DOOM (2016)

Playthrough / Review #1 , 2017

well Doom doesn't need an introduction, but it certainly has a lot to live up for. originals are obvious classics and highly redeemable, even doom 3 was a great game, so i'm glad to experience that nuDOOM is actually a respectable release
ignore the multiplayer because it has the lasting entertainment of maybe 30 minutes, but the campaign is one of the best of recent times.
yes pretty much the entire game revolves around wounding the enemies so they glow like christmas lights, hitting the Execute key, and gaining some precious health. the level design is total 100% arena style. you walk into an area, waves of enemies spawn, you hop around the arena collecting items, health, ammo, trying to get as many executes as possible to replentish your desperately lowering health supply. it's good, tencious, fun.

theres the classic selectuion of difficulty, and Ultra-violence is what I played on. it certainly wasn't a walk in the partk, people might say this game is too easy but even this is 2 steps down from hardest and I frequently (frustratingly) got my ass kicked many times on certain checkpoints. the careful balence of enemy types, juggling which enemy to attack first, what ammo to use, which weapon when, all in the matter of split seconds. its hard choice making, its 100% total action. this game is almost like driving a car on a busy street, always trying to be concious of your decisions, always knowing your enviorment, being cautious but discplined in your actions etc..

The graphics are good to great, with good lighting and tons of particle and gore FX that truly are satisfying to be a part of. maybe it feels a bit TOO saturated or colorful, it certainly feels more arcade than something like DOOM 3 vanilla. the sound design is there, weapons pack a good punch, the soundtrack is inspired by the original but with more contemporary 'up to date' things such as dubstep/electronic influenced ideas around the original concepts. There's 13 or so levels, with boss fights mixed in between. the campaign is lengthy however, about 10 hours to complete on ultra violence. level design isn't too much varied, but it never really gets old because of the attention to detail in the hellish enviorments. Certain levels and parts will be stuck in your head because of the memorable nature of the enviorment design (and having to do it over and over from dying..)


DOOM is a refreshing challenge with satisfying mechanics and great controls/movement physics. there are jumping sections, but because the controls and movement feel so fluid and well polished, the platforming is never an issue - actually a good break exercise from the chaos of fighting demons. theres really only good things to say about new DOOM, the only complaint for me is basically the execution system feels a bit TOO streamlined for consoles, they could of done something else with the health i don't know, something about having to tap EXECUTE > watch premade animation > EXECUTE every 10 seconds just to regain some health can be a little jarring.

Now it's not to say DOOM doesn't lack all the modern commonalities of recent games. it has your upgrade system, shoehorned perks system, upgrades, all that shit. You put new powerups on your weapons, get more health, etc etc. For this reason I say always start with Ultra-violence, the game is just too easy before any difficulty than that with all these upgrades. I didn't even use any until about half the game was over, though.. Did I mention Doomguy looks a lot like Halo's Master Chief? like a lot? Did I mention that some of the artstyle is kind of awful (except the enemies) and a lot of things just look and FEEL like generic modern halo-inspired shit? Oh well... theres a complaint i guess.

I like it. It's good FPS fun. It doesn't last forever, its a good experience while it lasts, killing demons is fun, what more can you want?

8/10

 

 

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UPDATE: SECOND PLAYTHROUGH, SECOND REVIEW 7/16/24
 

After many long years since Doom 2, Doom (2016) came out. This was a reimagining and reboot of the series of sorts, advertised as going back to its roots and not as much slow survival crawling around in the dark like Doom 3 was.


The game in typical fashion has multiple difficulties, with the same names as the classic games. I went with Ultra Violence, which is the second hardest.
Another very notable design choice is the fact that you cannot quicksave anymore. If you die, the player gets sent back to the last checkpoint. And honestly? I think I prefer it to the quicksave mashing of classic FPS games. I like it when playing bad has a real penalty, it makes death meaningful, and it makes you try hard to avoid dying. If you know that the only penalty for dying is quickly slamming the F9 (quickload) key, it doesn't really motivate you to play your best.

