The Earth Defense Forces attempts to ensure the Earth's continued security by monitoring the future with the help of their own time machine, but both their agent and a special team sent there have been confirmed MIA. Knowing something is wrong, General Graves sends in the famous Duke Nukem.
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queria saber quem foi que decidiu que isso tava apto pra ser lançado.
Ask someone what the worst Duke Nukem game is and odds are they'll tell you it's Forever. That's because they haven't played this one. Released just a few days prior, Critical Mass actually has a very similar backstory in that it too spent some time in development hell. It's evident that Apogee Software and developer Frontline Studios had big plans for the title; intending for it to be the start of its own trilogy and even having a more impressive PSP counterpart in development that you can find footage of online. The only thing that ever ended up seeing the light of day though was this shoddy DS version.
Gameplay-wise it's a lot like Manhattan Project, which itself was a throwback to the first two Duke Nukem games on MS-DOS. So it's another action-platformer in the series where you blast your way through aliens in a 2D side-scrolling format. It's competent enough, but level design is often haphazard with side paths that weirdly enough sometimes don't lead to anything. Plus, the most effective way to avoid cheap deaths is to simply run forward while holding down the fire button, killing enemies before they appear onscreen. That way you don't have to fight off attacks from two directions at once when the stages decide to spawn in foes behind you. That's not really much fun. The devs tried to prevent things from getting too monotonous by including over the shoulder third-person shooting and first-person sniping segments, among others. These sequences get overused however, and the controls are usually awful so their novelty wears off pretty quick.
A surprising amount of effort went into the storytelling aspect of all this. The cutscenes may look like pixelated garbage (and Duke somehow has the worst, least detailed character model in the game), but the voice work is undeniably high-quality with the titular hero himself even uttering more than just simple one liners. It kind of ends up being for naught though as the plot basically ends up going nowhere due to the abrupt cliffhanger ending that will never see a resolution, but I was still left fairly impressed. Also impressive is the amount of raunchy content they were able to slip in on Nintendo hardware. The franchise is well-known for its more adult oriented elements, and while this tame compared to most of its predecessors, there's more T'n'A here than you would expect.
Overall, it has some creative and compelling ideas, but the lackluster execution really holds Critical Mass back. I could see myself revisiting it as a guilty pleasure to find the last of the collectibles or if I was on need of some mindless entertainment on a long trip or something. Yet, that doesn't change the fact that unless you're a hardcore Duke fan looking to complete your collection, this isn't worth seeking out.
5/10
Gameplay-wise it's a lot like Manhattan Project, which itself was a throwback to the first two Duke Nukem games on MS-DOS. So it's another action-platformer in the series where you blast your way through aliens in a 2D side-scrolling format. It's competent enough, but level design is often haphazard with side paths that weirdly enough sometimes don't lead to anything. Plus, the most effective way to avoid cheap deaths is to simply run forward while holding down the fire button, killing enemies before they appear onscreen. That way you don't have to fight off attacks from two directions at once when the stages decide to spawn in foes behind you. That's not really much fun. The devs tried to prevent things from getting too monotonous by including over the shoulder third-person shooting and first-person sniping segments, among others. These sequences get overused however, and the controls are usually awful so their novelty wears off pretty quick.
A surprising amount of effort went into the storytelling aspect of all this. The cutscenes may look like pixelated garbage (and Duke somehow has the worst, least detailed character model in the game), but the voice work is undeniably high-quality with the titular hero himself even uttering more than just simple one liners. It kind of ends up being for naught though as the plot basically ends up going nowhere due to the abrupt cliffhanger ending that will never see a resolution, but I was still left fairly impressed. Also impressive is the amount of raunchy content they were able to slip in on Nintendo hardware. The franchise is well-known for its more adult oriented elements, and while this tame compared to most of its predecessors, there's more T'n'A here than you would expect.
Overall, it has some creative and compelling ideas, but the lackluster execution really holds Critical Mass back. I could see myself revisiting it as a guilty pleasure to find the last of the collectibles or if I was on need of some mindless entertainment on a long trip or something. Yet, that doesn't change the fact that unless you're a hardcore Duke fan looking to complete your collection, this isn't worth seeking out.
5/10