Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Disastrous"

Back in 1997, WizardWorks had a hard job: to gather the worst kind of Duke Nukem 3D maps and make a compilation with them. This pack of uninspired levels they called Duke!Zone II, an add-on to the popular First-Person Shooter from 3D Realms, Duke Nukem 3D (1996).

This expansion doesn't add sound effects, music or textures; only 18 single player levels (being three secret ones) divided in three campaigns. If the maps were actually well-crafted, then it would be easy to forgive the lack of new content. However WizardWorks' Duke!Zone II is a joke for serious players, especially because it's evident that every level in this add-on was made by inexperienced Build designers.

If there was something I enjoyed in this map pack, it was the relatively large amount of enemies per map. This is an approach that hardcore Duke players always enjoy in almost every level, even if it's bad crafted. Killing lots of tough aliens with overpowered weapons never gets dull, but it hurts the eyes to look at empty huge areas and asymmetric rooms too often.

Every map in Duke!Zone II feels in some sort of an unfinished stage. Enemies and objects are positioned in odd locations, like they were put in there randomly. Water surfaces mostly seem to be a hard concrete when you're walking on them, due to the lack of careful programming. In the Build editor, you can't just put a water texture on the floor and say that's a river until you define the correct tag. And, trust me, you don't waste more than 10 seconds to do so.

Each episode can be completed in less than 40 minutes, and the maps don't have a logical order, neither a background story. To be honest, not even the levels themselves make any sense. Sometimes the environments vary without following a coherent pattern; even worse, it's quite common to not know where Duke really are, because the artwork and the decorative objects used in most maps don't mix well.

Perhaps the problem with Duke!Zone II is that the original levels from 3D Realms are incredibly well-done, so it's hard to play an expansion with so many uninspired ones. I can remember one or two good maps, while the rest was just rubbish. If there was something to enjoy here, it was the difficulty and the generous amount of ammo spread in each map. I didn't mind to waste my RPG and Devastator rockets to explode the hordes of aliens, because I was completely sure that I would find much more ammunition later on.

What makes WizardWorks' add-on so disappointing, aside from the disastrous selection of maps, is the fact that it's quite hard to find a copy of Duke!Zone II and to make it work on modern computers. As with most non-official Duke expansions, it's necessary to unpack the original add-on files and group them in a recognizable extension, so those Win32 ports can run them on newer hardware and Windows versions. The expansion ran fine on JFDuke3D and EDuke32, although it didn't work with DOSBox and VDMSound.

Considering the complex way to make Duke!Zone II work and the much better choices available for expanding your Duke Nukem experience, there is little reason to bother with this lame expansion. You can try Duke It Out In D.C., Nucler Winter or even replay the original game, but don't trust in this lazy map compilation by WizardWorks.