Doom 2016 throws you right into the game with minimal intro, you wake up in some bed chamber of sorts and instantly are being attacked by monsters. You grab your shotgun and blast through them and get a brief framing of whats going on, it introduces this woman villian character that tries to set up the premise of the game as monsters breaking out onto the marine bases and hell breaking loose, the typical stuff. From there its just shooting monsters in typical fashion without many interruptions storywise

The general controls of the gameplay feel polished and refined, for the most part. Running, jumping, and shooting all feel satisfying. Sometimes, the monsters hit reactions could be more impactful. Like sometimes I will be using the Double shotgun and blast a monster and he'll barely move from the impact. And other weapons, such as the Pistol is just the wimpiest gun I've ever seen in a FPS game. Its this pew pew laser shooter thing, totally useless. The arsenal is huge, bigger than any doom game. You have multiple machine guns, a "Heavy machine gun" and also a Chaingun. One disappointment is that the Chaingun seems kinda underpowered or useless, because it uses the same ammo as the Heavy Machine gun, but the HMG is very powerful especially since it has a scope and you can upgrade it to do even more damage when scoped in AND when getting headshots. So the chaingun kinda doesnt have its place anymore. A new gun to the franchise is the Railgun, this thing has a scope and once fully scoped in (I think only an upgrade?) it does massive damage once charged up. Each gun has various upgrades you can get for it, you unlock these upgrade paths by finding little drones aorund the maps which unlocks the upgrade abilities. Then, just by simply killing monsters and playing the game you unlock passive points to spec into the various gun upgrades.

The guns are well balanced, and most of them do have their purpose. They are drip-fed to the player slowly throughout the campaign. For the first few levels, you only have pistol and shotgun. But you slowly collect them all, and its an exciting and satisfying venture.

All of the light RPG mechanics and influence are OK, but I cant say it really makes the game feel better. Like, it just means they had to try to balance the whole campaign around slowly unlocking these upgrades and who will have what upgrade at each point. I think I would still prefer, like old FPS games, where you keep the RPG mechanics out of it and just have everything 'unlocked' and build a consistently balanced game around these core fundamental mechanics. Like, when you start off the game, you only have 100 health maximum and can only get 25 armor. As you play, you also unlock character upgrades. Since I played on Ultra Violence, I need as much health as I can get because by default you die in like 2 fireballs from a regular Imp. So of course for the first half of the game I dumped all my upgrade points into Health, to finally get the maximum 200 which made the game much easier. Ammo is very short by default too, only being able to carry like 20 shotgun shells maximum for example. As the game goes on you unlock more and more weapon categories and weapons that ammo isn't as huge of an issue because you can swap around to so many different ammo types, so this the maximum ammo upgrade was a low priority compared to survival.

The RPG mechanics encuorage you to explore around the map, but its a double edged sword. If you just want to get on with the game and not search every nook and cranny, you might be severely unpowered, since the game is balanced around the idea that the player will be exploring everywhere to find these upgrades. Thankfully, most of the upgrades are near impossible to miss and are on the same path as the progression, or even forces you to get the upgrade before you can progress. So it isnt done too bad in that regard.

Also new in this game is the Chainsaw mechanic. No longer is the chainsaw just a regular weapon, it has a dedicated button where you pull it out and instantly kill any monster (provided you have enough fuel, but each monster type requires different amounts of fuel, and its not obvious at a moments glance what monster needs what fuel, which can cause frustrating moments) and once you kill the monster with the chainsaw, it plays a gory death animation, and then the monster explodes into a pool of ammo pickups that automatically graviate towards the player that gets collected. So now the chainsaw is more like a deployable ammo source more than a normal weapon.

The BFG also works in a similar way, you get the BFG about 3/4 through the game, and it also has its own dedicated button, it isnt just a regular weapon. You of course use this when the screen is covered in dangerous enemies, or youre in a bad spot. I like that they made it have different ammo than the Plasma gun, it makes it have its own unique purpose now.

Most of the classic monsters you'd expect are here. Revenant, Mancubus, Imps, Pinkies, Baron of Hell, Cacodemons.
Some monsters that are missing would be the Arch-vile, mini-spiders, and Pain-Elemental. Which is kinda disappointing, because the gameplay would be really interesting there I think. There are also no chaingunners, zombie gunners, or shotgun men - instead they are replaced with these laser shooting monster guys which arent near as identifiable or fun to fight.

The enemies behave mostly how you would expect from these, although the Pinkies are totally redesigned. For one they arent really pink anymore, and two they charge at you really fast, like a Bull which does massive damage when it hits you. Three, they have armor on their frontside so you cant really do much damage to them, you have to try to jump behind them and hit them in their back. This is one of the most annoying enemies but also I guess a fun threat, still it can be clunky and frustrating having these guys charging all around at you, slamming you from behind.
Theres a few new enemies, I'm not sure the names. But one of them is like this big hulking monster with his skull showing, he rushes at you and punches you. A few well placed Double barrel shots can take him down.

