XP compatibility mode. (I'm not sure where the problem came from, it went away on its own.)
* Mouse control on the PC is bad. Not just bad, outstandingly bad, as in "I rarely see this bad a control" bad. There are two sliders you can use, sensitivity and "precision" or whatnot, I have no idea what either slider does (except assume that sensitivity is the multiplier as always). There's no in-game hint or documentation. The mouse sensitivity seems to have some sort of limit (Why? In this day and age?), as in when I move the mouse very fast, it doesn't seem to follow me as rapidly anymore, and the precision setting results in hard-to-explain weirdness. The whole thing feels floaty, like forcing gamepad controls on a PC mouse.
* I did not feel I died often, and I didn't feel the game was hard in any way. I do, however, despise the weapon system, because it's mimicking every other CoD/Battlefield game in that you can only hold a painfully limited number of weapons. Why that was necessary is completely beyond me, as "realistic warfare" players were never the target audience at any point in the past 14 years, so I'm not sure what this achieves and whether direct feature parity was Broussard's or Gearbox's idea.
* I will ignore the bad graphics and the 2006-era scenery and map modeling, for the time being at least, because I don't judge games by their looks, unless they explicitly market themselves with the looks.
* The environments are not interactive enough, however. The demo has a ruined shack out in the canyons, with a door that's just barely open, and I spent a good few seconds trying to kick it open, shoot it open, or use any number of action keys, to no avail. It's nailed, bolted and riveted there and made of solid titanium, never to be opened by anyone ever. I had to run around the demolished building just to progress, which is in poor taste on the designers' part.
* Sound is fair, but one thing left a long and deep scar in my ears, and literally so. Using night vision with the Duke shades loops a shearing, sharp, brain-shattering high-pitched screech noise, which I assume was designed for 50 year olds in mind as a status signal, but when *I* played, it literally hurt every time I tried using night vision. That electronic squeal needs to go.
* Special effects, physics and details are reasonable, and I didn't feel I could easily lose my suspension of disbelief, except for one thing - ironically - right at the start of the demo. When mirror images sucked back in 1996, everyone ignored it and cheered there existed mirror images at all. What we have here today, however, is lack of basic animation: stand in front of a mirror, and jump. What do you see? (Let's recap the past. In Duke Nukem 3D (1996), you saw yourself holding your one-and-only weapon sprite hard-coded onto you, and your legs move as you jumped. In Postal 2 (2003), you saw a 3D model but a fake reflection - there was no leg animation at all, you just floated up and fell down, and the attack animations didn't match your first-person view either. Later that year, in a feat of "how to do it right", Max Payne 2 is released. With it came pixel-perfect reflections, albeit at a low resolution, if you owned a pixel shader 2.0 capable card. If you do something in character, you see exactly that in the mirror.)
Here we have Duke Nukem Forever (2011) stepping back to before 2003 with its mirror reflections - you get leg animation, but nothing else. It's like Duke's hands are chained to his belt, they remain motionless by the hips, as if standing still. Not even a twitch, just leg animation. I'm reasonably certain the reflection is pixel-perfect, but the model and associated animation(s) are lacking, to say the least, so it's not a special effect design problem. That doesn't make the error any less hideous, however.
* For someone who can purportedly bench-press over 600 pounds (according to the loading screen tips), Duke has extremely wimpy arms even with the most basic, girly pistol weapon. The kickback is so ridiculously high I can't make three shots in succession without throwing my aim off over to the neighbouring state, and the weapon itself isn't a champion of damage-dealership either, which makes the whole gun pretty much useless unless you're up close and personal. Which, incidentally, is where you need the shotgun, so you literally have no use for the pistol (remember, you can only hold 2 weapons plus gadgets). At least in the good old days, you could aim straight with it, even if it was just as weak.
And you have to assign a number to it, apparently. Well, it feels unjust to give it something like 3 out of 10, because 5-6 is more like it in my opinion, but at this point I can't bring myself to give it more than 7 even considering my most fond nostalgic memories. That's certainly not a good thing for a game that lost companies millions of dollars during production, and I honestly can't tell what (or if it) is Gearbox's fault, or rather 3D Realms's. What I listed are little things, but there's too many of them, and they add up quick.
