YMMV / Duke Nukem Forever

• Angst? What Angst?: Even after seeing how so many babes including the Holsom twins brutally became the alien's incubators, Duke didn't take any loss heavily. In fact after "The Hive" there is a Minigame Zone that take place inside Duke's dreams while he's being rescued. Duke also doesn't have much of a reaction after Dylan dies (or at least appears to as he later comes back in the DLC), either; it's sort of implied the reason is that Duke knows he's a character in a video game and thus isn't taking anything too seriously.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: As stated in Salvaged Story, Duke reacts negatively to a tasteless joke about the late Holsom twins, despite the cruel joke he made shortly before their deaths. Did he realize how awful the joke he made was and regretted it, or was he coping at the time and is now able to think clearly?
• Awesome Music:
  • The music in the reveal trailer True to the game, it's called "Invaders Must Die."
  • Ladies and gentlemen, Grabbag. The 2011 Edition.
  • The Ghost Town ambience music played while Duke needs to get gas for the Mighty Foot.
• Breather Level:
  • After The Hive you go to the strip club, and have a scavenger hunt to get a lap dance. It turns out it was All Just a Dream.
  • And in The Doctor Who Cloned Me DLC, The Burning Bush chapter, which plays pretty much in the same way in that you're given a couple of scavenger hunt tasks to carry out.
• Broken Base: The Limited Loadout caused this. Some say it's a nice change, showing 3D Realms wasn't seeking to just re-hash Duke 3D in prettier graphics, and are willing to try different things with Duke. They also cite how it's only a limit on your actual guns, not affecting pipe bombs, trip mines, steroids, and the like (you do still have a limit on how many of each of these you can carry, but it's no more restrictive than the limits on them imposed in 3D). Others say it's just 3D Realms changing Duke to copy gameplay mechanics that are popular, and that the game's weapon system really doesn't seem to be designed with the concept or level design in mind, since it makes it impossible to keep the rarer guns in reserve and requires at least one infinite-ammo crate plopped down somewhere within every encounter, and the only weapons you can reasonably keep loaded without using the crates are comparatively no fun to use. Then there's a third party saying they did it because of consoles and their limited controls (the officially given reason), and that console FPS players would get confused and/or frustrated by having more than 2 guns at a time. This particular base breaker was alleviated somewhat in a patch which adds a toggle-able option for Duke to carry four guns at a time, although the console versions never got this option.
• Critic-Proof: Duke Nukem Forever has gotten scathing reviews from many critics, yet it still managed to sell enough to be profitable. Some critics have even said they're somewhat insulted with how well DNF has sold, in spite of the thrashing they gave it. Of course, being profitable doesn't necessarily mean it sold very well, since the amount of money invested in it by its eventual publisher was fairly low, with most of the money spent on its development coming from 3D Realms over the course of its Development Hell.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The fact that the aliens are rapists, and Duke's aloof attitude toward that fact, was intended to be this.
• Dancing Bear: The very fact that the game was finally released after its legendarily long development cycle and could actually be played was in itself enough to move quite a few copies out the door.
• Demonic Spiders: Octabrains and berserk pig cops, capable of killing you in two hits. They always seem to be in tight areas with no cover. Berserk pig cops have the added bonus of immediately regaining all their health, so you have to deal just as much damage to them again for no particular reason other than that the game decided it doesn't like you right now. The Octabrains, meanwhile, are incredibly agile, capable of hurling things at you (including ammo from certain weapons you fired and your own pipe-bombs), and has an attack that can take out a large chunk of your ego bar, in addition to usually attacking in swarms, pulling double duty as Goddamned Bats.
• Fan Nickname: Duke Nukem For Never. After its release however it started to be referred to by its acronym "DNF" due to matching up perfectly with the racing acronym for "Did Not Finish".
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The Content Leaked 2001 build of the game has earned the general consensus of "janky and unpolished but promising", for its strong gunplay and much more focused vision than what the official release became.