Along those same lines, a new addition to the franchise is Glory kills.
When you shoot enemies, after a certain amount of damage is done, they start to glow, and if you walk up to them and press the glorykill button it plays various death animations. After the animation, the enemy pops out a bunch of health orbs that automatically float towards the player and give you health if you are within a certain distance. On paper it sounds OK, but I have gripes with it. For one thing, since it plays an animation, that means that as soon as the animation ends the player is left standing there for a brief moment, vulnerable and stationary. Even moreso, the camera spins all around unpredictably while in the glory kill animation, meaning once it stops you have to take a moment to get your bearings back. But by the time you do, youre getting hit from every angle by tons of monsters. So it can be a really frustrating event. The biggest problem, though, is that the game overwhelmingly encourages you to constantly do these gloykill animations. Like, the game is balanced around the fact that you will be doing these animations in order to keep your health up. So not only does it kind of slow down the pacing, having to watch a prebaked 'cutscene' animation every 5-10 seconds, but also it leaves the player frustratingly vulnerable and causes bullshit moments. I'm not sure the game is made any better from this concept of glory kills. It almost just seems like the famous mod Brutal Doom was gaining traction at the time ,and the developers noticed it and thought "Hmm how do we incorporate these Epic Brootal \m/ animations into our game?" It feels kind of shoved in there to appeal to this trend, moreso than a well crafted ingenius new gameplay invention. They saw the "Rip and tear meme" and went overboard with it.

The game generally progresses in a fun and interesting manner. You start off exploring the typical metallic looking military bases, but as the game progresses you destroy various pobjects or flip some switches to where you make hell break out, and around halfway through the game you find yourself in the Hell part of the campaign. The levels are interesting for the most part, but not really that memorable. Just the general themes are memorable. Thats because for the most part there arent really conventional levels with memorable level design, but rather a series of closed off arenas. Very commonly you'll enter an arena, and a voiceover will play "Demonic interference in the area too high, locking all the doors" and it will turn into an arena shooter like Quake 3 or something, where you have to bounce all around up down left right, run in circles around the arena, grab powerups, look for pickups in the arena, while enemies spawn in and you have to kill them all for the doors to open up and to progress a bit, maybe do a small jumping section or look for a key, until the next arena section. Its not bad, but it doesnt really make for memorable level moments, especially like the classic FPS games. There werent really arena sections in classic FPS games, it was more like intricate mazes and interesting set pieces and locations, which turned into memorable level design. The arena stuff came later, around Quake 3, and it seems like thats where a lot of the inspiration for level gameplay comes from, rather than the classic FPS games.

The game has two boss fights, one about halfway through which is the Cyberdemon, this is a fun fight that involves good movement abilities and dishing out lots of damage and knowing what weapons to use. The other boss is at the end of the game, the iconic Cyber Mastermind spider demon. This is also a fun fight, where you have to shoot at its brain and dodge the grenades and gunshots. Around halfway through the fight, the boss arena turns electrified, and the player has to quickly stand up on a platform to avoid death. Maybe the last boss is bit too easy, because I beat it on first try. Which is funny, because the overall difficulty curve of the game does ramp up a fair bit. Doom (2016) is a challenging game, especially on Ultra-Violence. Like I said, you start off with an unupgraded character, so you have low health and die in a few hits. But as the campaign progresses, it spawns in so many high-tier monsters like Mancubus, Revenants, Pinkies, Barons of hell etc that you really have to be sweating your ass off jumping around like a maniac to avoid damage, saving the powerups like Beserk, Invulnerability, Haste, etc, until the right moment, and I had quite a few angry failures redoing the same checkpoints over and over, especially towards the end of the game. It does feel rewarding once you get past the challenging parts , like you are actually learning from your mistakes and getting better. Except when your deaths are caused by glorykill animations and the camera flying all over the place, its a common annoyance.


The story is pretty much dog-shit, though. I understand they had to try to slam a story in there for 'modern audiences' but its just not good. Very genric sci-fi mumbo jumbo, a painfully cliche and boring antagonist, and then randomly this stupid Robot villian shows up that you work for or something, I don't know it was so lame I kinda just ignored it past a certain point. Even at the end of the game this robot walks away from you wielding this big sci-fi magical sword its like, what fucking game am I playing? At the very least there is not that much story interruptions, not that many cutscenes, so it doesnt get in your way too much.

The graphics are quite impressive. The lightning, textures, models, are very detailed and for the most part well done. I'm not exactly thrilled with all the monster designs, they dont quite look scary or threatning but sort of cartoonish in a way? Its well done, just the art style could of been a bti more intimidating I guess. I'm also not really a big fan of how the weapons look and act, sadly. Yes, they look and feel fine and do its purpose, but they a bit too bulky and mechanical looking, and the animations dont really hit you as hard as they should. Take the double barrel for example, a good double barrel in a game has a loud satisfying clunk of the barrels on the reload, and then its this carefully timed crafted dance of putting the ammo back into the chamber, with loud clocky sound of putting the shells in. But you dont get much of that here, its all kinda muffled and the animation is too fast or at a weird angle. Many of the weapons are like this, its OK , but could be better, and aesthetically I'm not a big fan of some of the designs. (Like the heavy machine gun, pistol,) Its a nitpick but I figured I'd mention it.

