Parent's Guide: Duke Nukem Forever - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Duke Nukem Forever puts you in the butt-kicking boots of Duke Nukem, a muscle-bound meat head, who saves the world and looks good doing it. The story here is that aliens have invaded the planet, and are stealing all the "babes". Nothing annoys Duke more than when someone messes with his "chicks", and so Duke sets off on a mission to, as he puts it "kick ass and chew bubblegum - and I'm all out of gum."

With three difficulty levels on offer, you can scale down the challenge the game presents, and, when you strip out most of extreme content, what's left is actually a lot of fun. As a first person shooter, you'll be defending yourself against aliens across a variety of levels, with logic, and physics based puzzles regularly breaking up the gameplay, and helping to test the grey matter. The game also has a unique sense of humour too, which in one level sees Duke getting shrunk down to just a few inches in height, where he commandeers a radio controlled car. It's often quite funny, but also very adult in humour, and not for the easily offended.

Where do we start? In a nutshell, Duke Nukem Forever is not suitable for children to play, and if we were to make a list of everything people may object to in the game, it'd likely be longer than the review.

The game kicks off with Duke peeing in a urinal (a prompt pops up asking you to p*ss), and gets cruder from there on in. From pretty much the second you start, there's strong, and regular swearing (the f word, along with practically every other swear word you can think of), and very early on in the game, there's implied oral sex. There are also levels involving you having to hunt out a sex toy, and a condom in a strip club, a numerous other references to sex.

The game also has an obsession with breasts. From the strippers who give you lap dances, with their breasts fully exposed, to an alien boss that has three huge, exposed breasts, to the breasts that can be found hanging from the inside of the one level, the Hive, which you can press X in order to poke, at which point they squirt something over you, and Duke quips about how "it's so wrong... yet... so right!", there are breasts everywhere in the game - human and otherwise.

The game also allows you to use steroids (taken orally rather than as an injection), which makes you stronger in melee combat, while drinking beer, we're assured "makes you tougher". Yes.

Sadly, Duke Nukem Forever doesn't allow for split-screen play - although it does let you play online across a variety of multiplayer modes. You can level up for completing various goals online, and earn rewards that let you customise your Duke. It's all pretty cool, but split-screen play would have been cooler.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360