Doom

Here's a Doom tidbit I didn't put in the Doom 3 review: I disliked Doom 2 because it didn't have the little map screen the original game did. It's total window dressing, but for some reason to my young mind it put in this extra layer of immersion. I used to imagine the Space Marine hiking his way to these remote locations along the surface of the Martian moons, hoping each time they wouldn't be overrun with Demonic nonsense and then solemnly rip/tearing through them. (Actually that might have been in there, but I don't remember and it amuses me to this day)

Here's another tidbit: AMD named a processor the threadripper. Huge threads. Huge threads to rip and tear.

Also, worth noting, the original Doom never goes to Mars. Episode 1 is set on Phobos, which is a tiny as tiny gets moon orbiting Mars. Episode 2 involves teleporting to Deimos, which now orbits Hell itself, and then you just climb down to Hell in episode 3. Seriously, I swear the plot was you just threw a rope down and casually climbed down to Hell like it wasn't any sort of thing.

Anyway, so in this, Doom 4 which we'll just call Doom from now on actually lifts a lot of its genome from Doom 3. There's a lot of weird overlap that doesn't feel so much intentional as parallel evolution, although Doom 4 skips act 1 of Doom 3 and just kinda rushes forward from there, as well as having a completely weird story that has equal parts schlock and Jacob Hargreave going on in it.

It's also the first shooter in a long, long time to truly abandon the "realism" elements that drag down shooters and instead says F-it, you're the DOOMSLAYER.



First off, I haven't played a shooter since Wolfenstein TNO and I immediately set Doom to Ultra-Violence. I died like, a lot, a lot lot in the first two levels until I got a handle on it. So all my views are from the perspective of a player probably playing on a difficulty just above their skill level at FPS games. That being said, I'd almost recommend it, since once you "get" how Doom 2016 works the high tension, high damage difficulty makes the critical flow just so much better. The game has a resource loop within combat

The game is, before I say anything else, so much better than Wolfenstein TNO it astounds me. That's not to say I thought WTNO was an especially bad game. I'm pretty sure my review said I thought it was good. What I'm saying is, Doom is really good when it is good.

Visually Doom 3 shows a lot more modern design than I'd really like, but for anyone just picking it up as a shooter and not a nostalgia trip, the visuals are excellent. I am running it on a 960 at 1080p, so the settings aren't super high, but I didn't notice much texture pop in or the various visual flaws I've come to expect since RAGE. I do wish the aesthetics had a little more of the industrial grimness of Doom OG, instead, it has much of the sleekness of Doom 3.

I don't miss the goofy bloody/torture stuff from Doom OG though, so it's a fair trade.

The audio, in terms of tunes and sounds, it very good. I do find the game loses something from the OG, where it doesn't use enough "arrival" screams that add to awareness, but that's a result of the game's attitude toward enemy spawns and the like. The music is, mind you, nowhere near as distinct as the original game. It's still good, and it can get you excited when it needs to, but it's not literally ripping off heavy metal hits so... Yeah I guess in some ways that's how it should be. It's a little unfair to compare.

Level design is ... A confusing mixed bag, to be honest. I'm not saying any level in Doom is bad though they do have bad parts, but the game is very confused about what it wants to do. It seems like it wants variety, yet it often jams too many of the same section again and again. I find myself longing a little for a slightly more realistic set of levels, which the game has at the beginning, before you go to Hell.

Which, to segue into the storyline, is pretty surprisingly immediate. The game's story reminds me, at best, of a fusion of Dead Space and Doom 3, and then maybe whatever other game decided to mine another reality for energy. I'm not too impressed. I don't mean it kinda reminded me of Dead Space, I mean the narrative hook legitimately felt more like Dead Space 1 than Doom 3, and not for the better.

Weapon design is, on the most part, excellent. Actually no, all the guns are good and I found myself using all of them and most of the weapon mods. Once you acquire them you have an alt-fire mode for each of the weapons, except the super shotgun, which was probably the odd man out among the weapons. I never got accustomed to some of the weapons, but this is a game where if you had a weapon limit you'd think hard about which ones you'd use.

Enemy design, outside of the visuals, is a bit of a trip if you've put as many hours as I have not the original. I think it's wired into a deep part of my brain to laugh at cacodemons, but none of the demons in this game are a joke. The visuals do not strongly remind me of previous Doom titles, everything is lithe and sleek, and frankly, bad ass.