• Fetish Retardant:
  • A lot of the women and strippers are more uncanny for some than attractive due to the outdated graphics and the stiff, lifeless animations.
  • The Holsom Twins are this to anyone not into Twincest.
• Goddamned Bats: Octabrains. They tend to attack in swarms of two or more, they fly, they're incredibly agile, and if they're not throwing things littered around the game environment at you, a blast of their energy ball can knock a helluva lot off your Ego bar. And did we mention that they can grab large ammo projectiles you fired (say, RPGs, devastator rockets or your pipe-bomb) and hurl them back at you? And fighting them underwater just makes things more difficult. Counter-productively, pipe bombs are actually one of the best ways to defeat them, as they will always pull grabbed projectiles in closer to themselves for a second before tossing it back - giving you a chance to actually detonate the pipe bomb before it's thrown back, and guaranteeing they'll be caught in the blast radius and die.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Duke's swear for revenge after the Holsom Twins get kidnapped early on becomes flat out hypocritical when later in the game Duke finds the two captured and impregnated by the aliens and then delivers an awful rape joke at their expense.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Randy Pitchford left 3D Realms to form Gearbox Software, which went on to finish the game.
  • Gearbox, the company now in charge of Duke Nukem Forever, is also the one which originally ported Halo: Combat Evolved to the PC. In-game, Duke finds Spartan armor and calls anyone who wears it a "pussy".
  • The game's various attempts to stay up to date, such as its two-gun system and Regenerating Health, and potshots at other games, most of which were outdated, become mildly amusing after the latter half of The New '10s featured a boom in Genre Throwbacks toward 90s First Person Shooters, including ones that this game had previously mocked (such as Doom (2016)), and one of the games, Ion Fury, having been created by the company who formerly owned the Duke Nukem IP (even throwing its own joke at Duke's expense at the end of its first level).
  • Part of the reason why this game took as long as it did was George Broussard forcing the devs to start over on a new engine whenever there was a new latest, greatest game engine on the market. The final game would turn out to be using (an extremely modified) Unreal Engine 1, in a time when 3 was the latest version of the engine.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Always Bet on Duke^ExplanationA tagline from one of the game's early promotional posters. Upon the announcement of the game actually getting released, people started joking that they can finally cash in their bets.
  • When it's done^Explanation 3D Realms' notoriously guarded response to any question about Forever's release date, which quickly became a shorthand for Vaporware.
  • Shrek Nukem^Explanation The Russian dub of the game (now itself a rarity to get because of bad export for Russia itself) has Duke voiced by the same person who dubbed the main character of all four Shrek movies. Needless to say, it didn't go over unnoticed by the fans.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Certain reviewers have put the blame for the finished product's various flaws wholly on Gearbox; some even seem to be under the impression that they restarted the game from scratch after they took over the project. In actual fact, the finished product is about 80-90% the product of 3D Realms, as George Broussard himself has frequently bemoaned. Whether Gearbox should have done a complete reboot of the project is a legitimate question, but most of the content was the product of 3D Realms. However, Gearbox did remove Duke's Distaff Counterpart who would basically put Duke in his place.
    • Said distaff counterpart eventually got her own game, though it wasn't Gearbox who made it. And another one in the Build Engine!
  • Gearbox also came under fire for threats to blacklist reviewers who rated the game poorly. It was actually The Redner Group, a public relations agency with Gearbox as a client, who was responsible for that statement and Gearbox promptly fired them for making such a statement, for the record.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The President of the United States tries to sell out all of humanity to the aliens so that he can get a seat in galactic rule, though he gets squished for his bullshit.
  • Some believe that Duke himself crossed it in more of a characterization sense with his "Looks like you're fucked" comment to the Holsom Twins in the Hive — after they've been raped and impregnated, followed by showing no real reaction to their violent deaths immediately afterwards.
• My Real Daddy: Many people consider Brian Hook to be the real hero of the story, since he was the first project lead that was able to say no to George's request for tweaks and changes, which greatly contributed to the game finally being able to progress.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The Hive. Between the "slap the wall boobs" and the eventual fate of the Holsom twins and several other babes.
