Yeah. Just the demo. But it's DNF. Something...feels...wrong...

The demo didn't tell me much I didn't know from the trailers, though. Still not sure if it's a game I'll really enjoy or just one I'll play for the sake of finally playing it.

I have heard rumors that after the end credits roll in DNF there is a preview for Half-Life 2 Episode 3 :O The two kings of vaporware meet!

Ha Ha, fat chance.

I tried out the demo, it's just like playing the old games, only with better graphics and vehicles.

I'm sure if the game had come out 4 years earlier I'd be thinking something else but jesus...14 years for a Halo clone?

Well, I wish I hadn't bought the full game. It's not very good at all. After about an hour of it last night I realized I hadn't been having any fun at all, but had instead spent most of the preceeding hour thinking "why did they do it that way?" about various things.

The game feels like it's trying to be Halo after everyone else is done trying to be Halo and then decided most of that stuff doesn't really work that well anyway. I cannot believe I only get to carry two weapons at once in a Duke Nukem game. What kind of BS is this?

The shooting is pretty meh. It's not bad, but not good. None of the weapons really FEEL like anything at all. They don't feel punchy or sharp or anything good, but they also don't feel wimpy or lacking in feedback or anything bad either. You just sort of press the mouse button and stuff happens. It's like steering in a Camry: you know you've turned the wheel and you know the car is changing direction but that's as much as the car is willing to let you in on.

And speaking of steering, the vehicle bits are downright terrible. The vehicle behavior is bizarre and unnatural. It's stiff and jerky and abrupt and never ever anything approaching smooth. You can never make small inputs, and you can never really tell what's going to happen when you press a particular button until after it's happened and you're on to pressing a new button to try and correct--just as blindly. It's not like steering in a Camry at all. Everything's binary: all or nothing, on or off. The monster truck segment is slightly less horrible thanks to the optional 4-wheel-steering which adds ads a third degree to steering and lets you make either crazy or REALLY crazy steering inputs rather than just the latter. But then again the buggy segment has lots of open space which allows you to steer like a buffoon where the monster truck takes place in not-even-very-tight canyons that punish you for even looking at your steering controls.

The other problem with the game is that it's so busy jumping from setpiece fight to setpiece fight it doesn't really let you have any fun with anything. And nothing ever feels dynamic or organic. You're always stopping to let the game do something to you. You're always stuck in a small room so it can throw a sequential series of baddies at you. It's a lot like the classic Adam West Batman series: all the badguys wait their turn to get their asses whupped. But boy are there a lot of them queued up to fight you at any given deus ex machina locked room. EVERY given locked room. It gets old, and you find yourself repeatedly thinking "just let me MOVE ON!!!" Just let me DO anything. Anything but this room and ten more bad guys.

These closed setpieces work together with the games most unforgivable failing to destroy any sense of progress. And that most unforgivable failing? CHECKPOINT SAVING. My brain is exploding right now. This is DUKE f*** NUKEM!!!!! WHAT THE HELL ARE CHECKPOINTS DOING IN THIS GAME?! It's not Call of Duty or Halo or some other terrible console shooter that wishes it was far more interesting than it really is. Except...except it is. It's all of those things. Duke Nukem Forever has less in common with Duke Nukem 3D or Duke Nukum (sic) 1 or 2 than it has with Halo or COD.

It just isn't fun. That's what it comes down to. It's not fun. It doesn't look particularly good. It's not very funny, even by accident (I admit to laughing at the "that guy would still probably have his arm" bit, though). It's not very exciting. I wasn't expecting it to be original, but I also didn't expect it to be unoriginal in such a terrible way, or for these particular reasons.

The whole summary of the game comes back to what I said at the beginning: the question "WHY?"

Why did gearbox make ANY of the decisions they made, rather than opposite ones? Why copy Halo on so many levels? Why not refine the vehicle controls? Why not let me carry ten weapons at once when I'm Duke Nukem? Why isn't this game A LOT better?

Sorry, Duke, I'm going to go play some Red Faction Armageddon. That game lets me destroy s***. THAT's manly. Your game just destroys my mood.

^ lol I just read the last 3 paragraphs for cliffnotes. That's exactly how I felt about GT5. Its a big let down isnt it..

While I understand all your points MOD, and I know that DN is and was always a PC game, I think that Gearbox built the game strictly for the consoles and realized that the PC guys would probably want it too. Having said that I'm a console guy, always have been, so I may wind up having more fun with the game that you did, not that I will be getting it anytime soon. I'll wait until the patches have been released before I get, which by that time I'll have forgotten about it, kinda like I had forgotten that I wanted to pick up Naughty Bear. My sole focus right now are the big 4 that are coming out in the fall, actually make that 5, COD:MW3, BF3, Forza 4, Bioshock Infinite, and Batman Arkham City. Maybe I'll get around to remembering that I wanted to get Duke Nukem sometime next spring, but it'll probably get pushed off yet again so I can get a used copy of a NFS: The Run or being the glutton for punishment that I am a barely played copy of Operation Flashpoint: Red River.