Duke Nukem Forever
This is worse than Duke Nukem 3D. It's clearly an example of a game that the director was clueless about what to do. Duke 3D came years after doom and it brought some interactivity and some tricks that weren't possible with doom. Things like moving trams, rotating sectors, sliding doors and floors above floors. Interacting with dancing girls and being able to blow up walls were additions that made Duke 3D stand out from other doom clones. Duke Nukem Forever was built on newer tech, the same tech that enabled Bioshock for instance. The developers sure suffered from a severe crisis that lasted years upon years, because DNF is just a mess of a game. I've played Duke Nukem Time to Kill and this one is way better than DNF.
The plot is plain nonsense. For whatever reason the american president in on a secret agenda conspiring with the aliens. Time to Kill did tell a much more coherent story, which included time travel. The classic Duke 3D didn't have a plot beyond aliens abducting all women and Duke saving the day. However, the progression in DNF is just nonsense from start to finish. Even Duke 3D had more coherence in it, despite the lack of NPCs or in game story telling. Many parts in DNF feel like incomplete techdemos or test areas.
There is nothing in DNF that makes sense. It lacks coherence and cohesion everywhere. Misaligned textures. Geometry that doesn't make sense. Level design leaves you clueless most of the time. Poor scripted events. Poor storytelling. Stupid jokes. They clearly stitched together a lot of levels and ideas without creating a solid game. If you want to see an example of a good transition from 256 colors to the era of HDR and advanced shaders, look for Shadow Warrior. Even Prey (2006) is better than DNF. Not even duke's voice acting is good. I don't know what happened but whoever directed Mr. Jon St. John made duke's voice be dull, flat, unappealing. Compare to Duke 3D and Time to Kill. With DNF they had access to much higher bitrates and much more control over mixing sounds, yet Duke's voice regressed in quality.
I took many examples of level design from DNF to comment about in my site. Duke 3D didn't had cutscenes or any storytelling regarding each level. There wasn't a plot with multiple characters, plot twists or characters with a lot of background story. It was a fun experience with real world locations mixed with sci-fic and aliens. Each location presented some exploration and the regular key hunting to unlock a door to progress to the next area. Each level on its own was a self contained experience.
DNF is a mess with levels done in a way that they attempted to showcase things that other games have, such as: turrets, vehicles, helicopters, swimming, etc. DNF just throws things at you without explanations and it's even worse than Prey (2006). For example: there are some physics based puzzles. In The Duke Dome there is an area where you have to use barrels to counterweight Duke's weight to use a container as a ramp to reach higher grounds. The game doesn't tell you anything, much like Prey (2006)'s puzzles. It's pure guesswork. Inside the Hive those creatures that function as power sources to turn on a door are yet another thing that you have to find out by yourself. The design of the challenges in DNF is so similar to Prey (2006) that I wonder if there were people involved in both games.
The environment art is just terrible. The Duke Cave is filled with misaligned textures and objects that feel like placeholders. The canyon part is atrocious. Even Duke 3D had better rocks and cliffs than what they did in DNF. Halo from a decade earlier had better modelled mountains, really. The road part was also terrible. They just dropped a road in the middle of the desert, connecting nothing to nowhere. In Ghost Town they just dropped some wooden constructions in the middle of nowhere, almost like some kid was playing with toys and left the area and forgot to pack away the toys.
The underwater parts were terrible. Did they try to imitate Sonic's underwater levels? In duke 3D we had a scuba gear. Why remove it from DNF? Nonsense! You have to look for bubbles of air, while at the same time the environment is dark and the night vision makes the whole screen glare.
The overheat bar with a Fahrenheit symbol is one of the most confusing mechanics ever! Not only that, they reused the same thing for other purposes such as to represent how much oxygen you had left. It's a prime example of bad game design mixed with bad interface design. The elevator is falling down and you have to pull up a brake. First, what elevator in the world is designed with an emergency break on top of its cabin? Second, any person would naturally pull it and hold it in an attempt to halt the fall. Who thought that there would be enough time for cycles of overheating followed by time to let it cool down in the middle of a free fall? It's a complete violation of all the laws of physics!
In this Duke you have Ego instead of health. We all know that Duke is the egocentric hero, but having to look at yourself in the mirror or do some weight lifting. These aren't even minigames. Couldn't they have thought on something better than this? Really, something such as having duke's ego gain levels or ranks. Higher levels or ranks granting him faster run, more ammo capacity, more damage, jump higher or something. Then to level up your ego you would perform brutal kills, kick monsters in the balls or some other "duke-esque" action. It wouldn't be too hard to think about some ideas.
From everything, I guess that the only fun parts that had some sense in them were the miniature duke parts.