  • The final boss of the DLC has Duke go inside her and shoot her ovaries.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Hive is a visceral, body horror level exploring sickly alien nests of chitin and mucus, before discovering the aliens have been using human woman (who are present, sobbing in pain, and can't be saved in any way besides mercy killings) as hosts for their children. We even see the Holsom twins graphically bursting into bloody chunks and murderous aliens while begging for help, as Duke cruelly jokes about it. It's deeply upsetting. Incidentally, if you're thinking that this seems wildly tonally dissonant with the rest of the light-hearted, low-brow action game? Sure is!
  Yahtzee Croshaw: This section contains about as jarring a shift of tone as you can get without splicing five minutes of The Human Centipede into the middle of Mallrats.
  • The 2001 build shows via mirrors that Duke doesn't have any sunglasses, letting us see that his eyes have no pupils.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Most critics tend to forget that the "ego is health" mechanic first appeared in the PlayStation game Land of the Babes and Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, where doing things like shooting members of the women's resistance would lower your health (in the former), and that rescuing women and killing enemies would raise it (in the latter).
  • Critics also forget that the alien-impregnated chicks in the Hive level are nothing new. Duke Nukem 3D featured many women captured by the aliens, stripped naked and imprisoned in pods or otherwise bound, begging Duke to kill them. Sometimes they were also surrounded by clutches of alien eggs (from which Protozoid Slimers would hatch and attack Duke if he did nothing). However, not only are the graphics less detailed, they're simply static 2D sprites, not to mention their depictions can be disabled.
  • In general, most of the cultural aspects of the game, like the humor and depictions of women, aren't changed from Duke Nukem 3D. It's the other way around: the surrounding culture did.
  • There's also the infamous "Capture The Babe" multiplayer mode. Running With Scissors had an almost-identical multiplayer mode named "Snatch" for Postal 2: Share The Pain, which was released on December 17th, 2003.
• Once Original, Now Common: In a meta way. George Broussard wanted the game to be a collection of every new and awesome mechanic he could find, but with all the delays the game was released well after those mechanics stopped being novel. Circumventing a keycard puzzle by manually opening a door via quicktime event in the first half-hour or so of the game is probably one of the most notable cases, as the game tries to present it as a unique and hilarious subversion of a common gaming cliché; however, not only had the cliché it's subverting long since fallen out of use, but it is subverting it by falling into what has long since become an even bigger cliché.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The game's reputation for being stuck in one of the longest Development Hells in video game history, failing to meet expectations when it was released, and containing very outdated views on sex which are considered extreme even by the standards of the eponymous franchise, is more well-known than the game itself.
• Popularity Polynomial: A large part of the hype shortly before release was the potential for modding — a significant part of '90s shooter culture — including promises that Duke's Enormous Tool (the level editor) would be available. When the game came out, not only was there no editor, the console itself was patched out, making it near impossible to mod the game without convoluted hacks. There were attempts to get a modding scene going, but they petered out and by the mid-2010s the game was largely left in the dust and forgotten as an unfunny joke. However, the leak of the 2001 build in 2022 seems to have given the modding scene a major kick in the ass. Mere months after it happened, in the flurry of reinterest in the Duke Nukem IP, it was revealed a level editor for the 2011 version was finally in active development, alongside plans to make a full game out of the 2001 leak.
• Porting Disaster: When the game was first released on the Xbox 360, the textures didn't load properly, the blood decals flickered constantly, the frame rate was very uneven, and the loading times were atrocious. However, after the release of The Doctor Who Cloned Me, it seems like most, if not all, of these issues have been rectified.
• Presumed Flop: The game's legendary Development Hell is more famous than its final release in 2011. Despite reviews ranging from "the most atrocious, outdated, insultingly bad game I have ever played" to "barely average", DNF still managed to turn a profit for Take-Two in the end, albeit this is mostly thanks to George Broussard self-funding most of the development and Take-Two getting their hands on the game when it was already mostly finished, before the original devs could restart development entirely again.