However while the graphics are techincally good, and the engine feels good, the aesthetic design of the levels can be a bit...drab and dull at points. For one thing, it seems like almost the whole game is just variations of brown and yellow. Like the first half is a lot of sandy desert stuff, or brown Mars scapes. At least when you start to get to the Hell levels the enviornments get a bit more interesting, but its still a lot of the same sort of color pallette. Really the game could of used more interesting colors across the board. Like take the original games, theres lots of weird looking areas and color schemes all over the place. One level could look one way, then the next level could be entirely different looking. Stuff like that creates memorable levels, but Doom 2016 kinda all blends together.

Doom 2016 is a good game, though. It has exciting fast paced combat, it really tests your abilities at least on Ultra Violence, and it gives the player agency to play how they want, with the possible exception of the annoying insistance on using Glory kills. Theres a lot of fun and even replayability to be had, here. There are even more things I didnt mention, such as the Rune Trials, these little minigame sections where you get teleported away and have to complete a challenge in a time limit to unlock a passive ability (rune, can equip up to 3) which do things like being able to collect health/ammo from further distances, or give you a speed boost after each glorykill. These arent really mandatory, but are interesting little challenges and rewards to collect if you so desire. Then, each level has a bunch of additional Challenges you can do that show up in the menu, these are various feats like killing enemies in a certain way or collecting items that you can also do. It tells you in the menu what things youve missed from the maps, and what collectables there are to get, so theres lots of stuff to be found to "100%" the game. I heard there are even 13(!) of the original Doom levels you can unlock and play, which is sort of mindblowing, but sadly I never unlocked any. This is my second time beating the game, and my impression and takeaway is still much the same as all those years ago, so its a consistently rewarding and fun game to play through. It's short too, I beat it in just 2 days in a couple different sessions. Its fun to just sit down and blast through a few levels, the pacing is well done, and the levels are not too long. Its a good pickup and play game, which is exactly what you want out of a retro influenced shooter. I just dont think its insanely similar to the original games, though. At times it feels more like I'm playing Halo more than Doom, with all the jumping around, and scifi and whatnot. I feel like the original games worked so well because of its limitations. Because of the lack of jumping, because of the lack of vertical aiming. It made for a very unique and constrained, grounded, but immersive experience. You start to add all these modern features, controls, RPG influences, and it loses much of its personality and identity. Still, I would say Doom 2016 is a success.

7/10.

NOTE:
So this is my second review of this game, the reason being I had recently beaten Doom Eternal and fucking hated it. I thought to myself, "How is Doom Eternal so bad, but I liked Doom 2016? Maybe I'm just wrong? Did my taste change? Is Doom 2016 actually shit? Is it really that different?" so I made myself playthrough it again. Turns out Doom 2016 is just good, and Eternal is shit. Why? Because Eternal adds so many mechanics and features that force the player to act a certain way, where it removes any agency or fun from the experience. In Doom Eternal, theres constant pacing issues, shitty annoying puzzles, TONS of these stupid Mario style platforming sections (Doom 2016 had them, but few and far between) and Doom Eternal really turns it up to 11 with the Glorykill/Chainsaw bullshit, its now extremely mandatory to be milking these mechanics for all theyve got or you're just fucked. Its also way, way harder, for all the wrong reasons. In Eternal, you HAVE to search every nook and crany for all the upgrades or you are just fucked because the game expects you to have them, and the upgrades are not as easy to find, and you can easily miss them and make the playthrough way harder than it should be. Doom Eternal also really dials up the Simon-says bullshit, now with each enemy having its own choreographed play, like oh make sure to switch to THIS gun for THIS enemy, and then THAT gun for THAT enemy, and if you dont you cant really kill them! or 'Wait for the yellow glow in order to do damage to that enemy!' theres just so much shit where the player is forced to play in boring, annoying ways, that the fun is sucked out of it. And the Hub area really fucks up the pacing, and the Story is even more cringe and in your face. Literally everything about Eternal is worse than Doom 2016. My opinion is soldified, Doom 2016 was maybe a step overall in the wrong direction, but still a decent and fun game, but Doom Eternal took all my gripes about Doom 2016 and really honed in on them, making it a shit game for me personally. OH and the soundtrack in Doom 2016 is at least decent and listenable, with ambient moments, orchestral moments, rock guitar moments, whereas Doom Eternal has this god awful ear grating annoying constant Djent/Dubstep shit.