![]() ![]() ![]() Amid the health and ammo items littered around most battle rooms (on the standard "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulty I played, at least), you'll also find frequent one-off power-ups that temporarily increase your damage, make you invulnerable, or let you take out the toughest enemies with a single punch. You're aided in this near-constant running and dodging by an enjoyably floaty jump (and eventually, a responsive double jump) that allows you to clamber up to better vantage points and away from swarming enemies. ![]() It's a constant struggle to maintain a safe distance from enemies while also leaving yourself room to safely sidestep attacks without getting cornered or backing into unseen hazards (the few areas where you can accidentally step backward off a cliff can be quite annoying, though). Standing still for more than a second is almost always a recipe for instant death. Most all of them make great use of vertical space, with tiered platforms, ledges, ramps, valleys, and side hallways that allow for multiple angles of attack and multiple avenues of escape. The few incredibly dull exceptions where you go mano-a-demono with a single, particularly resilient enemy go a long way to proving just how important a varied mix of enemy types is to keeping Doom fresh.įurther Reading Doom single-player impressions: Hell and back againThe varied terrain of the generally open battle arenas also helps keep the battles feeling exciting right up to the end of the game. That's largely because Doom is constantly throwing all sorts of different enemies together in a single room, forcing you to make on-the-fly decisions about priorities.ĭo you focus on the charging, horned Baron of Hell that's threatening to pin you to the wall, or first focus on the floating, round Cacodemon lobbing vision-distorting energy balls at your face? You'd better figure it out fast because they're not going to wait for you to make a decision (though the demons will occasionally decide to ignore you and fight each other in true Doom fashion). You'll see most of the dozen or so demon types hundreds of times in a single Doom playthrough, but taking them on doesn't feel nearly as repetitive or dull as taking on the nigh indistinguishable bullet sponges in many shooters. The only saving grace to it all are the tongue-in-cheek human resources holograms, who give long-dead employees hilariously matter-of-fact tips on how to cope with the unstable evil they're trying to work with. The rare unskippable cut scenes only take up a minute or two out of every gameplay hour, yet the overly expository characters make even those seem too long somehow. Most of this backstory is eminently ignorable-you can literally just run past those chattering holograms and get on to the action. The story is similarly ridiculous, full of holograms and robots blathering on about how opening up the gates of Hell was worth it to power massive weapons and an unlimited solar-system-wide energy source or something. You could argue that it's all intentionally over the top, but I found the ruddy, red and brown gore-fest to be more than a bit numbing after a while. The second half of the game in particular looks like it uses a disturbed 7th grader's idle doodles as concept art, full of the kind of occult symbols, flames, and blood-drenched surfaces that seemed a lot edgier when you were a teenager. Unfortunately, taking inspiration from the original Doom means taking inspiration from its general aesthetic as well. It's as if the makers of the new Doom saw a shooter genre weighed down by decades of complex and often unnecessary cruft and said, "Nah, that's OK, we think we got it right the first time." (even if the current id Software "we" no longer actually includes any of the company founders that worked on the first Doom). There are just enough modern shooter touches here to keep Doom from feeling entirely dated, but the basic gameplay doesn't feel like it's changed much since the days of Quake. Sneaking around or hiding behind a pillar won't help you here, and your health and armor meters don't recharge unless you actually run over items sitting on the ground-a once-standard shooter feature that feels practically archaic these days. You're constantly running at full speed while relatively out in the open, sidestepping bullets and enemies that you can actually see coming at you and shuffling between overpowered weapons to fire back at the enemies. Like the early '90s ur-shooter it draws its name from, Doom is about nonstop dodge-and-fire action. Further Reading id Software cofounder John Carmack leaves companyThose elements can all be fine in their own way. ![]()
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