Duke Nukem Advance (GBA)

 

Hail to the portable king, baby

Box art for Duke Nukem Advance, it uses the same artwork as Duke 3D

So, when you think about the Gameboy Advance and the kinds of games you would play on it, you might be thinking platformers like Mario, JRPG like the classic ported Final Fantasy games but something you probably wouldn’t think about are First Person Shooters. There are several FPS games on the GBA, much to my surprise. From Doom, which still stands as one of my favourite ways to play Doom on a console (At least until the modern Unity and Nightdive ports), to 007 Nightfire, Serious Sam and, today’s subject matter, the king of 90’s FPS, Duke Nukem.

Now, I had heard that this game was pretty good, but when I booted it up, I was a little hesitant. The game was brought to us by an Australian developer, Torus Games, who made the port of Doom 2 for the GBA, which stands as my least favourite way to play Doom on a console! The original Doom on GBA was quite impressive and worked quite well, but Doom 2 is just frustrating more than anything else. I must give them credit that they put Doom 2, in pretty much its entirety, onto the GBA and whilst two maps were split in two due to their size, it still had pretty much everything else, including the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind encounters, which were absent from the Doom ports based off the Atari Jaguar maps.

Duke at Area 51 using his desert eagle to fight Alien grunts

Enough Doom, though, let’s talk Duke. Duke Nukem for GBA is a totally new and standalone adventure for Duke. Aliens are growing a hybrid army on the earth and need to be stopped, so armed with a decent array of classic Duke 3D weapons and some compressed Duke lines he is once again off to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and you better believe he is all out of gum. Honestly, this game is incredibly solid, whilst there is a clunky way to aim vertically, there isn’t much of a need to, as vertical auto-aiming helps you deal with any height variation the game throws at you. Levels are designed incredibly competently to avoid sections where you need to fight with the auto-aiming. The controls are intuitive though the jumping can be a little bit awkward at times, graciously there is not many sections that require accurate platforming, most of the time will be spent running, strafing and blasting. Though, I did have some issues with the weapon selection, this was more of an issue with how the emulator was registering me pressing the select button, as it should cause a menu to drop down, and you can cycle through the weapons with the shoulder buttons. For myself, the menu would come down and immediately go back up and it was a bit of potluck if I managed to cycle to a new weapon.

Duke fighting a Pig Cop at a supermarket in Australia

But, yes, weapons! We get some classics and a few new ones. Duke’s classic shotgun, the RPG, pipe bombs, freeze ray and shrinker all make a return and feel just as good as the original game. Well, the pipe bombs can be a little difficult to aim and the range on them seems significantly smaller, so besides the pipe bombs, everything is good. We also have a new pistol, a desert eagle, it works as a last resort weapon. There is the MP5, which replaces the chain gun cannon from the original, but functions the exact same, spitting out lead making quick work of most of the enemies. For my playthrough it was my go-to weapon, mostly because I was struggling with cycling weapons effectively. Finally, there is the Lead Cannon, an upgrade to the shotgun that fires 4 shells at once, it’s… Serviceable, a bit overkill if I think about it. The shotgun is effective and this is one that just eats up more ammo. It also doesn’t help that late game the pig cop enemies don’t appear so ammo for the shotgun gets scarce incredibly quickly.

Duke using the MP5 against an Enforcer in Egypt

Speaking of pig cops, plenty of familiar faces from Duke 3D, from the alien grunts, the lizard-like Enforcers and octobrains. There are a few new enemies, including the new alien hybrid who looks like one of those stereotypical looking Grey aliens you see, they shoot projectiles at you, but can also revive dead enemies. No where near as annoying as an Archvile from Doom 2, but still very annoying when there are multiple of them and you’re trying to manage things. There are a few more late game enemies, such as little alien crabs and eggs but they aren’t anything particularly special to talk about in my opinion. There are a few boss encounters as well to test your skills against, one of them is more of a puzzle than a boss, but it is a puzzle in that you need to find some switches and lure the boss into a crusher.

The game isn’t terribly long, with about 19 levels divided between 4 acts. There are no secret levels, but plenty of secrets to find. Sadly, none of them are easter eggs or anything of that sort, which was always one of the more, I suppose, charming parts of Duke 3D. But I think this game captures the essence of the Duke 3D experience sans most of the sleaze. If you are looking for a decent shooter for the GBA, I don’t think you can go too wrong with this. It does everything it needs to do, providing a solid gameplay and whilst some levels can be a little challenging in terms of where to go, some of Sydney levels suffer from this, and there are two levels in the final act that are somewhat hard to navigate, but there is a map function so with any luck if you do get lost it won’t take you long to figure out where you are going. Visually, it might take some getting used to, as I can appreciate that the game could look like a pixelated mess, and perhaps this is just me, but I didn’t find the visuals to be off-putting, though if I had to play this on an original GBA without a backlit screen, I think I might be singing a slightly different tune! For a portable Duke outing that was released in 2002, I don’t think you could have gone too far wrong with this one.