Awful, even with lap dancers! (Duke Nukem 3D (PC))

Member Name: adamdavid

Product:	Duke Nukem 3D (PC)
Date:	21/04/01 (231 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Worth a look...

Disadvantages: ...if there weren't better Doom clones out there.

Duke Nukem is a Doom clone, i.e. it's a shoot 'em up played from a first person perspective. While Doom was hailed as revolutionary (despite being based on the game Wolfenstein 3D), Duke Nukem offers little over Doom (or any number of the other clones, for that matter). Doom was ground-breaking. It brought the first person perspective to millions of gamers.

Doom did what it did very well. Duke Nukem does what it does equally well. It just doesn't do anything radically different and it doesn't have the atmosphere that Doom had. I remember playing Doom and jumping out of my seat when I walked round a corner to be confronted by some nasty or other. I have Doom and wanted something a little bit different but of the same genre. All the magazines had been raving about Duke Nukem, and when I saw it in my local HMV for £15 (normal price £29.99, this was quite some time ago) I decided to buy it. I got it home and played it and it seemed okay. I played it a bit more and discovered that I had been suckered in by media hype and propaganda. Duke Nukem was just another Doom knock off, and a decidedly average one at that.

If you're after a first person shooter then there are quite a few that are a lot better (and newer) than this rather feeble offering. Duke Nukem was supposed to be a game with a sense of humour, and in fairness, it does have it's moments. The humour soon wears thin though and you are left with that empty feeling that somehow, there must have been more they could have done when they programmed this game. As an example, the funniest thing in the game (apart from Dukes "witty" comments) is when you go to the lap dancing club on the first level and get to offer money to the "dancers" who then open their tops! Cheap, and not very thrilling - a bit like the rest of the game, in fact.

Summary: