The famous "Come get some!" line from Duke Nukem 3D served as a phone call to boxing. This was a crewcut-sporting action hero who also wanted people to hail him as the male monarch, then he wasn't exactly big on introspective moments. But at present we've moved on to the 20th Anniversary Earth Tour edition of this revolutionary 1996 shooter, and I have to ask myself if I still desire some of what the Duke is offering. And I'm afraid that I have to politely--and somewhat regretfully--decline.

Equally much as the original game is one of my favorites from the aureate age of PC gaming, this slightly enhanced, expanded revamp is worth lilliputian more than than a cursory look back to see how far nosotros've come up in the past 2 decades. And it's not like we haven't been down this route earlier. Duke Nukem 3D has been re-released a number of times over the past xx years, most recently as office of the encyclopedic Megaton Edition that hit Steam in early 2013 just has since been pulled offline to make way for this new version.

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Now Playing: Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary - Raw Meat Gameplay

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20th Anniversary Earth Tour is slightly different from other re-releases, though. For starters, this edition contains some visual and audio refinements. The appearance of every level has been subtly improved, and new lighting gives the game a cleaner, less murky expect--although everything's still very pixelated, to the point where enemies morph into mesomorphic blobs of colour when they get close. Y'all can freely flip betwixt the former and new visuals, which lets you lot see merely how superior the lighting is today. Withal, it'due south tough to pick out fine details in level architecture, which can lead to some scavenger hunts to find the way forwards. This was a problem back in the day, and information technology remains ane now. Every bit with the graphics, the core sounds and music have been cleaned upwardly to just audio better while non losing the 1990s charm of the original effects. And original Duke Nukem 3D vocalisation actor Jon St. John has re-recorded all of the Duke's iconic quips and added a few new ones, giving new life to the game's activeness-moving-picture show-hero vibe.

Just the new visual features are a little understated. A more thorough visual remastering would've fabricated the game a little easier on the eyes--and more acceptable to a modern audience. Equally it is, the game is ugly by today'due south standards, especially in close-quarters battles. Fifty-fifty if you like the retro-purist approach, it wouldn't accept hurt to have provided more extreme graphical improvements so that gamers could brand the call whether or not to go sometime school.

Another big modify is the addition of a new fifth episode titled Alien World Order. This affiliate allows you to keep rolling with the Knuckles subsequently the original decision of the game and battle the extraterrestrials in seven new levels ready all over the globe. You blow up baddies in the seedy ruby-low-cal district of Amsterdam, near Cherry Square in Moscow, through the tweedy laneways of London with Big Ben looming overhead, amidst the ruins of ancient Egypt in Cairo, in the quaint streets of Paris, alongside the devastated Golden Gate Span in San Francisco, and finally caput back to Hollywood and outer space for a new boss battle (that doesn't conduct anything close to the impact of the stadium boxing that closed the original Duke Nukem 3D). Every level has been designed as it would've been back in 1996, with the same focus on finding your fashion through maze-like corridors, securing central cards to unlock doors, and, of class, blasting mobs of aliens.

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All of the new levels are challenging, and they slot in nicely with the originals. If you're playing the game in order--and you lot don't have to hither, since everything is unlocked from the outset of play--the new episode flows seamlessly from the quondam ones. But yous have to really be committed to the original game (and its at present-very-dated mode of play) to fully appreciate these new levels. I was initially impressed by just how much the developers nailed the item design sensibilities of the original Duke Nukem 3D--but then became annoyed past how little they sought to better things. Level pattern is labyrinthine in besides many places, and searching for the key cards needed to open up doors merely grew steadily more annoying every bit I plugged through Knuckles's globe tour.

Taken together, the old and new levels reminded me of how odd the original Duke Nukem 3D was. It had all the superficial trappings of a run-and-gun shooter just also intricate, maze-like level design with a ton of interactive features (including some decidedly non-politically correct moments that helped make the game such gleeful, raunchy fun).

Even though there'southward a lot of content offered upwardly hither, information technology isn't as complete a package as the i offered simply a couple of years ago on Steam.

I concluding noteworthy change between the 20th Anniversary World Tour accept on Duke Nukem 3D and some of its preceding re-releases is the corporeality of content. While the 2013 Megaton edition collected all of the original Duke Nukem 3D content, including the Knuckles It Out in D.C., Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach, and Duke: Nuclear Winter expansion packs released in the late '90s, this i features just the core four episodes from the original Atomic Edition of the game from late 1996 and the new episode described above. And so fifty-fifty though there's a lot of content here, it isn't as complete a package as the i offered only a couple of years ago on Steam.

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Non much else distinguishes the 20th Anniversary Knuckles Nukem 3D from its predecessors. A commentary choice lets y'all go the skinny on various parts of the original levels, though in that location isn't much of it, and the comments seem to mostly focus on the beginning levels of each episode. The game also includes full multiplayer forth with Workshop support for homemade user maps. Finally, it features the innovative replay-slider salvage system that lets yous rewind the activity to any merely-played point in the level every time you dice.

Even though I wanted to beloved Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Ceremony World Bout, if even just to dig into the nostalgia evoked past replaying a game that captivated a lot of my spare fourth dimension in 1996, the only emotion aroused was a sense of amazement at merely how far shooters take come in terms of graphics, immersion, and level design in 20 years. The Duke may forever be the king, but he'due south the rex of 1996, and his game is and then set in a particular time and place that it should probably be left in that location.