Many ten-year-old boys got to play Duke Nukem 3D, especially when I was ten. Not only was the game horribly out of fashion by that time but being a hard eighteen-plus rated game, Duke Nukem 3D was not for kids, especially after the huge amount of controversy the game had caused just a few years before. But ten-year-old boys have their ways, usually through shady playground trades, so I ended up playing a lot of Duke Nukem 3D.
Duke Nukem is a stereotypical ’80s action movie hero, in a video game, released in the ’90s and now remastered in 2016. After removing the much-loved Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition from Steam, which featured higher resolution textures and the only collection to feature Duke’s three expansions, Gearbox have a lot to live up to when it comes to this recent remaster.
For the most part, however, 20th Anniversary World Tour is the same Atomic Editions that Duke fans have owned since 1996. The same four episodes have returned in full 1080p 60 FPS—for the most part—glory but this time they’ve had a major graphical overhaul.
The game still looks like it’s from the late ’90s or early 2000s but Gearbox’s remaster has turned Duke from a pseudo-3D game with motion sickness inducing texture warping to a fully realized 3D game complete with ambient occlusion and colored lighting. The original Duke—albeit at a higher resolution—is just a press of the down button away for players who like throwing up every half an hour.
While 20th Anniversary Edition doesn’t include the fantastic expansions of previous games, it does include a brand new fifth episode created by two of the original Duke Nukem team members, Alien World Order. The new episode is pretty much the meat of the package and certainly pushes the twenty-year-old BUILD Engine to its absolute limits.
Alien World Order takes Duke around the world to locations such as Amsterdam, France and even Ancient Egypt. About half of these maps are very good, especially Egypt which features some of the best level design in Duke Nukem and is probably my new favorite official Duke Nukem map. The other half of these maps, however, especially the final map, are extremely disappointing.
As with any retro shooter, sprawling maps filled with high-octane action and puzzles are the greatest. They challenge your reaction time, resource management, skill and brain all at once. This is the reason why games such as Duke 3D, Doom, and Shadow Warrior have lived on in everyone’s memories as great gameplay experiences because all of these fuse together so well. The other half of Alien World Order’s levels, however, lack the maze-like, sprawling structure of great retro shooter maps.
Duke Nukem 3D was originally praised for its incredible interactivity within its stages. The “balls of steel” moment in the first level of Hollywood Holocaust will forever live on in my memory but Alien World Order fails to live up to the expectations that Duke 3D set twenty years ago. You’ll constantly find things such as bongs or adult clubs that you would expect to be able to interact within Duke’s world but you’ll be disappointed constantly.
Easter eggs are dotted all over the place in both the main game and the extra episode. The Valve-style director’s commentary will help you with some that are displayed in other languages but most of them will be discovered by you, such as the corpse of Serious Sam in Ancient Egypt, are all brilliant and bring Duke back to the level he was during the late ’90s. The optional director’s commentary is a different story, though.
Audible after interacting with little audio nodes dotted all over maps, the director’s commentary features information from level designers Allen Blum and Richard Grey about every level in Duke Nukem 3D. The commentary as a whole is a mixed bag, though, as it feels as if the participants are commentating over someone playing the game in front of them instead of the Valve way of doing things where different people on the team talk at lengths about certain aspects of the game in an isolated manner. This isn’t helped by the fact that you’ll run into instances where Blum and Grey are obviously pointing at the screen to point something out to each other that you can’t see yourself, creating a very obvious disconnect between them and you.
Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour mostly delivers a solid 60 FPS experience, which should be expected from a twenty-year-old game, even in its new True-3D Mode. Duke Nukem 3D does suffer from micro-stutter in my experience, though. Players of Duke know how important response time is and strafing around corners to quickly shotgun a Pig Cop in the face is essential to playing the game. 20th Anniversary seems to not like that as much as I do, however, especially in the earlier levels in Duke’s campaign.
Hollywood Holocaust was the worst offender when it came to the game completely locking up and Alien World Order even has minor slowdown, probably due to the rusting engine not being able to deal with the load that Blum and Grey are pushing onto it. This makes Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour even more flawed and with the power of the Xbox One and PS4 these types of performance issues should not be happening.
Summary
Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour removes a lot of the content available in the now-removed Megaton Edition but does replace it with full-3D graphics, a half-decent director’s commentary, and a half bad/half great fifth episode. World Tour is definitely worth it to people who haven’t played Duke 3D before and the new graphics and episode are probably worth a buy for old fans of the series but what Duke definitely needs is a new game, not a new remaster.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.