Custom 7-levels episode for Duke Nukem 3D (Atomic), with new stuff as enemies, textures, sounds and music. You will fight the aliens through high mountains, big lagoons, a village, sewers and more!!! I finished this work along 2 years (unconstantly), and after 9 years from my last work for Duke Nukem, "The Last Goodbye" (2007). This uses a modified EDUke32.exe (included with rar file), and was tested only for Win64 version (Win 10), but should run for 32 bits and Linux.
This map pack starts good but gets tiresome.
It is a great looking set of levels that happen to be gigantic. The first level, with the mountains and scenery, had me daydreaming about travelling to USA and seeing views like that in person.
As I made progress through it the problems began piling up. Enemies are everywhere, and when you have cleared an area and return to it later new enemies have spawned. The issue is that they are often so many that they slow down the game as opposed to add to it.
It feels ridiculous to complain about enemies being everywhere, but it is a thing you understand easily once you've experienced it: You’re a high-speed dude, who manage to feel sluggish because you can’t go fast. High-health and high-damage enemies show up early, and soon by very large numbers, so the battles all feel like chores. You have to stop and strafe and you have to take two steps back every time you take a step forward in the right direction, and then two steps forward and four steps back as you return to an old repopulated area.
When you play Duke Nukem 3d you notice that all the battles and encounters with the aliens vary in intensivity. Sometimes you're able to find a lone alien, sometimes you can launch a suprise attack. Then you make some major progress and a whole bunch of them might appear to have at you. Some battles are over in a few seconds, others are a little longer because you needed to take cover from shotgun blasts. When a area has been cleared you can pipe down until you've done collecting pickups and prepare for what's ahead.
In this map pack, almost every battle is as intensive as they can be. The difficulty of the levels escalates by the number of enemies that appears, disregarding the difficulty setting the player choose when starting a new game. There are already almost a hundred enemies in the first level alone – halfway through the mod they are over two hundred. This is not Duke Nukem - It is Serious Sam… With keycards.
Getting stuck trying to find the next hidden door or key card is a pain we all must deal with at times, but the size of the maps magnifies the problem. The labyrinthic design of the indoor levels (toxic bath, Pestilence, Duke Is Here) coupled with the classic bland textures makes getting lost easier, and because of the size, backtracking to the wrong area costs you tons of time despite the wonderful running speed. And the moment you make a inch of progress, bam! tons of high-health enemies!
I recommend this batch of levels to those that bought & loved Serious Sam first and foremost. The amount of killing required to get through is either going to be the best thing ever or the greatest timewaste.