Review - Duke Nukem Forever DLC

This is a review for the additional campaign for Duke Nukem Forever which is bought separately as DownLoad Content (DLC). If you would like to see a review for the main campaign of Duke Nukem Forever, check out my previous review found here.

The DLC campaign, The Doctor Who Cloned Me, is a whole new campaign for Duke Nukem Forever, but it is also a direct sequel to the main campaign as well. For this reason, I would recommend playing the main campaign first before playing this campaign to avoid any spoilers.

Below is a brief explanation of the continuity, and spoils the ending of the main campaign.

Spoiler:

The first scene you see in the new DLC campaign is the scene at the end of the main campaign, after having defeated the Cycloid Emperor, where General Graves comes to save Duke from the nuke zone. Duke wakes up in a room, strapped down in a chair, while you see Duke on a TV screen giving a press conference about how he's going to run for president.

This campaign follows the same recipe as the main campaign for the most part, except for a few differences. First, there's a lot less puzzles involved. There is one puzzle that's big (for Duke Nukem standards) that comes to mind. But considering that the charm of the game is its "Flavor" as I have stated in the previous review, if the elements in the game doesn't revolve around that "Flavor" of awesomeness and humor, it really has little place in this game without it being disruptive of the flow, in my opinion. So less puzzles may be for the better.

Another difference you notice is how you actually have help with combat in about half of the campaign this time around. As far as I know, your allies won't die in combat, so it is possible to just have them do all the killing in parts where you have them around. In fact, there is an achievement for just standing there and watching your ally kill an enemy, if you're into collecting achievements.

Sexy Scientits indeed

I should also point out that this campaign seemed a lot easier than the main campaign, as well as it is shorter. There are few parts of the campaign where it is considered hard like how there were in the main campaign. Perhaps a lot of it is how infrequent the annoying octabrains appear in this campaign, or the lack of difficult situations that you are put in. I was able to play through the campaign on the hard difficulty without having as much problems as I did in the main campaign.

Getting down into the details of the game, the game introduces some more new environments compared to the main campaign, like an underground city with lava, a big facility with many Dukinator Duke clones (with more humorous quotes and references to be made.), and a final level that most certainly caters to my interests as well, which I will keep a secret for now.

The game also introduces two new weapons; the Expander, the opposite of the Shrink Ray, but instead of making them bigger, it makes them fatter, slower, and more vulnerable to attacks, if it doesn't blow up the target from expanding to begin with, and the Impregnator, which basically shoots the same projectile attack that Pregnators shoot at you; that ball of goo that has some splash damage. Impregnator doesn't sound all that impressive, especially considering how the splash damage can damage yourself as well, but it does regenerate ammo like the Freeze Ray.

While the game follows the same recipe for the campaign with similar gameplay, it offers enough new experiences through events, environments, and other additional content for it to be worth checking out. The best stuff is still the "Flavor" though, and there's still plenty of fresh humor to be had from them, at least while comparing with the main campaign, as I haven't played any of the previous Duke Nukem games still.

Once again, I got this DLC on sale for $2.50. Normally it's $10 however. If you are reading this, most likely you already have Duke Nukem Forever, so if you feel that you enjoyed the game, this DLC will probably be worth the cost. I tend to value my entertainment by how long the game lasts me, and this one wasn't one that lasted me very long, since it was a shorter campaign in comparison. I think $2.50 is easily justified, but I'm not sure if $10 would be a price that I would pay, but I'm pretty cheap if you haven't figured that out about me already. At least I'm not regretting my purchase, as I had a fun time playing through this campaign though.

As for the other DLC, Hail to the Icons Parody Pack, adds more levels, game modes, and weapons in the Duke Nukem Forever multiplayer mode. Multiplayer is a bit tricky to rate since a lot of the servers I joined seemed to have mods that gave you infinite ammo, and sometimes modified the weapons that are available in the maps to have only explosives and such. Depending on who you play with, and with what game modes, modifications, and any other variables involved, your experiences can be very different. However, I can say that there are still some flavor in multiplayer mode, especially in Capture the Babe mode where there's more interaction with NPCs/flags, but will pale in comparison to the amount of flavor that Team Fortress 2 has with each character as a multiplayer game. Unless you really want to see Duke Nukem's mansion filled with his Digs that you can unlock by leveling up, there's probably more fun to be had on other multiplayer games.

In the end, it just comes down to whether if you enjoy the multiplayer enough to want to play more of it. Hail to the Icons Parody Pack DLC is an expansion to Duke Nukem Forever's multiplayer, and one that parodies other FPS multiplayer on top of that. If you enjoy the multiplayer, and perhaps if you have friends who have this DLC as well, you could consider picking it up to play the additional modes with them. Otherwise, I would find this DLC to be a lot more optional.