Duke Nukem Forever: The Doctor Who Cloned Me
On the bright side the DLC did improve upon the base game in some aspects, even if by a tiny margin. They clearly tried to make better scripted events, better level design, better environment art, better encounters, better story telling. Right when Duke Nukem enters the secret facility where the clones are made you can see that they placed crates and made the level more meaningful and with properly aligned textures, which also convey a better direction of art, level design. The sci-fic environment is clearly much better than Duke Nukem's own cave in the base game.
I didn't find the joke of trying to rescue the guy stuck at the door to be funny. I was disappointed because you travel a long road just to watch him die. I was expecting some reward, some weapon, bonus or something. Not a stupid death.
Inside the facility they at least tried to make some tutorial to guide the player. There are some scripted fights with tutorials to teach how to use the weapons. The base game just skipped all tutorials and left the player clueless about where to go, what to do, how to use something. The DLC tries to correct that. Another thing that they tried was to have NPCs that help you in some parts, such as opening a door from the other side.
However, Duke Nukem Forever is just doomed. The DLC doesn’t save this failure. After the cloning facility the game returns to its bad design. Bad level design, poor textures and lighting, poor dialogues, poor pretty much everything. For ex: the DLC begins at a prison and they clearly mismatched the lightmaps with the real time lights and the environment itself. They seemingly changed the environment and forgot to recalculate the lightmaps. The same mistake happens in the base game itself.
The last boss fight is one of the most stupid ideas ever! Duke Nukem goes outside on the surface of the moon, without any space suit and has to hold his breath! It’s physically impossible and plain dumb! Not even games from the 8-bits era were this stupid! Who had this idea of placing spots to breath oxygen flowing from the ground, on the moon, where there is no atmosphere at all? They reused the same underwater mechanic, except that they replaced water with the void of outerspace. Genius!
