This should be played by anyone who has been burnt out on the military shooter craze. Truly a gem in FPS gaming.
Duke Nukem 3D originally came out on MS-DOS back in 1996. This was back when games were harder to boot up than launching a rocket in space. But thankfully nowadays we have procedures that are much easier. There are numerous versions and ports of this game. The one I'll be reviewing is the Atomic edition. This contains another episode with eleven levels. You can try being a purist and buying the original DOS version but that would be a big pain in the ass. The easy way is to buy it off gog.com or get the Megaton edition from Steam. Let's dig in.
Duke Nukem 3D is an old-school FPS, were you control the always charming Duke Nukem. There are four episodes in total with eleven levels each, except for the first episode that only has seven levels. A multiplayer mode was also available but that is long gone. After the events of Duke Nukem 2, Duke finds himself back on earth. He finds out that an unknown force has taken over earth and it's up to Duke Nukem to save the day. It's a very simplistic storyline, although it doesn't really show itself throughout the game except at the occasional cutscene peppered throughout the episodes. But I believe that a simplistic, cliché storyline like this goes perfectly with Duke's outrageous character. Speaking about Duke, he's one hell of a character. Firing one liners at every opportunity he gets and blasting aliens without remorse, that's Duke alright. Duke is as two-dimensional as it gets. Nowadays characters in video games are more realistic and most of today's games have abandoned these macho one man army's with no soul, like we used to find in games like Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. I can't imagine what kind of controversy this game sparked up back in 1996. Why you ask. Well Duke 3D features strippers, (probably the first game to do it) and countless more nods to pornography.
Now that we have covered the setting and story, it's time talk about the gameplay. First of all, this game runs on the 2.5D build engine which is similar to the engine that Doom uses. Moving and shooting feels a lot like other 2.5D FPS's. It can be pretty weird to control Duke for players that never played a 2.5D game before. Unlike 3D shooters, the player is only allowed to look left or right. Eliminating enemies that are standing above or under the player can be done by shooting in the direction that the enemy is situated in. Unlike shooters of today, Duke 3D doesn't try to be realistic by giving the player only two weapons to use at a time, no it lets the player use the full arsenal once you unlocked them all obviously. Speaking about weapons, theirs a bevy of fun weapons to choose from like the chaingun, shrink-ray, microwave expander and others. It's so refreshing to play a shooter that doesn't have the usual military weapons like the M4, AK-47 and so on. Not to mention that all these weapons feel very different from each other. Theirs also an inventory system which is used to store items like Holodukes, health packs and steroids. To be honest the inventory is a bit of a pain to use and flip through items. I really like the levels in Duke 3D. I think that the level design is very clever at times. There are multiple routes to take to get to the objective and tons of secrets and easter eggs to find. The levels look awesome and the environments are very interesting to explore. These levels are filled with fun things to do like, tipping strippers, pissing in toilets and lots of other things to interact with.
Graphically it looks dated by today's standards, but it's totally playable. Even though graphically it looks dated it has this charm to it that makes everything all the better. As far as sound goes, everything sounds retro and awesome. To be honest some sounds from the alien enemies really creeped but I guess it's just me. I almost forgot to mention that the main theme is incredible. It's so awesome in fact that Megadeth actually made a cover for it. Duke Nukem 3D manages to still retain its charm after all these years and clearly stood the test of time. I doubt that you'll find an FPS as fun and creative as Duke 3D.