Thoughts
on DOOM (4) (called Doom in the review)
No game is perfect, but id’s 2016 Doom reboot perfectly melds the Doom experience with present-day shooter
design.
My initial thoughts on Doom veered towards “This isn’t the kind
of Doom I want.” My ideal Doom recreation would be built of labyrinths,
with monsters placed throughout. Instead, Doom
gives linear set pieces with demons spawning in combat-zone style a la Painkiller. “Once again, a shooter
reboot fails to capture the real classic
shooter design,” I thought. But I was quickly won over. Doom is a great game, and perfectly reboots Doom.
The core of the game is shooting and
otherwise tearing apart demons. There is some simple strategy to be had, though.
After shooting each demon for a while, and just before the next shots would
fell them, each demon glows a blue or yellow color. This means you can perform
a “glory kill” on them—a melee attack that has you finish off a demon in always
bloody, sometimes creative ways.
One glory kill on the Mancubus has you
tear out his stomach—or some other, apparently explosive, organ—and shove it in
his mouth. You can then watch as he explodes and organs spill out. Delicious—but,
not all are as detailed as this. Some just have you break a demons’ arm and
knock it in the head with it. Others boringly have you just punch a demon
forward. (Not everything can be a hit.)
These glory kills have the demons drop
more health. Chainsaw kills have the demons drop more ammo. These gloriously gruesome
attacks are one-hit kills, even for the bigger demons, but each chainsaw kill
requires fuel. The bigger the demon, the more fuel you need. You could use bits
of fuel each on a group of lesser enemies, or all of it on a big one. The big
one will net you more ammo.
So as you go about killing demons, you’ll
perform glory kills and chainsaw kills depending on how much health or ammo you
need. You’ll probably be performing these regardless, as they are ceaselessly satisfying.
As I noted above, most combat in Doom takes places in “battle arena” like
scenarios. Each of these have health and ammo pickups littered throughout, and
a lot of them have jump-pads and teleporters. When demons start coming, battle
music, metal in style, starts playing. Think of how Bioshock Infinite’s battle music worked, if you need a point of
reference. Really, Bioshock Infinite’s
battle scenarios are a good point of reference for Doom’s, as are Painkiller’s.
But Doom is better than both of those
for what it does.
All the shooting and killing takes place
across surreal landscapes in the UAC Facility on Mars and the demons’ abodes in
hell. The visuals are what really drive home Doom’s throwback nature. It was while firing rockets at a giant
horned and hoofed demon, with a surreal hell landscape in the background, and
while blasting my double-barreled shotgun at a Pinky demon as he charged
towards me in a surreal research-facility hallway, that I thought to myself how
much this game harkens back to the shooters of yore. There is great nostalgia
here if you grew up with the original Doom
and its contemporaries.
Extra touches keep the game from being a
totally straight shooter. You can upgrade your suit, say to be more resistant
to weapon splashback, and you can unlock and upgrade weapon mods. These are
basically alternative fires. Think of an old FPS game with secondary fire, and
then imagine being able to switch between multiple secondary fires and being
able to upgrade them. Yeah, it’s cool.
There is some story here too. A few
characters speak to you, the player, and there’s some backstory on all this UAC
/ hell / Doomguy stuff. The way id worked story elements in just enough, to
keep them from hampering the run-and-gun Doom
experience, is as near perfect as it can be. I was impressed by how lightly
and neatly story bits were segmented in. What was there worked, and it didn’t
dominate the experience. For that matter, there’s also a codex that you can
gain entries to for each demon, weapon, character, and location. It’s
interesting stuff, if you care.
Did I mention there are secret areas? And
Quad Damage (among other powerups)? And a couple cool, classic-FPS-style boss
fights? And red, blue, and yellow key doors? Well, there are all these things,
and a whole lot more goodness, that I didn’t touch on. And I didn’t do
Multiplayer or Snapmap. But, of course, I loved the singleplayer. Based on that
alone, id’s 2016 Doom reboot is a
fantastic game, that perfectly brings classic Doom to a present-day shooter design. I love it.
And now, id can focus all their time on
Quake V.
