Duke Nukem 64

The Good
Duke Nukem 64's biggest perk is that it is one of the most gun happy games on the N64. Players can unlock numerous fire arms and have a distinct array of weapons to use including sub-machine guns, shot guns, grenade launchers, and even pipe bombs. This allows you to get creative with your choice of weaponry and will keep several people playing for a long time.

The levels are some of the largest and most expansive in the Nintendo 64's library of First Person Shooters (For the uninformed-- a game which takes place from the perspective of your character's eyes and you would interact with the environment in a way the mimics the way you would in the real world). Many of the levels have hidden (and useful) secrets such as more ammo, weapons, babes to rescue, and special power ups as well. Players will spend a lot of time in the game searching for these hidden treasures, and since you time is not factored into your performance for each level, you can take as long as you want to play each one.

Duke Nukem is also fun simply because the main character, Duke Nukem, is a great protagonist. Rather than coming off as a cliche action hero, Duke Nukem is the opposite and instead combines aspects from many action heroes and becomes a parody of the genre. When your main character is using such memorable quotes as "I ain't got time to bleed" or "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I am all out of gum", it's very hard to not like him.

The Bad
Unfortunately, save for the main menu screen, Duke Nukem does not feature any music what so ever. This means that players walk around gigantic levels with no sound at all. While this may make it more scary when enemies pop out of nowhere, these moments don't happen often and so you may grow more bored than you ever thought you would in a shooter.

The graphics are also another slight let down. While the game is more than fully playable and doesn't suffer from any glitches, it doesn't use full 64 bit graphics, resulting in flat enemies, flat environments, and an overall feeling of a 2-D world attempting to be 3-D.

The game also suffers from ridiculous and unclear objectives. While players may jump at the chance of finding 3 different key cards in EVERY level, good luck finding them. Often times it is incredibly difficult to find these cards and once found it becomes insanely difficult just simply figuring out where to go. Since Duke only says "Where is it?" when prompted, and game provides no map or objective (even Doom on the Super Nintendo had a map screen), most gamers will be left staring at the wall for the most of their duration in harder levels.

The Bottom Line
Duke Nukem is a very solid game for the N64 and most people will enjoy their time finding its many secrets, and killing its numerous enemies with its humorous protagonist. Unfortunately, Duke Nukem has not aged as well as many other titles, as evident from the difficulty of navigation, the lack of a soundtrack, and the mainly flat graphics, which may bring down the experience a bit for some. Despite all this, Duke Nukem retains several stand out qualities and people who play this game will understand why these games were such a big deal almost 10 years ago.