Doom review: Heavenly

Modern FPS games differ from classic FPS games in that modern games are cover shooters. You take a few shots, dive into cover, and recover your health and repeat, ad infinitum. Classic FPS games had a kind of flow and rhythm to them. You had to keep moving to stay alive, health wouldn’t regenerate and combat boiled down to one rule: Kill anything that moves.

While you can argue that the modern shooter is the result of over 20 years of evolution, I still love the raw simplicity and breakneck pace of the classic shooter.

Enter Doom, the very definition of a classic shooter. The 1995 original brought with it fast-paced, frenetic action and the first glimpses of a real multiplayer mode. The pseudo-3D graphics were mind-boggling at the time and the level design, exceptional. The game managed to keep me glued to my seat as I waded through wave after wave of demon spawn with a big grin plastered on my face.

2004’s Doom 3 took a step-back from all of this. It tried to enhance the horror element of the franchise and bring a more measured pace to the combat. It did succeed, after a fashion, but to many ardent fans, it seemed to have missed the mark.

The latest Doom does something different. It attempts to meld the frenzied pace of the original game with the modern multiplayer sensibilities of today. Does it succeed? Yes and no.

To hell and back again

Doom’s single-player is simply glorious. There’s no other word for it. You wake up with your hands chained to the sides of a sarcophagus of sorts. You rip off the chains, stick your finger into the single eye-socket of an unwilling and smash its skull on the side of your sarcophagus. You hop out, grab a gun, blow a few heads off and pick up your enshrined, green suit of armour on the way out.

You will then spend the next 6-8 hours shooting, punching and dismembering the denizens of hell with joyous, reckless abandon. That reckless part isn’t entirely true since dismembering is very closely related to your health. Read on to learn more.

Enabling this pace are a couple of mechanics. First, you gain health by glory-killing monsters. Second, you gain ammo by subjecting demons to the working end of a chainsaw. Your health and ammo are both limited and the only way to survive is to keep fighting. In any other game, these mechanics may have ended badly. In Doom, they fit right into the flow of combat.

Glory killing involves “staggering” monsters (they’ll turn blue when staggered), giving you a window of opportunity to catch them off guard and smash them to bits with your bare hands. We’re not exaggerating. You literally smash the monsters to bits. Rip an arm off and use it to smash the monster’s face in, rip out a claw and gouge out the monster’s eye, literally punch the heart out of an imp, the list is endless.

From start to finish you’re double-jumping, circle-strafing, glory-killing and chainsawing demon spawn and it never gets old.

Secrets should know their place

There are a bunch of secrets to be uncovered and Doom dolls and classic levels to find. But take my advice and just avoid all of that in your first play through. The secrets will sometimes yield a horde of ammo and maybe a new weapon or upgrade, but stumbling across them is the best way to go across finding them.

Specifically hunting for secrets feels like a chore in a game that’s all about the frenzy and flow of combat. Sure, you need to find upgrades for your weapons and you do need ammo and health, but your initial play through should yield all weapons and enough upgrades regardless.

You can easily pop back into any level (at a higher difficulty if you wish) at a later time and rummage about for secrets should you choose to do so. There’s no need to find everything in the first run.

Tools of the trade

If you’re going to be hunting demons, you’re going to be needing guns, and big ones at that. Doom doesn’t disappoint. As a veteran, the assortment of weapons will be very familiar to you. Pistol, shotgun, super shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, link gun, and yes, even the BFG, they’re all there.

Each weapon has an alternate fire-mode that you can pick based on your play style (I fell in love with the turret mode for the chaingun). Want precision? Equip a scope. Want to blow some stuff up? Get a mounted grenade launcher. The choices abound.

The chainsaw is the star here, though. It’s a visceral, brutal killing machine that can saw through baddies in a heartbeat. The likes of the Hell Knight (a.k.a. the Baron of Hell) or the Mancubus don’t stand a chance in front of the mighty chainsaw.

Holding you back from truly unleashing the chainsaw’s raw power is a fuel mechanic. Fuel is limited to a number of cells and each type of demon requires a certain number of cells to finish off. If you don’t have enough fuel, you won’t even damage the demon. Countering that however, is the fact that a chainsawed enemy will yield a monumental amount of ammo.

The chainsaw now moves on from a weapon to be used as a last resort to a strategic choice to be made in the frenzy of combat.

A plot? In Doom?

If you’re playing Doom for the plot, there’s something seriously wrong with you. The developers are aware of that as well and certainly do their best to keep the plot as brief as possible. As brief as the plot is, it might just be a tad too brief. There isn’t much story here, but I would have certainly appreciated a more fleshed out ending.

You’ve all played Half-Life by now and must remember the ending conversation with the G-Man. It’s a very short conversation, but the import of that conversation weighed heavily. Without spoiling anything, Doom’s ending is a similar monologue, but without the impact.

Muddled multiplayer

The multiplayer in Doom isn’t as much fun. We won’t waste many words writing about it as nothing much has changed since the Open Beta. You can read our earlier story on the multiplayer beta here and rest assured that not much has changed.

The SnapMap feature in Doom, a feature that lets you build and design your own levels in Doom does show a lot of potential. It’s not modding in the true sense, but players are certainly coming out with very creative ideas. It’s still early days for the feature, but it’s the one area that shows real promise, as far as multiplayer is concerned at least.

A few steps short of greatness

2016’s Doom is a work of art. It signifies the rebirth of a genre that was on the verge of being forgotten. Bethesda’s own reboot of id’s Wolfenstein series tried to do this, with some success, but those games did not have the purity of purpose that is Doom.

Doom does have its flaws. The story is just that little bit too brief and the Halo-style multiplayer is an odd-fit for a classic shooter. But what Doom does well, it does really well.

There are some games that cross the threshold of greatness and move beyond their medium, games that define a generation. 2016’s Doom isn’t that game. But it is a beautiful, well-rounded shooter that deserves a place in every gamer’s library nonetheless.

Rating 8/10

System Requirements

Reviewed on:

• CPU: Intel i7 6700K
• RAM: 16GB DDR4 @2400MHz, G.Skill
• Mobo: Gigabyte Z170 D3H
• SSD: Samsung 840 Evo
• GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 ACX 2.0
• Keyboard: Corsair Strafe RGB
• Mouse: Logitech G502 Proteus Core
• Monitor: BenQ GW2760HS (1080p)
• Speakers: Swans M200 MkII