Duke Nukem 3D for the iPhone, developed by , is a straight port of the iconic 1996 first-person shooter. Sadly, the many hours of gameplay are rendered more a chore than a good-natured stroll down memory lane with your crazy gun-loving, chauvinistic friend Duke. Marred by a broken control system and the absence of multiplayer features or secret levels, Duke Nukem 3D for the iPhone gives a "mighty boot" to already beaten-down Duke Nukem fanbase.
Like the original, Duke Nukem 3D for the iPhone puts the player in the boots of Duke Nukem, a gun-toting, chauvinistic blond-haired muscleman who is humanity's only hope to fight the alien invasion and save the female population of earth from enslavement. It's a first-person shooter that was innovative at the time for its level of interactivity with the environment and the non-linear levels. (Duke at one point sports his trade-mark jetpack to take the fight vertical.)
In that vein, Machineworks Northwest deserves credit for staying true to the source material. The iconic hard rock soundtrack is back, as is Duke's not-at-all-dated one-liners. He's got his full arsenal of weapons, including an RPG launcher, shrink-ray, shotgun, and so on. The levels are all ported from the original, making Duke Nukem 3D one of the longest iPhone games to date. Multiplayer, sadly, is not available with the current release.
People often forget, but 12 years ago, Duke Nukem 3D was controversial game on the market. It featured strippers, mutated cops in the form of pigs, thinly-veiled digs at its rival Doom franchise, and a chauvinistic, gun-toting macho man as the protagonist. All of these elements are now on the iPhone (here, the strippers have more clothes on) but the controversy surrounding the franchise is no longer due to the content of the games but the development staff behind those games. The ongoing saga of has overshadowed whatever offensive chicanery Duke could ever hope to inflict.
Perhaps 3D Realms was afraid of releasing an unfinished product, and after playing Duke Nukem 3D for the iPhone, I can see why. Duke has always been a bit of a stiff, but the iPhone touchscreen controls make him maneuver like Frankenstein dipped in liquid nitrogen. The controls go from frustrating to functional to unbearable over the course of the first few levels. There are two control schemes--"digital" and "analog." The analog essentially creates two joysticks, one to manipulate movement, the other to manipulate aiming. The default settings are very sensitive, so some fine-tuning of this setup is required before use. Even then it's a clunky setup as you'll constantly have to choose between moving, aiming, and using the action buttons to shoot, jump, and duck.