This is the sequel to Duke Nukem. In the last game, Duke destroyed a bunch of robots and destroyed their creator, Dr. Proton, who vowed to use his robots to take over the world. While Duke is interviewed about his new book “Why I’m So Great”, he is beamed up into a ship by a race known as the Rigelatins. On the ship, he is hooked up to a machine, which manipulates Duke’s brain patterns and uses them to conquer Earth.

Duke frees himself, then escapes. In Duke Nukem II, there are four episodes consisting of eight levels and four bosses. Each episode has similar gameplay to Duke Nukem. The only differences are the addition of weapons. Instead of Duke’s default weapon, you have three other weapons that you are likely to pick up, including the laser shot, flame thrower, and rocket launcher. My personal favorite is the flame thrower. Besides doing massive amounts of damage to enemies and bosses, it can be used as a jetpack, so you can take a short cut somewhere in the level, rather than taking a long way to get where you need to go. These weapons can be found by shooting the green boxes.

At the start of the game, Duke starts off with eight health units as he has in Duke Nukem. One health unit is lost when Duke touches, or is shot at, by enemies, including soldiers, spiders, cyborgs, birds, or monsters throwing eyeballs, and even turret guns (which cannot be destroyed with Duke’s default weapon). When Duke loses all his health units, Duke will have to restart the level as usual.

If you have less than five health units, and you’re worried that you’ll lose them all quickly, then chances are that inside a red box will be a six pack of soda cans, that will give you six more health units instead of one, or the red box will reveal a napalm bomb, making your current situation worse. Health units are also awarded if you find and shoot a turkey.

Silver boxes will reveal some items that you need to complete the level, including a blue key, a computer board, or a cloaking device. Some of these boxes will contain the letters N, U, K, E, or M, which you can collect (in this sequence) to be awarded 100,000 points, or a rapid fire power-up, which gives you rapid shots. With this, you can keep holding down the ALT key to continually fire holes in enemies as you go left or right. The blue boxes contains items such as T-shirts, danger shades, computer games, video tapes, video games, and boom boxes that will help you get the most points.

At the end of each level, you are given a bonus if you do certain tasks, such as shooting all spy cameras in a level, completing the level without any health lost, and breaking all crystals and not getting them for points, and are represented by a number from 1 to 7. More often than not, I would get Bonus #6, destroying all the napalm bombs in the level.

There is a blue globe in some levels, which you can place in some machine to get hints on where a certain key or computer board is located. In each episode, Duke must find and destroy several radar dishes scattered throughout a level to prevent him from being tracked. Very rarely, Duke will find a ship that helps him manoeuvre through a level, blasting enemies with its deadly gun. Also, in a few levels, you are likely to see a TV appear from the right, showing a Rigelatin saying such lines like “Your brain is ours”, “Bring back the brain”, or even “Die!”.

The Bad

Duke 2 features Sound Blaster digitized sound effects, but if you’re playing the game on today’s computers, you will not hear gun shots or Duke’s dying sound, apart from Duke saying “I’m back”, and will have no choice but to select Adlib or the PC Speaker through the game options menu. Even Moslo does not work to solve this problem. All it will do is slow the game down. If you’re lucky, however, you can disable the CPU cache in the BIOS, restart the system, and try again.

The Bottom Line

The game’s graphics are excellent, better than the first Duke Nukem game. At the end of episode four, there’s even a mention about a Duke Nukem 3D, which tells the adventures of Duke in a first-person view. ****½