Christopher Seal

The question that is on everyone’s mind and must be asked is this: does age and time, like with a good wine, make a game better? In the case of Duke Nukem Forever, the answer is a resounding no. After over a decade of development, numerous restarts and developer changes, Duke Nukem Forever is not the Duke you remember. In fact, everything you loved about the original game will be ruined, your fond memories destroy and your wallet a bit emptier, all for this unappealing and extremely unsatisfying game.

The original Duke was released way back in 1996 and was an entertaining shooter staring a main character with a bad attitude and some comical one liners. After its success a sequel was announced, and anticipation grew. As the years went by though, the game kept getting pushed back, and many wondered if this game would ever see the light of day. Unfortunately for us, Gearbox decided to save the game from the abyss of a blackhole and today we once again play as the crude and muscular Duke Nukem. Unfortunately for Duke and Gearbox, in the time it took to release this game, we have seen games with breathing, photorealistic graphics, storylines that are engrossing and worthy of comparison to movies, and characters we not only relate to, with empathize with. Duke Nukem Forever is none of these things, and does not even deserve comparison to current day B list shooters.

Overall the game feels rushed and thrown together, if you can believe it. Fourteen years in development does not help make this game more engrossing, rather it gives us so many other games that are superior in every way to compare it to. The game will stutter without cause, damage models are essentially devoid of any type of realism, sound design and ambience do nothing to draw you in and online lag will make you yearn for something better. Frequent and long load times will have you groaning every time you die, which you will do, as the game can be rather cheap, throwing enemies at you without a chance of properly preparing yourself. Duke Nukem Forever is not better than the sum of its parts, rather it is a failure in almost every aspect possible.

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So by now you’ve probably head of this new game called ‘Dead Island”. Unfortunately for those of you who have been following all the hype, I’m going to predict it’s doomed to fail.

Why you might ask? Well, based on what I’ve seen and heard, the game seems to be confused as to what genre it’s trying to be. Is it a role playing game? Is it an action game? Is it Fallout 3? Dead Rising?

If you check out the recent gameplay videos, the pace of the game seems to be rather slow for an action game, and comes off as Far Cry with zomb… oh wait, they kinda did that in Far Cry.

I feel as though this game is going to have ambitious goals but in the end fall short, likely ending up as a generic, average game that will disappoint more than it will impress.

You heard it here first.