• Salvaged Story: The Doctor Who Cloned Me DLC has Duke react badly to a joke made at the expense of the deceased Holsom twins, after his glib reaction to their imminent deaths in the base game rubbed a lot of players the wrong way.
• The Scrappy: Captain Dylan is widely hated for being an intrusive Motor Mouth that tries too hard at being a Plucky Comic Relief. Though the DLC improved him somewhat.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Limited Loadout, especially in the default setting (or only setting, if you're playing on console) of 2 weapons. With 4 weapons enabled in the PC version, it becomes more tolerable, unless you're holding onto the golden pistol for the achievement. Since the shotgun, ripper, railgun, and various explosive weapons are all useful for specific things, you have to juggle weapons a lot, and won't get as much freedom to try out the more specialist weapons. It's very clear that the limit is an afterthought, only added because other games were doing it, and that much of the game was intended for Duke to be able to carry every weapon at once but with a limited amount of ammo for each forcing him to swap between weapons for specific threats, since Duke can only ever carry three or four full mags for any given weapon, and every combat situation has to plop down a crate of infinite ammo as a result.
  • The minigames scattered throughout the game can be a pain in the ass for how hard they cause the action to screech to a halt, an unfitting outcome for how Duke is supposed to be an Action Hero.
  • Vehicle controls, with the section in the RC truck being by far the worst of it. It's especially strange given the Mighty Foot handles a lot better.
  • Duke's Ego should be a good indicator of how much health you have, until it drains. Suddenly the game seems to decide at complete random if Duke can tank more damage or even indirect explosions, or if mere scratch damage drops him dead. There's no consistency to it, either, which isn't helped by the fact that regardless of difficulty, that Ego bar depletes fast, and even getting all of the possible boosts in the game is barely a noticeable improvement.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Boring, but Practical guns don't have many fans, especially as the aforementioned Limited Loadout means you'll pretty much always have to carry at least one around or run out of ammo constantly. The pistol is the worst of all; if you're going for the golden gun achievement, you'll be dealing with half your weapon slots being taken up by a weak and ineffective gun with somewhat-uncommon ammo. The energy rifle is also hated, mostly because it's incredibly unsatisfying to use and has low damage, but is also basically the only one you can regularly find ammo for. The only gun that mostly escapes these accusations is the shotgun, which has a decent kick and packs a good punch.
• Sequelitis: Though whether the game is So Okay, It's Average, surprisingly decent, or just plain bad can vary from person to person, it's hard to find anyone who considers it an equivalent followup to Duke Nukem 3D.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: During the course of the game, Duke can play video poker, pool, air hockey, pinball, throw basketballs into a basket and throw a frisbee. Winning any of them for the first time will have Duke's maximum EGO rising.
• So Okay, It's Average: After the dust has settled, the general consensus about the game is that it's not necessarily bad, but there isn't anything new or interesting aside from having the title character back in action. The story is functional, but not very compelling, suffering from several moments filled with topical gags (many of which incidentally ended up being woefully outdated because of the game's long development time), and the basic gameplay works, but suffers from being pretty slow paced for an action game. Some have taken note that the game most likely would have been more well-received had it been released in a previous console generation, or better yet, on time. Ultimately, the biggest reason the game is regarded with such disdain is that, as a result of its ridiculously long development cycle, it ended up being possibly the most overhyped game of all time and couldn't even begin to live up to the weight of expectations.
• Tear Jerker: Of the randomized quotes Duke can say when Mercy Killing the kidnapped women in the Hive level, two of the quotes stick out as genuinely somber and remorseful, as if Duke is actually being emotionally affected by what he is having to do:
  "Sorry babe, it's better this way."
  "Not even I can save you now."
• That One Boss:
  • The Octaking, especially the second fight since you have to take it on with your personal weapons and constantly-respawning regular Octabrains.
