THE BIG REVIEW OF DOOM (2016)

I can admit it.  I thought Doom was going to be trash.

Every sign that overly serious nerd tea leave readers use in these sorts of scenarios was there.  The review copy embargo.  The awkward E3 presentations.  Bethesda.  Seeing the game in action on various preview videos certainly made it look more Doom-y than the eternally unfortunate Doom 3, but they still looked clunky, and that melee kill mechanic, talk about a buzzkill.  And all those fights, it's just some lame arena shooter!

On that last respect I was partially right, and I should be clear here:  if you're looking at Doom to be the revival of the original two title's gameplay style and NOTHING ELSE WILL DO, you're not going to be happy.  Doom is a straight up arena shooter, where 90% of your combat will be from entering a room that locks you in while fighting a bunch of monster men.  But, oh my brothers, what an arena shooter it is.  Doom is the fulfillment of a promise started by Serious Sam and Painkiller, a breathing mix of adrenaline, humor, and copious gore that works in almost every way.

Where Doom triumphs over previous games of this sort is in the beautifully designed nature of its fights.  The biggest weakness of these FPS experiences starting with Serious Sam has always been the developer's reliance on fights just being a constant influx of a bunch of fucking monsters spawning over and over in the same area, long after you've figured out the best plan of attack against them.  There's alot of good things in Serious Sam, but did you -really- enjoy those rooms where you had to kill like 400 Kleer Skeletons for about ten minutes?  Sure it's fun for a little bit, but eventually you're just doing the same sidestep on a charge over and over with no variety in that murder motion.

can i just say how happy i am they retained the cacodemon's original look

No fight in Doom tends to go longer than four minutes, which is the perfect time to determine whether you're able to stand up to whatever the game flings at you or if you're going to be looking at an imp pulling off your arm and beating you to death with it.  I can't emphasize how important this change is, considering how every game of this sort previously relied on just throwing legions of cannon fodder at you until you went OKAY I GET IT JESUS PLEASE LET ME LEAVE THIS PARKING GARAGE.  Doom's fights are nasty and short affairs, just long enough to put you in a state of stress and force you to utilize the environment and scattered items to the fullest right before you glory kill your last Revenant.  A couple of fights near the end actually had me whooping in excitement as the last enemy fell and the last heavy metal guitar lick twanged out.  That never happens, and it says alot about how the game knows exactly how long it can keep up a player's adrenaline before it starts to drop off.

Speaking of glory kills, I'm still on the fence.  For those not in the know, glory kills come from when you've battered a demon enough that they start glowing, allowing you to perform an execution move on them.  Generally this nets a tiny amount of health, but if you're near death, enemies literally explode into a pinata of tiny health packs.  From a gameplay perspective, they're absolutely essential to do, because any difficulty level above the default mode is going to feature you getting shit on by the sheer unrelenting aggression of your foes, and holy fuck do they hurt.  Nightmare, the highest difficulty, will have you getting two-shot by an imp's cough, to say nothing of what the bigger baddies can do to you.

As a result, fights are an exhilarating affair, forcing a straight up run and gun experience where you pray to god that that imp is going to get stunned by your shotgun blast before you get a fireball to the face.  Still, after about halfway through the game, some of the kills become rather stale, and it feels sort of gimmicky that the only way to survive sometimes is to take advantage of the invincibility frames during your execution move to dodge a certain death attack from another monster.  And of course, you will occasionally fuck up the timing of your kill, coming off of the canned animation to be immediately murdered by an undodgeable attack.  Thankfully, checkpoints in this game are generally pretty fair about depositing you right before MurderBrawl 2016 begins anew.

What I'm not on the fence about is the utter fucking brilliance of what they did about the chainsaw.  The person on Doom's dev team that thought up the new chainsaw deserves a raise and an infinite supply of oral sex, because holy fuck.  For those not in the know, they transformed the chainsaw from an awkward melee weapon used by ammo-conscious nerds to kill Pinkies into a vicious hammer of god that not only instantly kills any demon you use it on, but also showers the player with an absurd amount of ammo.  The limitation is that the chainsaw now has fuel as ammo, and larger monsters require more fuel for the blood-making.  This forces the player to choose between using the chainsaw to kill more fodder-y enemies for essentially infinite ammo, or to deal with that raging 14-foot-tall Baron of Hell immediately but risk running out of ammo for your favorite Gunny.  Not only does this place the player in an immediate tactical choice, but it also highly diminishes forcing the player to root around in the given Fight Room for more ammo.


Guns are also almost uniformly goddamned amazing.  No fucking two-item weapon limit here, assclowns.  All of the old favorites are here, along with a few new guys like an assault rifle which I'm sure has the purists crying all over again but whatever.  All of the base weapons have some sort of relevance, but what puts things over the top is the introduction of weapon mods.  Yes, that means the dreaded UPGRADE PATHS, but it's okay here really!  Throughout the game you'll run into upgrade robots that let you place one of two attachments to a weapon of your choice.  Each one drastically alters the way the weapon operates.  For instance, you can make your shotgun fire a handy grenade every few seconds, or after a short charge, make it fire three rounds in quick succession.  You can upgrade the capabilities of these add-ons further with upgrade points, which drop from just playing through levels, finding secrets, and completing various combat challenges.

