Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour Review

What can I say about this game? It is nothing short of an upgraded and updated version of Duke Nukem - 3D! Back from 1996 and holy crap… this game is as old as I am. Mother of god…

So the entire point of Duke Nukem? Run through levels like a bad-ass blasting away at various types of enemies with whatever weapon you happen to have handy. Levels become more and more challenging as you progress and introduce a variety of new creatures throughout the game; all whilst on a quest to rescue sexy ladies!

Duke Nukem 3D 20th Anniversary World Tour is a first person shooter, it is a rather casual game as you do little more than run around and shoot things. As far as I could tell there is no real story that actually matters. More of just plot points to guide you towards the next slaughter field.

Of course, I mean… That's why we do this sort of thing right? Yeah.

This version does feature some pretty awesome levels, whilst the graphics aren’t the greatest but that is to be expected in all honestly. The new levels and weapons are not something I really had the chance to try out. From the brief glimpses and chances I got to play on the levels; I found that they were really well made! Surprisingly so in fact, my previous experience with the first Duke Nukem was short lived as I was only seven when I played it round my friends house and truth be told neither of us were that interested in the game. After barely 30 minutes we moved onto something else rather swiftly. Whilst others, I am fully aware, loved the original game it just failed to grab the attention of my seven year old mind. So it is hard to compare the original to the current but mostly because back then I paid no heed to graphics or actual content of the game.

To be honest the humour wore really thin really quickly for me and I found that my laughs were replaced with a slight “heh.”.

The game really does have its flaws. However, playing with 400 ping feels absolutely great, fantastic even. It caused me no end of grief as when I attempted co-op my teammates and foes alike would be walking on the spot. Before suddenly warping around corners or behind me and ending my sad, rubber banding life. It didn’t take long for me to give up on cooperative game play.

The mouse feels really sluggish for some reason and it took me an age and a half fiddling with the mouse sensitivity options on my actual mouse itself. (I don’t know how it works, okay? It just does!) I spent a good hour or two attempting to make it feel like the character was at least slightly faster than a snail.

Finally the price, £15? No way. Not a chance in hell. I would rather throw this money at DOOM guy who was on sale last week for only £2 more!

The new engine they implemented is rather underwhelming, whilst we were given almost everything they promised such as new lighting as well as a few fixes to enable what they term “True-3D”. I honestly don’t really see that much of a difference. I mean, the fixes are nice and all but it just looks like the old game. I am not aware of any major bugs that survived the port. A few new ones have been added as mentioned previously but it seems like they managed to squash the majority of the ones that inhabited the first few games. Though most of this information as to what bugs did exist have come from a small amount of time spent researching.