First, a disclaimer: I never played the original Doom or any of its sequels. My first experience with a shooter was glomming in on my brother’s Halo parties in high school because I didn’t have anything to do on Saturday nights. So you can think of me as either having no bias one way or the other, and being a great person to review this game, or someone no real context of what it’s trying achieve, and so probably not such an ideal reviewer. All I can say is, I heard some positive sentiments somewhere I can’t quite recall—basically something that said, “Hey, this game isn’t terrible and is actually kind of good!” Then I saw Zero Punctuation give it a positive review, and those are rare enough from him that I thought it was worth checking out as a rental during an otherwise dry spell of games.
The story of Doom (2016) is actually a little more important to the experience that I was led to believe, though still not as important as I would’ve liked. The idea is that in the sort-of-distant-but-not-really future, humanity is facing a major energy crisis when the shady United Aerospace Corporation (UAC) finds a massive supply of something called “Argent Plasma” on Mars. Turns out, though, they were getting it from, well, Hell–yes, the Hell, which there is apparently a portal to on Mars. All was going smoothly until lead the scientist Dr. Olivia Pierce, a wrinkly woman with an gray Duke Nukem haircut, is seduced by demons into releasing them into our world (if not our planet) to wreak havoc. This is, unfortunately, their only Miltonic act of temptation, as the demons spend the rest of the game as mindless killing machines indistinguishable from the alien enemies of any other sci-fi shooter. Indeed, [minor spoiler] the Argent Plasma isn’t even originally from Hell, but a world that Hell somehow conquered…militarily. Basically, Doom is so unconcerned with the theological implications of its story that you may as well consider the demons in the game as extra-dimensional aliens who bear some vague similarity to our Dantean concept of demons.
As for you, the player, it’s not really clear who you are. You are human, the “Doom Marine” clad in the Master Chief-looking Praetor Suit–but it seems you were recovered from some kind of tomb in Hell where you were in suspended animation before any other contact had been made with the demons. As best I can tell, the implication seems to be that you are somehow the same Doomguy from the original PC game, but you’ve now been delivered to a sort of parallel universe where things are in HD you can aim up (yeah I never played it, but even I know that much). You wake up in a foul mood, literally ripping the chains binding you to your sarcophagus, and commence killing demons, which you continue to do for the next 10 to 20 hours.
The tone is sort of the opposite of the original BioShock—when the helpful voice of Dr. Samuel Hayden attempts to guide you along to your next objective, you defy his commands on at least one occasion, and the text between levels even says that he thinks you could use his help but “you don’t”. The plot gives you just enough to stay interested, even when you can tell it’s just window dressing to all the fast-paced demon killing. That said, I would have liked more, though I realize I am probably in the minority. At least, I am not very fond of discovering what little plot there is through text descriptions of items and people in the menus a la Dark Souls. It’s far more fun when we get a little taste of how UAC views its employees through the still functioning holographic messages reminding workers that their lives are several times less important than their research and encouraging them to further ingrain themselves in the company’s cult-like hierarchy.
What really matters is, is it fun to play? I would have to answer with a reserved yes. The main mechanic that sets Doom apart from other shooters is the use of Glory Kills. When you damage an enemy enough, they start to flash light blue; when you close in so they flash yellow, you can tap the R3 button to do a pre-rendered animation of tearing the demon apart or shoving something where it doesn’t belong after you’ve the ripped it off, depending on what angle you approach it from. Doing this gives you health and occasionally ammo drops, while also rendering you invincible while you’re performing what amounts to a quick time event. When you’re low on health, enemies spit out more than they normally would with a Glory Kill, you’ll need this because even full health can get peeled down to almost nothing with just a few hits. Half of the enemies in the game, mostly the human sized ones, can be staggered for glory kill with just one shotgun blast, and it is these enemies you’ll be using to heal yourself during the frequent melees where stronger enemies are ganging up on you.
