Duke Nukem Forever: The Doctor Who Cloned Me Review
Throw a dog a clone.
It's a definite improvement. Duke Nukem Forever's latest batch of DLC feels like an attempt to replace the game's original campaign with something a little less wobbly, and it just about manages that. The storyline is a touch wittier: Duke's fighting an army made from clones of himself before jetting off into space to really stick it to the alien menace again. The pacing doesn't seem quite so haphazard and the grim lady grot has been confined, more or less, to an eleventh-hour visit to a brothel - a sequence that feels more like a contractual obligation than anything the developers actually thought was a good idea.
As campaigns go, this four-hour episode, with its own beginning, middle and end, is better than the main event in every way imaginable. Sadly, it's still not particularly good.
The problem is pretty simple: The Doctor Who Cloned Me can improve on the detailing all it wants, but it can't escape the fact that it has to build on the original game's rotten framework. That means the same arsenal of weightless, ineffectual weaponry wedged into the same two slots, the same boxy art assets, and the same lengthy loading times between levels. The locations may zip past a lot faster and the references may be a little more current - Portal gets a nod this time, instead of Team America - but it's still a bit of a slog as you move from one cramped interior to another, stopping now and then for a limp forklift puzzle or a painful bit of first-person platforming.