Duke Nukem 3D was a big deal in gaming, and for me personally. I owe a lot to Duke Nukem 3D — figuring out why my home PC could not run the game was what got me into computing and IT as a hobby in the first place. Like many folks twenty years ago, I was crazy for the game. I played through it multiple times, played co-op and deathmatch (known as Dukematch) on my dial-up modem, and even printed out the entire BUILD manual on a dot matrix printer and made several of my own levels, single and multiplayer.
Fast forward twenty years — it doesn’t seem all that long ago — and we have a special 20th Anniversary Edition release of Duke 3D with several nice features added. Unfortunately, this release is not as content-complete as the Megaton Edition that was released in 2013, which included three 3D Realms-published add-ons including Duke In DC, Nuclear Winter, and Caribbean Vacation. You will not find those in the 20th Anniversary sadly, but you do get a host of other goodies, including:
-True3D Rendering mode, which you can toggle instantly by pressing down on the d-pad. This is not quite as dramatic as a “original vs modern day remaster” in terms of the differences, indeed the differences are much more subtle, but the change in lighting, clarity, and overall visual appeal is noticeable. It’s worth keeping on, but I liked that I could toggle it instantly to compare before/after appearances.
-Developer Commentary – I haven’t played the game through with this enabled the whole time, but this is a neat feature in which the player discovers microphones in parts of some levels (definitely not all) and when you activate it you’ll get a recently recorded track from some of the devs about that part in the level, it’s worth checking out, but don’t expect a ton of this kind of material, it’s a bit sparse.
-New and Legacy “Duke Talk” – Duke Nukem paid homage to some of the great lines in film and had a lot of great lines of his own. Those are intact here as are new lines and you can toggle between the two.
-A completely new episode made by two of the original level designers – Alien World Order, which is selectable from the start screen along with the other four episodes (the original three plus the Atomic Edition one). Eight new maps total, including one secret Dukematch one. There is also a new weapon, the Incinerator included in this episode. The maps take you all across the world, from Egypt to San Francisco. The levels are well designed, not super complex really, but still quite good.
For Duke fan’s, this should be more than enough to justify the $20 asking price. Given that the game is only 1GB in size, it’s likely going to be one of the last ones deleted from your hard drive too, which is great given how much replay value it has. Replaying these levels and the new ones this past week has been both nostalgic and fun; great level design and gameplay never ages. I was pleased that I still remembered where so many secrets were, including all eight from the first level and re-discovering the levels all over again, which I hadn’t done in probably fifteen years, was wonderful. Granted a lot of players won’t have the sentimental attachment to the game that I do, but suffice it to say, great level design, awesome weapons, and fun enemies make for a great and classic FPS experience.
Other nice features include the ability to save your game anytime in multiple slots. These do not show a timestamp though, so you just have to keep track of which save game is which via the screenshot of the moment you saved. Also, when you die, you can instant rewind to any point in the level, a feature lifted from the Megaton Edition I believe, and this is another nice, optional perk. On the PS4, which I reviewed it on, the game ran perfectly fine (which is no surprise), the only gripe I would have is that weapon-switching had just a slight delay, by design, that is a minor nuisance.
Overall, there is very little to complain about with this release and it’s one of the easiest recommendations I could make all year. To the summary…
