It’s been twenty years since the release of Duke Nukem 3D, so to commemorate the event Gearbox has released a repackaged version of the game with some new features. I’d like to stress, I’m going to discuss the new additions added for the World Tour version of the game. Duke Nukem 3D has been released on so many platforms I felt it was only fair to judge this package purely on its changes (which are extensive) as opposed to the game itself.
Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour
Developer: Gearbox
Price: $20
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
The biggest addition to the game is the inclusion of an all new episode created by the original designers of Duke Nukem 3D, Allen Blum III and Richard “Levelord” Gray called Alien World Order. This is an eight level romp through various notable cities and their landmarks like Paris and Egypt. To put it plainly, this episode is fantastic and it’s great to see that they still know how to make a great Duke level. The episode assumes you’ve played through the core four episodes and starts things off fast and heavy with dozens of enemies relentlessly coming at you in the very first level. Each area is constantly keeping you on your toes and the visual variety really helps keeps things interesting. The San Diego level in particular stands out in how different it is from every other map due to its sprawling, open level design. The only thing I’d really fault the episode with is that it ends pretty anticlimactically as you work your way up a straight, linear hill only to fight a boss at the top with way more health than he needs.
Included in the new episode is a new weapon and enemy. First off, the new enemy, the scorcher, isn’t super great. It’s an alien that can shrink and shoot you with its flamethrower, which makes fighting it a bit of a pain since it can be somewhat difficult to see and hit when it’s shrunk. The new weapon is the incinerator which is easily one of the most satisfying weapons in the game. It fires pools of lava that causes burn damage on an enemy and can lead to them crumbling into a pile of ash. The episode also features all new music by Lee Jackson, creator of the original Duke 3D theme and it’s easily the highlight of the episode. The tracks come at you in a wonderfully aggressive way that matches the chaotic fights on screen and it’s going to be a damn shame if they don’t release it separately.
World Tour also includes some smaller changes that come in mixed results. The most immediate change you’ll notice is a new graphics option called True3D Rendering that turns everything in the game into a somewhat proper 3D look with new lighting effects. Gone are the days where you’d get a sick feeling from looking either up or down which really makes me wonder how I dealt with it before. The new lighting is a really nice touch as well that spruces up older episodes. Giving everything a proper 3D effect causes some weird moments with flying enemies. Since enemies are still 2D figures, they can sometimes appear as vertical lines when they turn and you’re viewing them from the side which can make hitting them at times somewhat difficult.
On the audio side, besides the new music I previously mentioned, there’s new dialog for Alien World Order and Jon St. John re-recorded all of his lines from the original game as well. Most of the new stuff sounds good, but there’s a decent amount that sound like he was slightly bored delivering the line. The game also allows you to use dialog from the original release but I wouldn’t recommend it since it’s not balanced for this release, with the older dialog coming out at a much lower volume than everything else. The weapon audio is also off with most of it coming out slightly muffled; the pistol and rocket launcher in particular lack any sort of oomph that you’d expect. I loaded up my copy of the Megaton Edition and there’s a definite noticeable difference in the sound effects, and not for the better.
Some gameplay changes include a new replay slider that activates upon your death and lets you immediately restart from any previous point and the addition of autoaim. The slider is pretty impressive and was surprisingly useful at times when I forgot to make a quick save. The autoaim on the other hand is less impressive with it becoming an annoyance when you’re trying to hit a specific enemy when others are around. Rounding things out is eight player Dukematch and eight player co-op which would both be really cool if there was anyone playing. I’ve tried checking for players multiple times throughout the day, nearly every day since release and I was only ever able to find a single lobby with one person in it.
Missing from this package are the three expansion packs Duke It Out in D.C., Duke Caribbean, and Nuclear Winter with the reason for their exclusion being a jokey tweet about it not being twenty years since their release. I pray there’s a better reason than that because that’s some hot bullshit if that’s actually the case. Duke Nukem 3D was released on practically every system through Devolver Digital’s Megaton Edition package and if you didn’t own it by now then the removal of that version of the game means you now have no way of playing those expansions. You’re also in a way paying more for a slightly prettier version of a game with less content which is a hard pill to swallow.
What’s perhaps the biggest selling point of this package is the inclusion of developer commentary that you hope would give deeper insight into the creation of the game; it instead leaves you kind of wanting. I come at the developer commentary from the perspective of a major movie nerd. I’m one of the five people who still buy physical copies of movies because I like to support my favorite films and I greatly enjoy seeing the behind-the-scenes commentary content. Unfortunately, the commentary suffers in terms of pure content and questionable technical issues. To start, the audio balance is stupidly off with the commentary coming out at a much lower volume than the rest of the game which caused me to constantly juggle the volume buttons,quickly becoming annoying. Some subtitles for this would have also been much appreciated considering how quiet the audio comes out, and because it’s sometimes hard to make out what the developers are even saying since they tend to mumble.
The most glaring issue here though is the complete lack of commentary. When you tell me your game has developer commentary I expect it to have developer commentary. There are nearly a dozen levels per episode and only two or three of those levels actually have commentary and it’s usually just a small handful of snippets. There’s some genuinely interesting information like how they managed to pull off a certain effect, but a good portion of it is just uninteresting nonsense. The only episode with a steady amount of commentary is the new Alien World Order, with only one level out of its eight missing commentary. The problem here is that this is a package that’s supposed to be celebrating 20 years of Duke Nukem and we’re not getting much celebration on the part of the package we’re supposed to be celebrating.
The Final Word
Duke Nukem 3D is still a fantastic game, but technical issues, little to no commentary, and a dead on release multiplayer community makes an already overpriced package hard to recommend.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
