Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Total letdown"

Released by Sunstorm back in 1997, Duke Caribbean: Life's A Beach is just a cool yet mediocre expansion to 3D Realms' First-Person Shooter classic, Duke Nukem 3D (1996). Duke, one of the greatest heroes of the gaming world is relaxing and enjoying his vacation, just to discover that aliens are there also having fun in their own sadistic way. Your objective, naturally, is to kick their ***es and save the babies (read: hot girls) from the alien onslaught once again.

Story never was a shining point in any of the Duke Nukem games, so no one can blame Duke Caribbean for lacking in this. The bad thing about this add-on is the low production values. From ugly new graphics to lame level designs, Sunstorm just proved that gameplay isn't enough to make a game worth. Make no mistake: if you enjoyed the action sequences in the original Duke Nukem 3D, then you'll still love to shoot aliens in the Caribbean environments of this add-on. However, it's impossible to overlook the bad quality of the new textures and sprites, as well the confusing maps and the uninspired new content.

First of all, the most noticeable problem in Duke Caribbean is the weapons. You have exactly the same arsenal featured in the original game, except to the boring sound effects and their new horrible looking. For instance, you throw pineapples as pipe bombs and use a magical voodoo ring to shrink your opponents. Water pistols and poisoned dart launchers make their appearance as well, not to mention that my favorite weapon, the shotgun, became literally a squirt gun in this expansion. They all sound so shy that, at the first moments, I thought there was something wrong with the sound effects.

To make things worse, every new sprite in Duke Caribbean was poorly designed. I can stand the fact that Duke now eats bananas instead of using medkits when he's hurt, however Sunstorm should put a little more effort to draw the new healing items. The same goes to the ammo boxes and most of the new textures. The scenario, instead of giving you the impression that Duke is in a Caribbean paradise, you'll think the hero is in a nightmare where every place looks confusing and not beautiful at all. Fortunately, you can turn off the music so you'll not have a headache early on while trying to find the way out. The soundtrack is mostly irritating, although I kinda liked the final stage music and a few other ones.

Aside from eight maps, there isn't really any new content, except to a particular annoying enemy: a pig cop flying on a buoy, which fires ludicrously fast explosives. Although you can kill him with a single squirt gun shot, it's very hard to dodge his projectiles because he'll attack Duke right in the moment you spotted him. This uninspired enemy probably replaced the flying pig cop from the original game, which I remember to be a fun opponent to fight against.

The new episode features eight maps, which are a bit confusing sometimes and not nearly as good as the original ones. However, there're three maps in peculiar that was worth of my time: "Lost Dagoon", "Voodoo Caves" and "The Alien Remains". By their names you may have already noticed they don't have too much in common with the Caribbean setting, although these three levels are well-designed and one of the few good points in this expansion.

The enemies from the original game are here, but wearing some cool vacation dresses. Sunstorm actually did a good job to design the pig cop with sunglasses, shirt and sandals, as well the rest of the well-known aliens. There're also a few new girls, but one of them is so thin that doesn't look as hot as she's supposed to be. The developers also recorded new voices for the babies and Duke himself (featuring the same actor, Jon St. John), which is indeed a nice touch.

Sadly, today is quite tricky to make Duke Caribbean run in the Windows. DOSBox, a MS-DOS emulator that works perfectly fine with almost every old game, doesn't seem to install this add-on properly. The only way I managed to run Duke Caribbean was using a Win32 port (such as JonoF's JFDuke or eDuke32), but I had to use a program to unpack the expansion's *.SSI files and convert them to a compatible extension. I'm saying this because, if you're lucky enough to find a copy of Duke Caribbean, you may come across with these installation issues; you'll probably spend more time googling websites to find a solution than actually playing the game.

A few good maps and some cool-looking enemies aren't enough to make Sunstorm's add-on worth. Duke Caribbean would be a good addition to the series with more and better crafted maps, well-designed new textures and sprites and a better soundtrack. Unfortunately this is just a lazy and uninspired expansion that isn't as much fun as would be to replay the original game one more time.