Duke Nukem 3D Mac Review (1998)

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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published March 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

You are DukeNukem, ready to kick some alien butts! Aliens have invaded LA and it’s up to you to wipem out!

Gameplay

I really enjoyed the gameplay of Duke. There’s 4 different episodes each with 7 to 11 levels and different plots. I think the best feature of this game is the interaction with Duke’s environment. Opening doors, shooting holes in the wall, blowing up toilets and garbage cans, riding subway trains, and handing money to the exotic dancers (making them strip) are just some of the cool things you can do with Duke you can also relieve yourself in the toilet. It’s a standard 3D shootem up game, you use the arrow keys to move around, fire, crouch, jump, use items such as a Jetpak or steroids. In each level there are many different guns and aliens to pick up and wipe out. I think the best part of Duke is the sound effects, the sounds are great this has the best sound effects of any Shootem up game I’ve played. But where Duke excels in sound it lacks in graphics, Duke was a straight Mac port which means the graphics weren’t redone like LucasArts did for DarkForces and therefor the graphics in Duke look very blocky.

Interface, Difficulty, and Reliability

Lion did a good job of porting Duke, all the options have Mac dialogue boxes unlike Doom. Changing the controls, sound, and difficulty is very very simple.

I found Duke Nukem refreshingly challenging compared to Doom and DarkForces, if you had trouble finishing Dark Forces or Doom then this isn’t the game for you.

You can play Duke Nukem an infinite amount of times using 3rd party maps and/or playing multiplayer games. It’s very fun playing multiplayer games knowing you’re playing against a real person.

Conclusion

In conclusion Duke Nukem 3D is a very good game. I would recommend buying it unless, you don’t buy that many games and have a high end PPC Mac in which case I would say wait for MacQuake.

Find a copy

Duke Nukem 3D has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Duke Nukem 3D on Amazon.

Ratings use the MGA’s original 1–5 apple scale. Prices, system requirements and web links in this review are from the time it was written.