Doom

I’ve never played the original Doom, but interestingly the first game I ever played on PC was Doom 2. Before then I had only been playing games on the Amiga.

It was my first experience of the first person shooter genre and it was marvelous. I fell instantly in love and I kept playing that game for years. I even played it in coop over modem, which I guess was my first multiplayer experience, long before you could play over the Internet.

I did play Doom 3, but I remember that I found it too scary. They play around a lot with darkness in that game, and you use a flash light in order to see properly. I would hate that mechanic today as I do not like to dark games.

Thankfully Doom (2016) doesn’t try to scare you with darkness. Actually, I don’t think the game tries to be scary at all. This is not a horror game, but an action FPS just like Doom 2 was. It is fast, it is furious and it is extremely gory.

Doom (2016) does one thing really well. It shut you into a room, spawns a lot of demons and give you a hefty arsenal to deal with them. The action parts of this game is phenomenal. It is really high paced, you can pick up power ups to make it even higher paced. You blow up, slice up, and rip apart demons with your bare hands. I must say, this is the best action game I have every played. The music starts pumping and you get into a flow of wrecking chaos, blood and fire around you. When every demon are slain you stand victorious in the battlefield with your heart pumping adrenaline though your veins. Feels great!

As an arcade experience this is great. It is all the other aspects of this game that I find lacking.

Should we start with the story? It is so dumb that it would be better to just leave it out. The scientists on Mars has yet again opened a portal to hell. I would have wished when they are prividing a story it would be something more interesting. You do not have to be true to the original. You could just make something fun out of it. Instead we get long monologues from a robot that is going to explain why we need to go back and forth between Mars and Hell like a juju. I do not like it at all, and it doesn’t end particularly well either.

The game is pretty much moving from one arena to another. Once you entered an arena all exits will close, demons will spawn in and you will kill all of them. Then you can move on to the next arena. At first this is quite okay, because these segments are really fun to play, but I did find them quite tedious the second half of the game as there wasn’t much progression in the game play. Once you pass the half way point you have gotten all the weapons, and seen all the enemies. Now you just going to do the same thing for 5 more hours until the end. Sure, the intensity is cranked up, the arenas are new and refreshed, but you will fight the same demons with the same weapons. At some point the demons will turn purple, which means that they have a larger health pool.

The weapons are the classic Doom weapons and I really like them. Even if I had my favorites, it wasn’t uncommon that I would utilize all the different weapons in a fight, because they have advantages in certain situations. The enemies are also the same enemies that we’ve seen before, but the way they move, and the way the break when you tear them apart is really standing out. Even if there isn’t much variety in enemies, the enemies that are there are very fun to kill.

The Mars base is quite boring. It looks like any space base in any other space game that has been made. However when you get to hell, you will see some really pretty scenery. They have managed to create levels that are really cool looking. After a while, you will question who is placing all this ammunition in hell to make sure that you can stock up, and why the horde isn’t hiding it away. You will get tired of seeing the same kind of gory corridors both in hell and Mars by the end of the game.

After two thirds of the game it decides that it is boss time. That is very strange pacing. Why weren’t there any bosses until now, and why do they suddenly feel the need for it? There are three bosses in this game and they all are terrible. They are not terrible as in hard, but terrible as in boring meat walls that you just have to shoot enough times in order to progress. I would love if they had put these at the end of the levels instead, but made them with less health pool and just as a cool thing to end of the level. Instead we have a 20 minute, shoot it until it dies, that is not very fun.

There you have it. The action arenas are the best piece of action I have seen in a video game, maybe ever. This whole game is pretty much going from arena to arena which makes it really good. Everything else is crap, but that doesn’t ruin the game. I still had fun all the way through even if I thought that it overstayed its welcome by the end.

I rate this game as GOOD.