4/10.

Boring, repetitive. Janky controls. Kicking enemies didn't work half the time. Double jump didn't work half the time. All the levels are on rooftops and look the same. Fight the same 2-3 enemies with the same 2-3 guns. Worst part is after having played it for 30 min, and the game said my progress was saved, on the main menu my game wasn't in the load screen. When trying to do new game it gave the option to type in a name of the save game for the new game I was starting, of which it didn't do the first time. No thanks game, not going to waste me time replaying because you can't save a game properly.

Best game tbh(to be honest)

Only been able to play this for a few minutes before it crashed. In spite of a lot of trying, haven't been able to get this to run again.

Don't recommend if you have a Mac with O/S Maverick or later.


Update: The last patch and it is now running fine.

You lose your double jump if you touch anything(ceiling, wall, etc.) while jumping.
Some questionable level design, especially with Nuke placement.
It was originally a budget title, it shows.

So very, very mediocrely designed. It's also painfully slow. It's not really a bad game so much as missing the point of old duke.

This is not too bad but many level is too long and impossible to find the maps
not good enough to buy

Manhattan Project is not a good game. Few new Duke's quotes wont save this empty game. You are just jumping and shooting everything in your screen, sometimes you save random babe and sometimes you fight a Boss. The bosses are made pretty good for this game. But all those levels with stupid enemies and not even one easter egg or something to laugh is a bit frustrating. And what is worst, the game as it continues has more and more complex levels, where you just run around in circles to find some colored key card. And you can get pretty lost in these mazes. So if you are a great fan of Duke like me, you should give it a try. But if you dont like Duke or dont even know him, spend your money on some other game.

There could be only one reason to buy it: If you like retro games. If not, forget about it. Old, awful graphics, bad gameplay etc...

lame 2d contra clone except its not fun and has worse graphics then super contra. worth $1 at most

Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project is sort of spin-off game for Duke Nukem, that came out in 2002, made by Sunstorm and shocked every Duke Nukem 3D hipster by being a platformer. Little did they know that Duke Nukem was a platformer before 3D. Then again, it's surprising that it came for PC instead of some console at that period of time. Oh, and came to Xbox Live and iOS too.

Also, note that Steam release actually got some love, and as result it allows widescreen and better controller support. All yay for such rereleases!

The plot of this platformer is that Aliens once again invaded. What aliens? Well, it's actually robots and mutants. And you have to blame Mech Morphix, who is like Proton from Duke Nukem 1 but with beard, with his GLOPP, which mutates animals and insects into huge anthro forms. With guns. And so Duke double jumps up and moves to find keycards, rescue bomb-strapped babes and go sight-seeing the most boring stereotypical levels. At least he didn't lose his one-liners.

The game actually has 8 levels with 3 parts in each, with boss battle at the end of the third part. And each part has 10 nukes, collecting which will give you tiny health and ammo bonus. Each part also requires you to find one key and one babe before exiting, being mazey.

And it sure shows that it was platformer that came in 2002. It was very weak time for side-scrolling action. By this time gaming scene was so self-wrapped in 3D concept, that developers forgot how to make a good 2D platformer. And that was before the famous indie-explosion too. Good things in 2D genres were happening only on Gameboy Advance thanks to Japanese developers, so it's hard to blame PC developers of that time for delivering such mediocre product.

I mean, if you take a look at game mechanics, it feels a lot more in common with FPS than with classics. Instead of shooting projectiles and avoiding them, the hits here are instant. It worked in more tactical slower-paced positional side-scrollers like Flashback, but here Duke Nukem is positioned as a straight action game. The first episode feels pretty promising, where there is enough verticallity and positioning variety to make you think before jumping into action, or just to throw a pipebomb at a certain angle, reminding a bit of arcade Shinobi or Terminator for Sega CD. But soon in second level you will meet uzi gators who will shoot you as soon as they appear on a screen, making damage mostly unavoidable unless you shoot blindly while running. And soon you are confined into tiny underground corridors where you don't even have space to jump.

Actually, instead of straight health, the game uses "ego". Actually, it's like hitpoints, but you gain some points for killing enemies or doing some small stuff, and it has no limit, aside from decaying slowly when it's over 100. If you can get it to 250 then you recieve free Double Damage powerup. It's interesting. You also get double the amount of ego if you kill enemies with a kick, which doesn't suck here. Especially jump kick, which you will abuse.

But it also futher drives the point of a game where it feels like an endurance test, where you do some damage and try to gain enough health by jump kicking enemies so you stay above zero while taking some cheap damage. It's a lot like all those early 2000s shooters, when everything was hitscan, but they still had hitpoint-driven health, so you would just try to outdamage and try to lose as little health as possible. I don't know, you can say all you want about "realism" in FPS, but this sillyness doesn't belong to action-platformers. At least not in as dull as this one.
Though it kinda gets better in second half of a game, where you often have enough space to jumpkick everything. It also is interesting in how it carries over the FPS tradition of having many weapons to hold, but most of them are upgrades over each other or barely of any use.

It also means that action never gets as hot as in Contra games. Especially bosses. Actually, they are far far worse. There are only 3 bosses out of 8 that are proper. Others are just buffed up enemies, who, guess what, is easier to just tank up. It's really harder to play smart and try to avoid damage, when you can just be dumb and outdamage them. At least this is how it was on Normal.
Then out of those three bosses only the first level one was more or less awesome. Or at least the only one with a good music. At least Demo version of a game gave be false better impression of a game since I imagined that bosses would be as good as this one. If forget that it still has tedius part.

Levels are actually maze-like. You have to find keycard and babe in each level and sure thing developers turned them into mazes. Well, actually it's not so bad, since you usually play some linear section, then find exit lock, and then get a small maze where key and babe are placed. What is fancy is that developers tried to do this 2.5D thing where Duke at some points can switch the planes. It's used to make levels maze-like, yes. Nope, couldn't be just 2D, because everything had to be 3D and polygonal back then.

But hey, maybe level design and music can carry it?
Nope.
Level design is so boring and unoriginal that it's amazing. It's like developers took setting of each level from most mediocre games on old consoles. Explore your gray mazey factories and underground level and underground level and grey space station. Music, the last saving grace of mediocre side-scrollers, is bad. It's like a short loop of some industrial unmemoriable track.

Erf, to be honest, this game is not technically bad. It doesn't anything wrong. Well, aside from high standart game design WRONG. It's just that this game is so average in mediocre way, it's like absolute zero. I kinda was amused by it at time, kinda had bit of funs here, but I felt extremely empty after beating it. You can take any platformer from 16-bit or 8-bit era and it probably would be more interesting than this one.

Steam needs "Meh" recommendation badly. I still think of it as a bit more of positive. But then being boring is the worst sin of videogames for some.

And no, Duke personality and main theme can get you only so far.