I played all through Doom and Doom 2 back in the day. Maybe not as many playthroughs as others, but still. Those games were groundbreaking to early-20s me--more immersive than anything I’d seen. Even today, the action stands up quite well against the modern shooter, even if the play in the genre has completely evolved.
The new Doom (call it Doom 4 or Doom 2016 if you want) is a total throwback to that age, which is exactly what id and Bethesda have been telling us for months. It is absolutely glorious. No reloading weapons. No cover. No regenerating health. No stopping. Just run everywhere at full speed and blast demons in the face for a few hours.
But this, too, has evolved. There’s now jumping, and it’s used to good effect on extremely vertical maps. There are weapon mods that can be switched on the fly. Throwable grenades. A new weapon (gauss rifle). And there are the glory kills--Mortal Kombat-esque finishing moves when you’ve weakened even the largest demons enough.
The older Dooms were non-stop action fests with absolutely no plot. You just shot your way through a maze, picking up health and ammo as you went. The new Doom wraps the action with a thin veneer of story; just enough to tell you WHY you need to get to the other end of the maze. I’ve seen some complaints about the story being hackneyed or superfluous (I’m looking at you, Ars Technica and Kyle Orland) but I found it totally natural. And believable? If anything in this universe is held to be acceptable, then the story is no more ridiculous.
In addition to the gameplay, the visuals are absolutely stunning. The Mars dirt, used-and-abused metal corridors, demonic beasts and their cyber-modified brethren--all are equally eye-appealing. The animations of both demon and player are fluid and well designed. The glory-kill animations take some beats of time, but they’re hurried to limit that time, and done so in a way that they don’t really suffer. And the whole thing plays without slowdowns or stutters (aside from a handful of times that I completed Rune Challenges and the game engine seemed to slow down by 75% until I restarted the game). I’m still using a GTX680 video card, which was a good performer 5 years ago, but is pretty far behind the curve now. Even so, I played the game on high graphics settings (there is an ultra high) and it looked fantastic and ran surprisingly smoothly.
If I have any complaints, the first would be about the environment being TOO vertical at times. The visual fidelity, high rate of speed, and absolute drops can really play havoc with my acrophobia. That’s not the kind of thrill I’m looking for. Actually, it’s a kind of adrenaline rush I try to avoid at all costs. I could also complain about boss fights, I suppose--I’ve never liked them, but I knew full well that Doom would have some. They’re invariably and inevitably less interesting than the typical combat set pieces. Only one opponent (or two)? Much easier to dodge. Have to run completely through 2 of your 3 types of ammo? That’s not actually fun and can lead to frustration. The final boss fight in particular was vexing for its consumption of absolutely all resources. Finally, I can’t stress this enough: I hate it when game developers don’t allow us the option to save games. HATE it.
All this, and I’m only talking about the single-player campaign, which I completed in probably less than 20 hours. It would have been faster, but I was working diligently to find as many secrets as I could (no advice existed on teh intarwebs because I started playing at 7:00AM on release day) and power up my armor and weapons. Even so, that left many secrets undiscovered, which failing I’m currently addressing by being allowed to replay any level in my save-game slot. There’s still a whole multiplayer game (which I haven’t tried) and Snapmap, which allows you to quickly build new maps and play ones created by others. There’s some visual scripting that Snapmap is capable of, so it’ll be interesting to see what the player base will have created a year from now.
So I’ll break it down:
- Base run-and-gun gameplay: 70%
- Meaty, satisfying, moddable weapons: 15%
- Smooth-as-glass graphical performance: 15%
- All this is only 1/3 of the package: 10%
- Sometimes overly dependent on verticality: -5%
- Complete dependence on checkpoints: -10%
Verdict: 95%. Go get it. GET IT NOW!
