Duke Nukem Forever has finally been released, and 2K Games and developer Gearbox have to be happy that the game has finally dropped so that the longest running joke in the video games industry will end. All isn’t a celebration, however; the reviews of the game are pretty bad, with the game achieving a Metacritic score of just 49 as of the writing of this story. A rating of 49, as you can guess, is pretty darn bad.

After reading a number of the reviews, we can tell you that the majority of the reviews are pretty unkind, suggesting that the game was just cobbled together; which is surprising, given the length that the game was in development and the large amount of time there was to develop a story line and create assets that could be used in the final title produced.

In the end, we suspect that DNF will sell pretty well, but it will never make back the amount of money invested in the development of the game. The game teases another sequel, which we do suspect will be much better than this mess of a game. While there appeared to be some momentum, in the end it just didn’t live up to the hype. But how could it after 12 years of waiting?

Still, we wanted and hoped for more, but honestly, getting the game out was the first thing that needed to happen and that it did. We expect next time around the next offering in the franchise will be much better and deliver a better experience, or so we can hope.