Duke Nukem 3D

THE BAD:
Not much

SUMMARY:
Duke Nukem was effectively 3D Realms’ answer to the Doom games from ID Software. This wasn’t Duke’s first outing in a game, he’d had a few side scrolling games before this. But this game was what turned Duke Nukem into the famous guy he is today. The plot is that aliens are invading Earth (original huh?) and you’re the one man army that has to stop them. Working your way through three episodes each consisting of 9 levels with an end boss at the end of each episode, and using everything from pistols to rocket launchers, it’s up to you to save the babes of Earth.

When you start off you have only a pistol but more powerful weapons are soon available. One thing I loved about this game was the fact that there were a few weapons that I’d never seen before. Everyone has seen the Pistol, Shotgun and Rocket Launcher in plenty of games, if in different forms. But weapons like a freezethrower, shrink gun and devastator were new to me. The freezethrower is similar to a flamethrower, and when you freeze an enemy all you have you to do is to walk up to them and you’ll automatically kick and shatter them. The shrink gun is self explanatory and once an enemy is shrunk, walking up to them will cause you to trample them underfoot. The devastator is a rapid fire rocket launcher basically.

Weapons that caused an area of damage were important to getting to certain parts of levels with ease. If anywhere there was a crack in a wall, using an explosive weapon on it would cause it to blow up and allow you to get through. Most levels involved coded doors or switches, blue, yellow or red. You would have to find a card to allow you to pass through to another area. Doing this allowed the game makers to make levels longer without making them too large. At times trying to remember where you saw a certain door is hard, particularly on later levels, but it’s a good challenge.

One thing about this game in particular was the fact that you could store certain items. Things like medipacks, jetpacks and a hologram could all be carried and then used at a later time when you needed them. Other items like health packs are used the minute you pick them up, but being able to basically move a power up to another part of the level comes in very handy when you find yourself low on health in the middle of a fight and you have a medipack with you. The jetpack allowed you to shortcut certain levels, steroids allowed you to run faster for a period of time. One of the more interesting ones is the hologram. When this is deployed it will fool enemies into thinking that is the real Duke and they will fire at that allowing you to get the advantage.

As far as enemies go, there are weaker and stronger ones. The basic enemy troops appear more frequently than the formidable ones, as you’d expect. They range from infantry with pistols to flying octopuses and slime. A few of them drop ammunition as they use weapons that you use, so you sometimes get a bonus for killing them. There are 4 difficulty levels in this game, and the hardest one is like Doom. Any enemy you kill will respawn to fight again and this process repeats indefinitely so you really can’t afford to hang around levels for too long.

Another way to replenish health is to go to the toilet, as odd as that may sound. And once you’ve done that you can destroy it to release water. Drinking water replenishes your health as well, but much slower and there are even sound effects to go along with it. Also when you fire a gun that uses bullets they leave holes in the wall. A small touch, but a good one nonetheless.

There aren’t really any downsides to the game that I can think of, unless killing people doesn’t really get you terribly excited. You have the ability to jump and look up and down, which Doom didn’t have. While we seem to be spending ages waiting for another decent Duke Nukem game, this one has more than enough to keep you going to pass some of the time.