NeoRaider
Member
The worst offender is just the lack of care taken with integrating Duke into the regular game. While all of Grayson's lines are redubbed, the lip syncing on Duke's character model is not. In the opening scenes, you'll see Duke muttering a few choice words with his lips then continuing to move like some awful Hollywood dub job. They don't even bother to change the animations, having Duke move his arms and point to things without mentioning them.
All of the characters from Bulletstorm have their dialog remain untouched, so Ishi and Trishka will still refer to Duke as Grayson. While this might be initially funny (with Duke asking, ”Who the hell is Grayson?"), it becomes a big problem later down the line. Like I said, Duke has a huge ego, so he would never stand for not being addressed by his actual name.
Then there is just the general delivery that Jon St. John (Duke's longtime voice actor) brings to the table. This has to be the sloppiest I've ever heard Duke sound. Even my sister, who has a huge fondness of Duke from the ‘90s, was baffled that this didn't really sound like The King. I know Mr. St. John has aged, but I've met the man in person and he can still deliver the old lines. I think he just truly didn't care or felt disrespected that Gearbox wasn't doing something else with the character.
Really, why was Duke even placed into Bulletstorm? I think that can be answered quite easily: pre-order culture. Gearbox doesn't give a crap about what happens with Duke Nukem. This company shut down a fan-made free remake of Duke Nukem 3D seemingly because it would have upstaged their lazy port of the game from last year. No, they just wanted some incentive to get people blindly dropping money on their recently acquired intellectual property.
Pre-order culture has become a massive problem in mainstream triple-A gaming. We see sometimes significant content being gated off for people who don't take leaps of faith before a title is even released. This has led to tremendous flops like Deus Ex having an "augment your pre-order" campaign or retailers getting exclusive content for specific games to incentivize people to shop at their outlet.
Then again, this is the same company that lied to our faces about Aliens: Colonial Marines and continues to exhibit shady business practices. Why did I expect anything more from them? I'm mostly just disappointed that his happened to two things I actually like. Despite Duke Nukem Forever being a flaming trash pile, I'll never forget my time with 3D and how creative its level design is.
Duke Nukem is goofy and crass, sure, but that doesn't mean he can't work in a modern space. Duke just can't work under the care of Gearbox because they don't care about anything but the bottom line. For that matter, because of launching Full Clip Edition at $50, I'm almost certain Gearbox has washed their hands of anything to do with a sequel. Maybe I'm underestimating the cost required to rebuild a game for newer consoles, but releasing this for $30 would have given it the shot in the arm that the original never had.
So what does this mean for Duke Nukem's Bulletstorm Tour? I'm sad to say this, but I feel it's a total failure. It might be worth a chuckle or two, but this easily should have been a feature included in the remaster and not some extra DLC. If you didn't pre-order Full Clip Edition, then don't even bother dealing with this. Duke is dead on arrival for his tour and that is a shame.
Also they are selling version of the game with DN for 5€/$ more, compared to the standard edition, which doesn't include DN.
More: https://www.destructoid.com/duke-nukem-s-bulletstorm-tour-is-a-big-failure-430284.phtml