  • The Energy leech, especially on higher difficulties as you have to juggle both your health and your oxygen meters and its slam attack has a deceptively large hitbox that makes it tricky to avoid, and later on you have to deal with Octabrains.
• That One Level: The underwater parts of the Dam prior to the Octaking. Not only do you have to juggle a tight oxygen limit, but baby Octobrains that are hard to hit come pouring out after you in a situation of reduced mobility and a severe disadvantage in fighting back.
• That One Sidequest: Three of the minigames are notable for being extremely clunky.
  • The pinball machine is somewhat difficult to get the ego boost for, but it's generally considered insanity to go for the related achievement (unless you use the trick by keeping the ball in the upper left flipper and hitting the targets by using tilt).
  • Meanwhile just beating a round of pool is an exercise in frustration, real-world understanding of pool or not.
  • Worst of all is the Air Hockey mini-game, as the A.I. is a real pain to score against, and god help you if you are going for the "Air Duke" achievement which requires you to get a perfect score of 7-0. The only reliable way to beat that mini-game is to increase the vertical sensitivity in the options menu to around 7 (which lets you score more powerful shots against your opponent with less movement of the mouse) and tone down the horizontal sensitivity to around 4 (to make it easier to defend your own goal without overshooting and letting the puck through); it's a major cause of Guide Dang It! as most players would never guess that changing those options would make a difference for a mini-game.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Pretty much all the gameplay changes get this, due to many having hoped the game would be a Genre Throwback (similar to the later entries in Wolfenstein and Doom). The game instead featured just about every mechanic that classic shooter fans had come to despise, such as slower-paced gameplay, Regenerating Health, an extremely low threshold for exploration, and two-weapon limits, making it controversial at best.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The game takes place in Las Vegas, a setting that seems primed to make use of Duke as a character. However, this whole idea is barely utilized, with only the fifth level (Duke fights through a casino called The Lady Killer, and can play with the slot machines for an ego boost) really doing anything with the concept. You don't visit any famous locations, you can't play any other gambling games, and Duke never gets to interact with the wacky things associated with the city. For most of the game, the city doesn't even look like Vegas, as the city levels are set in broad daylight and after an alien invasion, when Vegas is famous for being a Neon City that lights up at night. Notably, the city looked far more distinctively Vegas in the leaked earlier builds (including being set at night), suggesting this was an idea that was once at the forefront but fell out of relevance with time.
  • The game builds up towards the President of the United States pulling a Face–Heel Turn... then he shows up at the Hoover Dam to monologue for a minute before he is unceremoniously killed by the Cycloid Emperor.
  • The game makes the Sequel Gap between it and 3D canon, with over a decade having passed since 3D and depicts a Duke who's holed himself up in Las Vegas surrounded by glitz and glamor with a museum dedicated to his deeds, with some characters early on referring to him as from another time. Many reviewers remarked that this seemed to be leading to the idea of a washed-up Duke coming out of retirement and reclaiming his old edge or having to reinvent himself for a new threat, but instead, the game depicts Duke as a universally-beloved and unbelievably talented celebrity and never treats him as anything else.
    • On a related note, as horrifically unpleasant as the infamous Hive level is, it might have worked if it had included some genuine character development for Duke. Had Duke grown and matured from the experience, or at least treated the experience seriously in the time it was happening, it could have shown a much more sympathetic side to Duke (and there is an inkling of it, see Tear Jerker). Unfortunately, whatever sympathy the player could have had for Duke gets brutally stomped out as he continues to make jokes throughout the level, to the point where he cracks wise at the sight of his own girlfriends being killed right in front of him.