Unlike certain other severely overrated trash games, Doom does a really good job in giving you slightly more than enough points to let you experiment without fucking you over if you over-invested in a questionable upgrade path.  There's even strategic choice in that it costs more points each time you upgrade a specific attachment, but unlocking everything on an attachment opens a combat challenge which boosts that upgrade to an absurd degree.  For instance, for the shotgun's grenade, unlocking everything gives you the challenge to directly hit 30 imps with grenades, after which your grenades drop fuck-you clusterbombs after exploding.

However, there is a problem with weapons.  And that problem is named the Gauss Cannon.

The Gauss Cannon is one of the new weapons in Doom.  It is essentially a sniper railgun.  It hits like a goddamned truck.  Both upgrades for the cannon bring that absurdity further, one a chargeable scope that kills anything in two headshots, the other a siege mode attachment that forces you to stand still, but if fully charged will kill anything in one headshot, oh yeah and it also pieces through enemies.

I hesitate to call any enemy in Doom a bullet sponge because my definition of that term is something that is only hard to deal with due to its resilient nature, but most of the enemies in Doom do not go down easily, unless they're versus the Gauss Cannon.  It's obvious the developers tried to lessen the overpowered nature of the Gauss Cannon by forcing the player to limit his or her maneuverability while using it, but this just makes alot of fights a matter of getting enough distance between you and the Prime Bad, squeezing off a shot, then running away before everything in Hell hits you.  It's not that the Gauss Cannon is the only thing I used in the later stages of the game, but it certainly was my default "we are in a jam boys" option.

The other issue is that the Gauss Cannon shares ammo with the Plasma Rifle.  I was not a big fan of the plasma rifle in the original Doom games, but it had its place as the "I need to clear out a room of squishes as quickly as possible."  Here, the fact that the Gauss Cannon is a jealous and needy penis substitute undercuts the already questionable usefulness of the plasma rifle.  To put things nicely, the best way I can describe the plasma rifle's feel and power is "the water gun thing from Super Mario Sunshine."  Even imps require a thorough dousing in the supersoaker before going down.  Attachments don't help, since your options are some sort of area of effect blast that requires you to fire a bunch of rounds before becoming available, or a stun grenade that would be good if it wasn't for the fact that any fight in the game features about five deadly threats coming at you from any angle.  Still, for a game like this, one pretty overpowered gun and one pretty shit gun is pretty good.  And it's not like Doom 2 wasn't guilty of this shit (hello super shotgun, I love you but you're so goddamned stupid), so whatever.

I'm not going to discuss the enemies because part of the joy in this game is discovering each new baddy and how they're going to completely fuck you over, but I do want to talk about Imps.

Look at these fucks.  If they original Doom imps were annoying cannon fodder, and the Doom 3 imps were embarrassing cannon fodder (seriously, every time they blundered out of monster closets or summoning circles 2 inches from me and my shotgun I couldn't help but think of The Shockmaster), the new Doom's imps are unbelievably dangerous and obnoxious cannon fodder.  They're fast, they climb things, their fireballs are fast and hit like a truck, and they can even throw them over their shoulder while running away from you, like some sort of goddamned infernal banana peel.  The number of times I've been wrecking in a fight with full health and armor, only to be laid low by some imp that was hanging on a rafter above me and decided to scratch my butthole out is significant, always led to a GODDAMNIT, and always made me laugh.

Ultimately, that's what makes Doom work so well and why the accolades other critics have been giving it are not unwarranted for once.  It's a genuine joy to play, whether you're nailing the perfect Gauss Cannon headshot or getting hilarious murdered by some shit you didn't even seen because you were trying to dodge the 15 other stuffs guaranteed to kill you.  I've heard complaints about the game forcing you to look for secrets and complete challenges for weapon upgrades, but unless you're playing on Nightmare difficult or a total baddy, you don't have to deal with that, and what's the point of Doom if you're not taking some time out of murder to rub your face against the walls looking for secrets?

Likewise, I don't really want to discuss the plot aside from making fun of this awful Penny Arcade comic:

Ignoring the fact that somehow the art style has become even worse than when the comic started, actually yes the game is entirely about the increasingly inhumane nature of corporations, and a parody of the fps protagonist that blindly follows the commands of his establishment overseer.  Again, no spoilerinos, but one of the high points of joy in this game is Doom Guy's body language in contrast to how a player is supposed to react to the disembodied voice telling them to save the space whales.  It's not a perfect plot, but the fact that there's maybe ten minutes of unskippable plot sequences in a ten hour game forgives everything in this depressing day and age.

tl;dr: Doom is as good as Penny Arcade is wet shit