[Reincarnate]

I just finished DNF.

Here were my main problems with the game:

1. In DN3D, you could carry multiple weapons. In DNF, you can only hold two. This was hugely disappointing to me because the two-weapon system doesn’t hark back to the 90’s-FPS days. It’s a Halo/CoD gimmick.

2. There are way too many scripted events. Too much storyline I simply don’t care about. The first 30-50 minutes of the game is a huge snore-fest. In DN3D, you were shooting aliens within seconds. It seems like in DNF they want you to do everything BUT fire a weapon.

3. The humor overreaches. Even though DN3D was raunchy, it knew where to draw the line. The worst thing you’d see in DN3D was a stripper with some, er, tassels. The sexual detail is so much more profound and graphic in DNF and it’s honestly really awkward, creepy, and unsettling. At least DN3D always felt like a FPS. Sometimes DNF feels like you’re playing an adult porno game or something. The dialogue is loaded with curse words and it’s like listening to a group of punk middle school kids dropping the f-bomb every other second. It not the slightest bit funny — just crude and dirty for the sake of being dirty. Duke no longer feels like a parody of action heroes. Instead, he comes across as a pervert, and I can’t take his badassery as seriously in this game.

4. I know key-and-door puzzles are sooooo 90’s, but damn it that’s what I wanted from DNF. Instead of some good old-fashioned 90’s FPS logic, we get all sorts of silly crap: Push the balls into the holes, move the steam pipes, maneuver through the jumping puzzle, climb up a Duke statue, slide your way through a moving gear system, load barrels into a crane, stack a bunch of boxes, turn off the electricity, etc. Even when you finally get to do something halfway cool like drive the monster truck, the experience is ruined because the damn thing will constantly run out of gas and force you to complete a side-quest mission to fetch a tank. The puzzles are tedious and don’t make the game fun. They feel like distracting timewasters that you have to grind through before you can return to the action.

5. The level designs are uninspired. Think back to DN3D and a ton of levels stand out as really creative, cool, memorable layouts. Tons of hidden passageways, different routes, easter eggs, and interesting landmarks like the theater, sinking sub, rocket pad, command center, hotel, etc. Instead, DNF feels like it’s trying to copy Half-Life with its mountainy-terrain levels and the dam, or Doom and the generic strung-together gauntlet of tech-lab stages.

6. I like how the enemies were translated into present-day, but seriously, when most of the game is Duke vs. Pigs, it gets repetitive.

7. The difficulty was all over the place. Sometimes the game would be boringly easy, and other times you’d be facing off against a boss like the Queen where you’re basically killed in one hit if you screw up, forcing you to spend most of the battle hiding. Where’s the fun in that? The final boss was a huge pushover.

8. The Ego system was interesting, but later on in the game, there were practically no opportunities (at least that I ran into naturally) to boost it any further. It was a largely underutilized system because all the interactive items were stuffed into the first few levels.

9. After you beat the game, the ending is total crap. Even Duke says “What kind of shit ending was that?” If you know it’s a shit ending, make it a non-shit ending. You had a decade and a half, after all. It was a real letdown. There’s a scene after the credits where Duke basically says he’s going to run for President, but at that point I just don’t care anymore. The ego-feeding motif has already long been milked dry.

10. Overall, the game was simply boring. I got DNF the day it came out and I only managed to beat it today (about a week and a half-ish after it was released). I couldn’t play it for more than an hour at a time because I’d get so bored and lose the desire to carry on.

Ungh. Oh well. I’ll just pretend DNF didn’t exist. When a game takes 15 years to release (because of problems, as opposed to spending a lot of time making things of optimal quality), it’s going to suck. DN3D all the way.