  • At one point, the President claims that Duke, not the aliens, was the first one to kick off the hostilities (something that honestly wouldn't be out-of-character for Duke and could lead to him learning the consequences of his actions). Not only is it completely wrong with how the game actually plays out (the player doesn't even get a gun until well after the aliens start attacking), but it goes absolutely nowhere.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Due to Development Hell causing the game to be delayed continually since its inception 13 years prior to its release, it has the unintended disadvantage of seeming as though certain gameplay parts were added when they were the latest trend in gaming. The gameplay borders on Genre Roulette as it tries to mimic, almost in sequence, late-90s cornball camp shooters where you can interact with everything, early-2000s dark sci-fi shooters with frequent sections where you have to hold the line (typically with a fixed turret) or drive a vehicle and get out at regular intervals, and late-2000s grim realistic shooters where nearly every NPC on your side is killed off. Zero Punctuation noted that "you could practically cut it in half and see the entire fourteen years of shooter evolution it's tried to keep up with, like the rings in a tree stump".
  • The humor of the game also appears to be rooted firmly in the mid-to-late 2000s. Among the references included are Expies of the Olsen Twins (who haven't acted together since 2004), a Take That! directed at Halo (ironically preceding a level that is a close replication of an actual Halo level), several one-liners lifted from a "Ventrilo Harassment" video from 2007, a massive gas-guzzling vehicle that needs to be refueled every five minutes (Hummer, the brand most closely associated with that sort of car, was out of business by 2010), and a near-exact replication of the infamous Christian Bale rant from the set of Terminator Salvation (a movie that released in early 2009 and a meme that was already fading by the end of the year).
  • Because of this effect, the mechanics that were added more recently (Duke having a regenerating "Ego" bar instead of health, running out of breath after sprinting short distances, only being able to carry two weapons, and being completely incapable of scaling anything taller than his ankles) stick out like a sore thumb instead of making the game more accessible to modern players, especially since several of these mechanics don't play well with how the game is actually designed (the two-gun limit clearly wasn't made with Duke's extremely limited ammo capacity or the wide variety of gimmick weapons in mind, necessitating boxes of infinite ammo every time the player is expected to stick around and actually fight things). This also pretty clearly dates it to before the halfway point of the decade, prior to games like 2014's Wolfenstein: The New Order or 2016's reboot of Doom, both of which deliberately eschewed several of these "modern/realistic" mechanics (only keeping what could actually synergize with or be reinvented to fit classic-style gameplay, like one-button melee takedowns and weapon attachments) and were largely praised for it.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The story paints Duke as the world's coolest dude and biggest badass, even after being out of action for so long, and the only person that seriously doubts him is a traitor to humanity. He's also a massive douchebag whose ego is so extreme that he tends to shrug off most normal people that isn't a pretty face practically begging for him, and the player can even partly play it up with certain interactions. He's also immensely apathetic or downright unconcerned with innocents and soldiers dying around him, with only the kidnapping of women truly pissing him off. And then he finds these women forcibly impregnated and unable to be saved — and makes a rape joke at the Holsom twins, while again being abnormally unconcerned with their gruesome fates. The result was transforming Duke Nukem from an action movie badass into a chauvinistic, sociopathic Jerkass that only seems to care about himself and none of the usually-endearing parody elements and jokes managing to save him from this, which was the exact opposite intention of the writers. As Civvie rightfully puts it:
  I think that being king of the world was the worst thing to happen to Duke.
• Values Dissonance: The game's humor is this thanks to its decade of Development Hell. The previous games of the early nineties were considered funny and the eponymous character was a fresh take for being an actual protagonist with a voice and personality rather than being a faceless, voiceless space marine. However, when Forever came out, Duke's dialogue, humor, and the overall tone of the game felt wildly out of date to some.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Doctor Who Cloned Me is considered by some to be better than the base game.
  • This arguably makes the entirety of DNF worse as it shows that they could have made a better game - better story, better characterization for Duke, better gameplay, etc. - but they were so busy chasing trends, switching developers and engines, and generally screwing up that they never did.
• Woolseyism: The Fetch Quest in Duke Nukem's Titty City had to be censored in the Japanese release, and the translators got creative. The vibrator is replaced with a statue of Duke, and the condom is replaced with a helmet to "do some kinky role-playing" (it's a hardhat). When Duke picks up one of these objects, he says "Hmm, I think this was something else overseas."

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