I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that Duke Nukem Forever was going to be a good game. I wanted to believe that Duke Nukem Forever might justify its insanely long development time. I wanted to believe that somewhere in Duke Nukem Forever was something absolutely worth playing. I was wrong.
Duke Nukem Forever is not a good game. It's a dated game. It feels like it was released in 2005, not 2011. The levels themselves are by no means interesting. The jokes aren't funny. The references are dated. I mean, it has the absolute laziest Portal joke of all time. There's a strip club scene that is not only gross, but immensely sad. John St. John delivers all of his bad dialog as well as he can, and the funniest parts are the reactions he has to fishing a turd out of the toilet.
For all of its time in development, there's one new gun, and it's a railgun. There's a two-gun limit, or there was until they patched it so you could have four guns. The action doesn't even hold up to Duke Nukem 3D. There are quick-time events. You spend too much time as a tiny Duke doing some dumb platforming. None of the action is all that great, and it's been done better many times over by other games. Bulletstorm is a better Duke Nukem game than Duke Nukem Forever.
It's real difficult to find anything positive to say about Duke Nukem Forever. In the extras, there's a selection of demo videos from the multiple iterations this game has gone through. There's one in the middle of the timeline that looks like it would have been a really cool game if it had come out on time. Then it's immediately followed by another video that's absolute garbage. Get this game only if you absolutely must play a piece of gaming history, and get it as cheap as you can. It's not worth your time otherwise.