Enemies are pretty unique in this game in that they... At least it felt like ... Have different AIs and patterns within individuals, and also had a variety of attacks. Imps seem to come in a couple different types, it's hard to figure out if the behaviors are just buried in two main kinds, but some run and climb, others flee and fire charged shots from a distance and some get right up into your face.

I really don't know if all the enemies have the same AI with lots of different behaviors, or if there's different patterns, or whatever. All I know is fights had a lot more variety than expected, and could often go very different ways from attempt to attempt.

Basically, Doom4 is the most refined, attractive and enjoyable shooter I've played in a long time on pure objective components. Which is to be expected, it's id, although I guess in final analysis RAGE wasn't that impressive.

I have to admit I find myself missing the story of Doom 3, which was far more subtle and a bit more interesting. Doom has a better protagonist but a bit worse feeling of grounding the whole battle against Hell. This one just comes off as schlock, whereas the other one was schlock that actually cared. It doesn't detract from the game, but I just kinda wish it was either Doom 3 or original Doom, not this sort of half ass story that reminds me of a Dead Space knock off.

The other modern problem the game has is the ... Well, I'll complain about this tangentially in a moment in regards to Doom, but it has this in relation to modern FPS; "enter arena, enemies teleport in, doors are sealed" is a consistent design choice in FPS games. And, in all of them, it begins to become rather tedious. It becomes a consistent feeling, where you're waiting for the door to lock and the arena fight to begin, which hurts map design and level narrative.

Doom also has the Super Castlevania problem, where elements from the old game were brought forward without regard for how they influence the new stuff. The main thing is some of the enemy design really doesn't mesh with glory kills.

You always want to be glory killing. Let's be totally clear on that. Once you start, you never want to stop, and the game - most of the time - is urging you to. And then a cacodemon kills you by hitting you as you're coming out of the glory kill, and you couldn't see it because it floats out of your general sight lines. I find the cacodemons don't work very well in general. A stunned enemy floating out of reach is just lame.

There's a couple systems that feel like this. I find myself really missing the chainsaw, which was used to preserve ammo, even though the new chainsaw sort of does the same thing - converts enemies into ammo - and just little thorns like that.

But to go back to it, my biggest gripe is teleporting in enemies and not just the whole arena thing. The original Doom used all sorts of means to fill your screen with enemies, and it felt good and fair. Doom has - every game has it, but I was hoping it wouldn't - teleporting enemies. So you get into an arena and then it fills with enemies from random angles.

I often felt like I had a good handle on the game and did pretty well, then I'd get in some encounter where it dumps crap on top of me and it was hard to ever really figure out where enemies were going to come from until I'd wiped on the encounter a couple times. This didn't usually bother me, but there's a couple encounters in the game where they stretch out for a long time and they backload all the difficulty, so it's a bunch of boring stuff and then one crucial moment you need to figure out. Often it'll involve spawning in the right spot to get the Summoner really quickly, and then putting them down before the fight snowballs.

Also, it's an odd complaint, but Doom simply has too many weapons and they became a real pain to manage. It's a question of muscle memory and getting accustomed over hours of play to using whatever you have to utilize ammo evenly. Like I said earlier, all the weapons are good, but I feel like I had so many I couldn't get used to all of them. Remember, you have two alt-fire modes for most of the weapons, then upgrades on all of them, and yeah...

One thing that may or may not come up for most players, but one I was really disappointed in, is how unpolished and just shitty the arcade mode is. Basically it's supposed to be a score multiplier driven fight festival, but it... Didn't edit the maps at all. So you need to memorize where keys and other things are, instead of just enjoying a good ol' fashioned Doomfest. With a couple replays you could get the hang of the levels, but that goes against the whole spirit of an arcade mode.

And yes, I get that there's irony in referring to 'ol fashioned Doomfest' when Doom always had keys and mazes with puzzle-solving. It just feels like the mode is tacked on instead of exploring a fully alternative single player experience.

In conclusion, I would say Doom is an excellent shooter that is surprisingly creative in pursuit of nailing that vicious, arcadey feeling down. Which ironically is not, in fact, actually that close to the original Doom. I'm satisfied with the price I paid, and frankly, befuddled at how Bethesda doesn't seem interested in making single player DLC or expanded content. I think they're making a Doom VR, with comes off as difficult to translate into VR, but maybe they've got a good team behind it.