I've played most of the first level and so far it's really fun. It feels quite sloppy mechanically, especially compared to Doom, but the LA movie-house setting is fun and it has lots of stuff going on - letting you turn on a film in the projector room, use the security cameras, stuff like that, plus enemies sitting on the loo or plummeting to their death, looking back and seeing your bloody footprints from where you walked through an alien corpse. FPS mechanics can get quite repetitive, so having variety elsewhere - enemy types, weapons, one-off events, stuff like that - really helps. Like Dark Forces, it has little touches like seeing your ship go down in flames at the start of a level, or hearing your character speak, that give it little narrative touches. While id's games would have minor environmental storytelling, these other games are pushing more overt stuff.
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Played a few more levels. Still lots of fun stuff going on and interesting level settings. There was a really nice moment where I found a little secret area by blowing up a manhole cover and heading down into a little alien nest in the sewer. After exclusively urban environments, I suddenly found myself in a little pocket of utterly alien surroundings with a load of new stuff thrown at me all at once. It was really effective.
They pulled the old "you lose all your weapons" trick really early on and also have been doing some ride-the-conveyor-belt/get-picked-up-and-carried-by-a-crane-arm-claw-thingy, which reminded me of the Half Life games.
The "babe" stuff is getting gradually more heinous, though, with the strippers you can pay money to for a quick flash, and the naked women stuck to the wall with alien goo begging you to kill them. The former can be taken as part of Duke's ridiculously exaggerated 80s action hero machismo, continually throwing out lame catchphrases and detonating entire skyscrapers to make a path to an access card, but the latter feels a bit gross.
It's actually pretty hard, you have to be really good with strafing and even on Normal, it's very easy to lose most of your health after a couple of hits from relatively low-level enemies like the pig-cops. It's nice to be back to levels where I don't get lost a lot of the time, which is really helped by each room having a different motif (for example in the previous level, there was the electric chair chamber, the prayer room, the jail cells, the outside area and the alien hologram head room). Having said that though, I have just got stuck for the first time, which is exacerbated by the fact that I've used up my scuba gear, so if the route out is underwater it's going to take me a lot of deaths to find it.
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I finally finished Episode 1 - that boss was TOUGH. I'm going to play it on easy from this episode forward. I enjoyed the San Andreas Fault level (apart from the fucking platforming) - huge rockscapes collapsing to reveal underground alien caverns which have a weird kind of Satanic vibe to them, then getting into the trippy alien spaceship.
I'm now on an orbiting spaceship, Duke apparently fuelled by his anger at the aliens kidnapping the "babes" whom so far he's been mercy-killing in order to collect power-ups.
I've already encountered a new enemy type, which is cool. I'd be very interested to see a comparison of various FPSes' amount of enemy types and at what pace throughout the game they introduce them, how many of each occur etc.
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Okay, I struggled through as much of Episode 2 as I could, but I had to give up. The balancing is awful - none of the kooky weapons is actually safe to use and all of the new enemies are ridiculously tough/irritating (face-huggers, turrets, kamikaze flying things etc). The setting was pretty dull and there are a fair few gotcha deaths which are impossible to avoid. Plus the space station environment just isn't as interesting. I skipped ahead to the next episodes but nothing held my interest, so I'm giving up on this one.
I was surprised to see how much stuff which I'd assumed Half Life was the first to do was in here - air-ducts, looping transit systems, interactive environments, explosive set-pieces, scenic transport shuttles that feel like a miniature predecessor of HL's tram intro. Surprisingly, though, Half-Life didn't feature gross misogynistic stuff like TRIGGER WARNING aliens torturing a naked pregnant woman (Wikipedia tells me they were using her to give birth to an alien queen) or Duke shoving a remote bomb up the alien queen's vagina and detonating it while saying "Time to abort your whole species".
Note: Episode 3 of Duke does go back to LA, but I immediately got stuck on a) the insane difficulty and b) the fact that they hide essential keys and switches in utterly camouflaged secret areas. Plus it seemed to be pretty much more of the same. For anyone who fancies playing it, I'd recommend picking it up super-cheap and just playing the first episode on easy mode.
Rating: Orange
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