YMMV / Duke Nukem II

• Franchise Original Sin: Among the many other criticisms leveled at Duke Nukem Forever, one of them was the treatment of Duke by NPCs, who practically worship the ground he walks on. The games have always treated Duke like he was the coolest man alive ever since he first defeated Dr. Proton, and a significant chunk of his dialogue has been him bragging. The difference was that in the earlier games, his bragging was over-the-top enough to be endearing in its own way - keep in mind the intro to this game has him shilling his autobiography, which is literally titled "Why I'm So Great". It also helps that there wasn't as much room to emphasize any of this in the earlier games, as outside of very specific circumstances Duke was the only character who spoke at all, and the vast majority of the game consisted of the player proving Duke every bit as badass as he claims to be. By the time Forever came out, it's become standard to have bit characters with at least one or two unique lines of dialogue all over the place, and rather than letting Duke's coolness speak for itself right away the game opens with a lengthy segment where the player can only walk around and watch things happen, forcing you to put up with half an hour of Duke being verbally fellated by five dozen NPCs^note not to mention literally fellated by the first two and then another ten minutes of everybody ignoring the aliens clearly preparing to open fire before the game finally gives you a gun and lets you shoot things.
• Goddamned Bats: Several:
  • The small spider creatures that latch onto Duke (some even fall from the ceiling) and drain his health until you shake them off. Three guesses at what inspired the Protozoid Slimers in the sequel.
  • The slug-like creatures that throw their eyeballs at you, then explode into a shower of eyeballs when you kill them.
  • The ships that fly overhead and drop bombs with a rather huge blast radius; if you don't have anything besides the default weapon you're practically guaranteed to get hit (and even if you shoot the bomb as it's falling, it blows up anyway and the explosion will probably travel downwards far enough to still hit you).
  • The panther-like creatures made of green slime.
  • The small ships in the first level of episode 2 which don't appear until you're practically on top of them.
  • The hopping one-eyed robots.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Red boxes contain either health pickups or bombs, with far more of the latter than the former. For extra screw-you points, they're frequently placed right next to actual health pickups, which they'll promptly destroy if you don't scroll the pickup box off-screen so that the explosion doesn't affect it.