So I finally got round to getting my First Access Club demo key for Duke Nukem Forever, but to be honest I was a tad unimpressed by the experience.

For some reason the resolution, despite being at maximum, is still kind of bad; everything is sort of fuzzy. The models of the characters are quite out-dated, and the gameplay itself feels like that of something released nearly 10 years ago. I still had some fun with it, though, and I never truly had any expectations of any groundbreaking gameplay or ideas. It’s a Duke-fest, with nostalgic comments and scenes that take me back to some of the memories of Duke 3D, but so far nothing more.

The highlight for me was writing ‘dick’ and ‘tits’ in varying colours of pen on the whiteboard next to a commanding soldier who then proceeded to praise my plan to take down the huge monster on the football field, so I did get at least a few laughs out of the typically immature-but-spot-on Duke humour. The demo is only about 30 minutes long so I can’t imagine it’s really enough time to get a great feel for all of the content in the game, but apparently the full game is going to be around 17 hours long. This is ample time for there to be a lot more to see and do, and maybe even redeem the let-down of the simple, rather empty demo. Pretty sure this won’t be a day-one purchase though, as I simply can’t afford to gamble at the moment; I learned my lesson about pre-ordering on faith alone when I bought Naughty Bear.