Slayer1 wrote:

Quote: I always thought it was weird that an up and coming developer like Gearbox quickly snatched this up and made a game in less than a year. If they sucked at developing Duke, then Duke is completely irrelevant. I never liked his character or the crappy Doom/Wolfenstein knock off games, so I couldn't really get ramped up for this. Too many good games to waste cash on this. I had to laugh at this quote. A) Gearbox has been around since 1999 and B) Gearbox also did the Half Life Expansions, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, which is also considered a Doom knock off at the time... dear god, people just want to bitch. And the PS3 has a long load time as well Greg... mandatory install, still long time loading the game.

Also, Randy Pitchford (head of Gearbox) originally worked on Duke Nukem 3D to some extent, so he probably still had his connections to work in a deal.

I think reviwers are trying to go the Yahtzee/AVGN route of just bashing things for kicks and attention. Problem is, nobody's good at it, and they all make the same lame "jokes" that have been made for the past 12 years. It's funny how reviewers will call out games as pretentious, or wish games were just dumb fun these days, but will immediately rip on something for being vapid or brainless when they can get some lame, cliche humor in.

Looking around, I think I found the worst commentary on Duke so far. This guy takes a decent route of saying "Hey, gibbing alien rape victims while spouting one-liners is unfunny, cruel, and makes us all look bad." Then he goes on bashing western development, but still bringing up RapeLay, while also talking about how he doesn't like developers objectifying women, while he enjoys doing it himself. If I sent that into a 6th grade English teacher he'd give me a D- and call my parents, but he probably got paid for this shit:

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9082206

As far as my experience, it may sound superficial, but the loading times really are killing it for me. Levels are short and have taken upwards of a minute to load (The first Vegas street one must have taken at least a minute), not to mention the twenty seconds or so it requires to reload a state (I played for twenty minutes when I first got it, and took a break for a day after having to reload that stupid fucking elevator brake mini-game 3 times). It's a shame, because when the action ramps up, and I'm circle-strafing pig cops, it's a lot of fun, but the loading screens and constant running-out of ammo kill the flow. The one big compliment I can pay it is that I'm glad to see an FPS bringing back legit, non-gimmick, health-bar bosses, which I haven't really seen since Painkiller came out.

JRA wrote:

Yea, Gearbox going with the tentacle/alien rape route with this game was a bad, bad idea. I mean it was always kind of obvious that's why the aliens were kidnapping women to begin with, but actually spelling it out like that was really unnecessary. Honestly, one of the things the N64 version of DN3D got right was you could save the girls instead of executing them. That was a much better idea.

Well, in all fairness, Gearbox didn't put that in, but they could just have easily fixed it up. Between this and turning their once-respectable Brothers in Arms series into a Nazi crotch-electrocuting Basterds-ripoff, I'm afraid that one of my favorite developers is one-noting itself after Borderlands (which was great, seems like they're half-heartedly mimmicking the anarchic sense of humor in it, minus the wit that made it appealing).

Gametrailers always does great reviews, especially for such a popular site.

There's just nothing there in the game. The game just throws maybe two, three enemies max at a time, so there's none of the old-school Doom/Painkiller shooty fun, the constant loading and re-loading murders the flow, and I just feel no sense of fun that I expected. What confuses me is how long this game took, when your average studio could have farted it out in a year or two.

I regret purchasing it, and gave up halfway through. I traded it in with Dragon Age 2 (another disappointment, both of them my first trade-ins since I got my 360) to get Brink, Dead Space, and Persona 4, and couldn't be happier.