MERCH!
Giant Bomb - a website about video games and the people that make them

Duke Nukem Forever Demo Impressions

by mcbonjon

The demo is finally live!!!! All I can say is, June 14 can't come soon enough. Full disclosure, I was playing the PC version. This demo gives a fairly good representation of what is to come, but there's so much that they're holding out on. The game plays well, up to conventional standards in this genre. The guns are fun to use and there's a good variety of them with the shotgun being my pick. H...

The demo is finally live!!!! All I can say is, June 14 can't come soon enough.  Full disclosure, I was playing the PC version.
 
This demo gives a fairly good representation of what is to come, but there's so much that they're holding out on. The game plays well, up to conventional standards in this genre. The guns are fun to use and there's a good variety of them with the shotgun being my pick. However, the shrink ray and devastator are great, despite their brief appearance. The aiming feels a little sluggish, but can be tweaked in the options. There's no option for mouse smoothing, which is a disappointing.
 
This is also pretty to look at as well, with some nice effects. There's a lot shine on the models (similar to Riddick), but this didn't get in the way. There are a few options to tweak the graphics such as anti-aliasing, textures, vertical sync and so on, so nothing overly complicated. The game seems pretty good at scaling and the changes happen instantly instead of having to quit the game and start it up again.  
 
I've heard a few complaints about the load times (at least on console), but in my experience, the loading is fast. The longest being five seconds. Since the game has gone gold, I wonder how this will end up in retail builds of the game. 
 
I'm happy with how this turned out, but let's hope that some of the minor issues are fixed up before launch. If that isn't possible, that's why patches exist. What are your thoughts?