The game play is divided between, on the one hand, periods of exploration where are you’ll make your way through the maze-like level, occasionally doing a bit of first person platforming that is actually pretty functional, all the while facing mostly one-hit enemies, some of them with projectiles and sometimes with stronger enemies mixed in (but not always). On the other hand, you have free-for-alls where you’re trapped in a winding set of interconnected rooms usually revolving around a central open space, and you have to clear wave after wave of stronger enemies while you dash from place to place like a runaway tilt-a-whirl until you’re allowed to leave. When the game tells you that standing still is death in the load screens, it sure isn’t kidding–the moment you try to take cover to get a few shots off at the Minotaur-looking demon chasing after you, another identical demon is going to come up behind you and either gore or you melt you with a blob of green laser juice.
Oh, and there are boss battles…like, three. They’re not that great, but not terrible either. The worst that can be said of them is that, once you get a feel for their pattern, even if you’ve died like 10 times before, you realize its only inevitable that you’ll beat it—whereas, in some of the more difficult free-for-all sections, all you can do is adapt to the chaos and hope you don’t miss too much. I know that that fist I raised during after beating some of these was more triumphant that any of the boss battles. And, like I said—there’s only three of them, and they’re all clustered near the second half of the game when you’ve already mastered the game enough that you don’t have the raw challenge of trying to figure things out when only have your base health and a few weapons.
So anyway, Doom is definitely a good, fun game—I can say that with more certainty than I could with Bravely Second. Its biggest strength is that it knows what it wants to be—a run-and-gun shooter where you can rely on your instincts and eventually come out on top and feel like you’ve accomplished something. There are no turret sections; you never lose your weapons and have to stealth kill wandering enemies; you never get in a vehicle to reach your next objective; it doesn’t have an overly involved story full of stock characters you’re meant to care about but don’t. Doom simply is what it is.
But this leanness is also what keeps Doom from being more than just a pretty good, B- sort of game. For example, say there was a guy who only knew two things well enough to talk about them intelligently—say carpentry and opera—and when he’s talking about those things, he’s not only insightful and interesting, he can make the topics he knows engaging even for people who don’t know anything about them. Let’s also say that this guy is self-aware that these are the only topics he can speak intelligently on, so unless he’s with his family or maybe very close friends, those are the only things he’ll talk about; he won’t shove his two topics down your throat, but if you’re talking about, say, hockey, he’s just not going to say a thing. Now, the fact that he doesn’t try to talk about things he doesn’t know and that he would just bore other you trying to talk about is a good thing—but it doesn’t change the fact that he can only talk about two things. If you’re a carpenter or you love opera, the guy might be one of your favorite people; but for the rest of us, no matter how fascinating he makes his interests out to be, he’s more the kind of guy you don’t mind running into every now and then in mixed company rather than someone you specifically seek out. Again, in small doses, the guy is great, but the fact that he knows his limits doesn’t change the fact that he is, indeed, very limited.
To make this more concrete, let’s compare Doom to another recently game revamping an early PC-game, but doing it better—not massively better, but still better—Wolfenstein: The New Order. Unlike Doom, The New Order has a story, and it’s a pretty good one, even if it does fall victim to the old problem of the most affecting story elements being revealed in audio-logs. Like the Doom Marine, B.J. Blazkovicz is a pretty big badass, though its tempered with humanity enough to make him relatable. The New Order also offers more variation in game play, mostly because you can sneak around if you want, but it’s never artificially forced on you. The fighting is fast-paced, but more tactical since you can’t just replenish your health with Glory Kills and even the mookest of the mooks have guns. That said, I don’t think The New Order necessarily beats Doom on the combat front, since it’s apples and oranges, and both are fun in their way. For exploration, I think it’s also pretty much a wash, but I give the slight edge to The New Order because the environments are more varied, so it feels more rewarding to find out as much as you can about them.
There are probably a dozen other aspects I could compare, but the point is that compared to The New Order, Doom feels like a pretty fun theme park with only half the rides you expected. The lack of variety may be good for not giving you dull experiences, but it’s also pretty easy for it to make the main experience of running and gunning get repetitive pretty fast.
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