DOOM (2016)

WHAT YEAR IS IT!?

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...

Oh, it's 2018.

And my last post was in 2014.

SO IT ONLY MAKES PERFECT 1000% LOGICAL SENSE THAT I REVIEW A GAME FROM 2016.

SPECIFICALLY, DOOM 2016. Which is actually just called Doom, but it's not THAT Doom, so we have to do that thing where we add the year to the title to differentiate a reboot from the original. Like when SEGA tried to do that with Sonic The Hedgehog (2006), only that didn't turn out so well because the development was rushed and the game just full on lost sight of what made the original concept fun and engaging.

See where I'm going? HA! Trick question! You thought I was implying with the utmost masterful subtlety that id Software made similar mistakes with this version of Doom!  The truth is, I really can't draw a lot of comparisons between this Doom and the original because I've only played the original for a grand total of maybe fifteen minutes and couldn't really get into it, but I get it. It's a fucking legend without which we likely wouldn't have an entire GENRE. Doom 1993 just isn't for me. I'm used to FPS games having a lot of mechanics that hadn't been implemented yet, and that's not a knock on the quality or status of the game, I'm just giving a little bit of context for everything I'm getting ready to say about THIS Doom.

I REALLY FUCKING LIKED THIS DOOM.

It hits that perfect balance between mindless action, exploration, and storytelling. It knows exactly what it is, and it isn't afraid to just be DOOM and revel in its own nonsense. You're a sci-fi marine with a fuck-ton of guns mowing down waves of literal hellish abominations! You're a unstoppable death machine who will literally smash expositional material to the side in pursuit of the next shooting gallery, which the game will reward you for completing with more guns and upgrades to the ones you have!

Doom 2016 is just plain fun. It might just be the purest First-Person Shooter to come out in the last decade. Which isn't to say that any others in recent memory have been bad. Hell, some have been downright fantastic, just in different ways. Doom is a game FIRST, and a story...maybe a close third? I mean, you wake up in a science lab on Mars, find out a portal to Hell has opened up, then run around blowing things up while you sort of come around on the idea of maybe thinking about closing it at some point because Hell is pretty firmly established as "bad." There's a lot more story you can pick up by collecting little data thingies, but you can take it or leave it. I took it, incidentally, because I'm the biggest sucker for world-building, even if it's not meant to be taken all that seriously. I could tell you about the corporation that somehow figured out a way to tap Hell itself for power to solve humanity's energy crisis, but if you honestly give a shit you can just read the Doom wiki.

Besides appealing to the gun-toting psychopath in all of us, Doom 2016 is also filled with more than its fair share of collectables and secrets. That said, some are a lot more fun and satisfying to find than others. You might wander around lost for ten minutes, and discover what appears to be the way forward only to find a dead end with some ammo that's slightly harder to come by. Even the MAP STATION ITSELF is hidden away in a secret area in some of the levels! Overall, though, it's more fun than tedious when you decide you want to hunt down that last couple of secrets you missed before hitting that "end the level" button. I'm honestly debating playing through the game a second time and attempting a 100% collectable run.

HOWEVER. There are some things I take a bit of issue with. Yeah, it ain't perfect. Show me a game that is. Even the best ones have problems, and Doom's biggest one is PLATFORMING. Platforming, first-person camera, and instant death pits have NEVER played nicely together before, and they don't here. For the MOST part, it's not an issue, but once you get the ability to double-jump, suddenly you start seeing a lot of things that you just might be able to reach. And then you can't. And you fall. And you die. See, for being a game that encourages exploration (as I literally just finished saying a paragraph ago), Doom really likes to punish you for trying to push the boundaries. You may very well attempt a jump, fail, and walk away from a secret area instead of trying again because failing means reloading the last checkpoint again. Not that there's any real punishment for dying, even a lot. The only thing making death any more than a minor slap on the wrist is the load time, which itself is a minor inconvenience at worst.

Doom 2016 has a little bit of an inconsistent difficulty curve with the odd spike here and there (I played on what I guess passes for "normal), but  I found it really helps you get over the classic gaming fear of using powerful weapons you might need later. It practically encourages going all out with your rocket launcher or gauss cannon, and gives you JUST enough ammo for the infamous and immensely satisfying BFG 9000 that you're never put in an unfair situation that isn't of your own making. (I got ganged up on by some of the more powerful baddies a few times, but only because I was trying to kill them a certain way to complete a challenge.)

I haven't even mentioned the "glory kill" system yet! Every enemy has a set of unique cinematic kills you can perform by weakening them until they flash with a colored outline and getting into melee range. Performing one of these will always cause that enemy to drop a bunch of health pickups, which is the only real reason to keep doing it because it honestly gets a little boring seeing the same two or three animations hundreds of times. Similarly, using the chainsaw on an enemy will always one-hit kill them and cause them to drop a shitload of ammo for everything else, the downside being that stronger enemies cause the chainsaw to use more of its appropriately limited fuel.

Doom 2016 is a great game even if you're totally new to the series. It looks great, plays great, is fun to explore, even the backstory is an amusing read if you need a break from the onslaught, but the platforming detracts from it in the way it does from most FPS games, and the whole thing does get a little repetitive after a while once you've got all the weapons and seen all the different enemies. Some games you play for the in-depth story and relatable, well-developed character arcs, and some you play for the psychotic amusement of force-feeding demons their own still beating hearts. 

Doom is obviously the latter and gets a 9/10.