I make no secret of my love for 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D. I’d go as far as saying it’s the best first-person shooter ever created and has never been matched. Aided by Ken Silverman’s legendary 2.5D Build Engine, it contains some of the best level designs to ever grace the genre.
Moreover, its levels feature this strange and lonely atmosphere that I rarely ever see duplicated in games. Usually, when it is, it’s fleeting. I say it’s like an empty strip mall, but I think Dusk developer David Szymanski put it better by calling it “urban after hours atmosphere.” It’s like walking home at 3 a.m. on a summer night when everything is closed. I’m not sure it was intentional with Duke Nukem 3D, but it’s something that I connected with in my youth, and it’s something I want to recapture today.
Ironwork Game’s The Last Exterminator is a game that tries to parrot a lot of what Duke Nukem 3D did. That’s nothing new, as titles like Ion Fury and Cultic have tried to do with different levels of proximity. The difference is that judging from the demo, The Last Exterminator knows the recipe for the gravy.
Go away. We’re, like, closed.
You’re put in the boots of Kira Parker, a worn-down exterminator working her everyday job, when aliens suddenly invade and shoot up her ride. Those aliens look a lot like bugs, so Kira goes to work doing what she does best: exterminating pests.
The demo includes one level, which is your general urban exploration. However, it accurately harkens back to ‘90s shooters by cramming each crevice full of secrets held just slightly out of reach. There’s a shotgun in the bar near the opening of the level. I needed it, and I wasn’t going anywhere without figuring out a way in.
There are ways that The Last Exterminator comes a bit too close to its inspiration. The enemies, in particular, are visually reminiscent of the ones in Duke Nukem 3D. This might become less of an issue later in the game, but those cockroaches definitely look like the grunts of the Nukem army. On the other hand, they don’t necessarily act the same way. The Pig Cop analogs, for example, behave in the more feral manner that they adopted in Duke Nukem Forever.
The arsenal of weapons you pick up is less of an obvious copy. The shotgun, for example, is the much more satisfying double-barrel variety. Whether we get the same outlandish variety as The Last Exterminator’s progenitor, however, is yet to be seen.
All out of gum
The combat feels a lot closer to Quake, which is probably because the engine is fully 3D and doesn’t need to rely on hitscan. As a result, it’s more impactful at the expense of having less splatter. Oh, there’s still splatter, but exploding models don’t have the same effect as a sprite disappearing and being replaced by a spray of gibs. The engine itself is interesting because it’s designed by the developer, and that’s not something you see often these days.
Kira is also shaping up to be a pretty good approach to the action protagonist. If Duke Nukem is the Army of Darkness version of Ash Williams, then Kira is Roddy Piper’s character in They Live. She’s a more relatable working woman. She still spouts one-liners from various movies (prominently Ghostbusters, which I appreciate), but she doesn’t have the same bravado. Instead, she’s just annoyed. In particular, I love it when you pick up a medkit when she’s low on health. She states simply, “Thank Christ.” I feel that.
The level design is also pretty true to the ‘90s key-hunt formula for first-person shooters. It’s more exploration-based than narrative-focused. There’s more of feeling of playful experimentation as you delve through collapsed buildings and over rooftops. There are even places that have different routes you can take. It’s an impressive replication of a frequently misunderstood art.
The recipe for the gravy
But what is most important to me is that The Last Exterminator nails the atmosphere of Duke Nukem 3D. Playing this, Ion Fury: Aftershock, and the demo for Phantom Fury has made me really start digging deep into how I feel about that era of shooters. Moreover, why some of them succeed, and others fall short. Why do I feel more strongly about Slayers X than Turbo Overkill? What do modern attempts at the formula lose what early games so effortlessly had?
The answer is different for every shooter, but I think the most understated success of Duke Nukem 3D is its atmosphere. In a lot of ways, it’s a slower game than Doom or Quake. It forced you to pause every so often so you could solve a puzzle from atop your mountain of alien corpses. The soundtrack is calm and steady, and there are environmental sounds everywhere making the world feel a lot bigger than it was. Exploration was often done in the calm of a swept battlefield.
The Last Exterminator manages to recognize and accomplish this same atmosphere, and I am deeply impressed. Hopefully, the rest of the game can live up to the promise of the demo. I can hardly wait to find out.
