Duke Nukem Forever (Game)
The content of the demo that we got to play is the same as the PAX 2010 demo and it's been covered fairly extensively by pretty much everyone and their mother that attended PAX this year. What was unique was the ability to play with the keyboard and mouse, an opportunity that I was ecstatic to have. As has been stated multiple times by multiple people, the "demo" is of an unfinished project (is it in alpha yet? I really don't know. Again, I was too overwhelmed with the experience to bother them with any silly questions) and the end product could be significantly better or worse for whatever reason. While I truly believe that it'll only get better given the people they have on it (TOP. MEN.), anything can happen.
Without having the option to configure the controls or reference the present configuration, it took a little playing around to figure out what each key did. Zoom wasn't a toggle (darn it!), but crouch was (thankfully!). You start off at a urinal taking a leak and can then explore the bathroom. The sinks work, the showers work, and you can even pump the soap dispenser. For what it's worth, the soap doesn't accumulate, I couldn't figure out a way to hop into the hot tub, which I actually found kind of disappointing. Also, while walking around the bathroom and locker room, you couldn't sprint/run. The path towards the stadium was chaotic but strictly linear. I tried to break through a few spots but the path was pretty clearly cut there.
Once you're equipped with the devastator and rise up into the stadium proper, you realize that you're in a reimaged version of Episode 3 Level 9. The new Cycloid Emperor is amazing looking and if I didn't know better, if someone had told me that this was a heavily modified UE 2.x based game, I'd call them a damned liar. One of the nice touches in the level was that it had the blimp that originally flew above the classic level and you can even shoot it down (!!), but it doesn't dispense any ammo or goodies this time.
Ammo is resupplied during the encounter by an aerial dropship that swoops down as you run out of it. There's not any additional ammo sitting around on the perimeter like there was before and it's not possible to break out into the stands like it was in the Saturn version. When the boss goes down, you run up and engage in a QTE-based segment that involved pressing spacebar quickly to rip a chunk out of his neck. I wasn't the only person that had a problem with this part; the "Press Space" indicator barely pulsates to indicate the need to rapidly press the button, so it took a second to catch on to what it really wanted from me.
...and yes, his eye pops out and Duke kicks it through the field goal (all in the first person view!) and yes, it is awesome. So awesome. Duke does not, however, rip off his head and shit down his neck.
The second level was noted as "Level 15" and started off with Duke driving the Big Boot monster truck. Bucking the Quake Rally Halo trend of mapping the steering to the right analog stick mouse, it used straight up WASD for movement and steering, with space using the handbrake.
I'll probably catch some shit for this, but in their present form, I think the steering controls need work on the keyboard. I did not check them out on the gamepad to see how those compared, but I imagine that attempting to powerslide and drift would be more intuitive than trying to lefthand it all on the keyboard. Maybe I just need to work on the timing a bit more and maybe I need some more practice, but I honestly don't think that driving should be that deep of an experience.
Goto10 pointed out that maybe including such a linear and relatively bland vehicle segment seems kind of pointless in a modern age of games like Red Faction Guerrilla and I kind of agree with him. If they insist on having you rip through a linear canyon, then I think it should be a ridiculously fast paced experience with maximum destruction and mayhem as you go through it.
Once the truck runs out of gas, you climb out of it and get to run around on foot. At this point you get to play around with a couple of the game's weapons starting off with the classic Duke 3D pistol, upgraded with a laser sight. Honestly, I couldn't tell you if it was really like the Duke 3D one, the Zero Hour one, the Time to Kill Desert Eagle, I don't know. Dude, it's a hand gun with a laser sight and you shoot stuff until it's dead.
The first weapon I found after that was the rail gun, which had an awesome sniper scope on it enabling me to start lobbing limbs off of enemies from a distance. Very satisfying feeling, but the slow rate of fire and reload speed made me dump it in favor of the shotgun when the opportunity came up.
Which brings up the point that you can't carry every weapon. While I don't always disagree with the weapon carrying limitations of most games, one of the things I always loved about Duke 3D was that you were Duke Nukem, you had every weapon available to you (assuming you found them of course), and you were going to use them to blow. shit. up. The initial feeling of having to swap weapons in and out left me with a bit of a sour taste, but perhaps I'll feel differently after playing through the whole game.
The last two weapons I played with were the ripper (more commonly known as the chaingun) and the shrink ray. At the point that I picked up the ripper, I found it too ineffective to be worth while. The effective range of it is quite a bit shorter than Duke 3D so I quickly dumped it in favor of the slower railgun. My second biggest disappointment of the play session was the shrink ray, which doesn't auto stomp when you walk up to an enemy that's been shrunk. You have to actually manually look down to stomp the enemies, something that I didn't figure out as I was running around trying to smash those little munchkins. The biggest disappointment for me was that ~ didn't whip out the mighty boot on command. There's probably some balancing reason and the weapons probably already have a melee attack, but that was a difficult adjustment to make after, hell, almost 15 years of instinctively tapping that button with my left ring finger when I get in close to an enemy.
Grabbing onto a mounted chaingun kickstarts the scripting for the end of the sequence; enemies drop in, you blow them away, the drop ship returns and blows up your position, knocking you back and showing that awesome animation from the leaked demo reel of Duke flipping off the aliens. While I wasn't too enthused about being trapped like that in a scripted sequence (there's no way to let go of the gun once the sequence starts), seeing him flip them the bird was just so badass.
I believe the entire demo took me almost exactly 15 or 20 minutes, because as soon as I finished it Steve's buzzer went off and he informed the rest of the gamers that they had to wrap things up in a minute. While it sounds like I'm griping about a few of the things I didn't like, what's important was that I fucking LOVED the slice of gameplay that we got to see and I absolutely can not wait to play more.
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