4/5 ★ – letshugbro's review of Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour.

Satisfying to finally play Duke Nukem 3D after many years of reading breathless hype and praise in Nintendo Official Magazine and GamesMaster. It almost lives up to its reputation, but coming into this hot off DOOM 64's molten heels meant I couldn't help but compare the two - and Duke often came off worse, even though he can jump and Doomguy can't. Early on in the game, there's a snippet of developer commentary (the World Tour edition comes with a bunch of cool features) where the Duke 3D level designer and programmer complain about their own game's puzzles - "If I'm honest, the puzzles in this game just involve running around looking for the door that a switch just opened. Kinda pointless. I prefer how they do it in Call of Duty. I just wanna kill things." ... And he's right! Duke 3D excels at guns and enemies and stupid one-liners. When you're fiddling with buttons and platforms, it gets stale pretty quickly. Fortunately, the devs kindly provide you with a jetpack item that often allows you to skip minutes of gameplay at a time. Very convenient! There's a lot of things in this game that you simply can't imagine happening in a 21st century video game and it's nice and refreshing and good. Unfortunately, the new 21st century World Tour levels are kinda weak - there's an over-reliance on huge open spaces which simply don't lend themselves to solid gameplay in the same ways as the tight corridor shooting of the originals. Still, I can't help but love the Amsterdam level (resplendent with weed aliens and dev commentary about how cRazY coffee shops are) and a London level that involves blowing up Whitehall and Big Ben. Yeah baby, that's the good stuff.