Who's up for a story; way back in the early days of this blog, back when it was filled with even more spelling errors and sloppy writing, I wrote about the Doom E3 demo, and it was bad, as you'd expect. The demo however was amazing, and I was very right to be excited to get my hands on Doom, just as I'm now very excited to get my hands on Doom Eternal. But my love of Doom goes back a long way, back to my early high school years when I would play the original Doom from 1993 on the school computers, I would also play Doom 3 on the original Xbox after I got one, and then I'd play it some more when it was released on the Xbox 360. I could talk a load of platitudes and foot notes about the significance of Doom to the gaming industry, but I figured that expressing my personal history with it would be more authentic, because since I was about thirteen, I've loved the Doom series, and I've wanted a fourth instalment. Fast forward to 2016, and that Forth instalment arrived, Doom, a game that promised to recapture the awesome not just of Doom, but of a kind of video game that, in 2016, had long since died, with the mission of giving what the shooter genre had become the middle finger at every chance it got and mercilessly kicking the Call of Duty Kids' arses. And with the sequel probably about two years away still, I sat myself down and went for a second round on Doom, and now I feel like an idiot for not playing it in two years because I want to play it forever. Also, I'll only be talking about the campaign here, because I haven't even touched the multiplayer and haven't played enough snapmap to really form a solid opinion on it, but that's fine with me because the campaign's all I need, cough cough Trash Ops.
Doom 3 saw a change in the series when it hit the scene in 2004, one that almost certainly came about because of the climate in which it was developed and released, coming not far behind shooters like Halo and Half Life, and horrors like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. It opted to ditch the loose storytelling and huge, chaotic and open battle arenas of Doom and Doom 2 in favour of a much greater focus on storytelling, a tighter and more compelling narrative, and slower, more atmospheric and claustrophobic combat. This transition into horror made Doom 3 a vastly different game to its predecessors and made the direction the series would go from there much more interesting, because Doom 4 never came, instead remaining in development for years before being scrapped entirely and turned into the Doom we now have. Doom saw a return of the old Doom's approach to matters like storytelling and combat, which is to say that the story here is light, very light.The game's characters are minimal and simplistic, there are no cutscenes, and while the game does sometimes force you to stand still and listen to Samuel Hayden as he tells you what's going on, it's rare and it never outstays its welcome. Storytelling very clearly took a back seat to gameplay in the game's development, but it never felt like an afterthought thanks to the game's long, long catalogue of data logs, which provide hours of reading material for those willing to sniff them all out and go through them. This works massively in the game's favour, as it gives you the choice to either ignore the story all together and get on the ripping and tearing or browse the logs for backstory and information on pretty much everything; characters, locations, weapons, demons and relics. Beneath the surface of this story light shooter is a very rich and very well thought out world that's right there, waiting for anyone willing to take the time and look. I also love the spin this game puts on the character of Doomguy by basically turning him into a superhero; an ancient warrior driven purely by rage and bloodlust, gifted with magic armour and superhuman strength and speed. Despite him never saying a word, the game's exploration into his history through data logs and the Slayer's Testament is gripping and badass, and essentially turns him into the ultimate power fantasy, a man who literally cannot be stopped.
This becomes important in the gameplay, because fundamentally, Doom has one task, a task far harder to pull off than it sounds, Doom's job is to make you, the player, feel like the biggest badass in existence. This is quite the task, especially now because a character must have weaknesses in order to be compelling or interesting, and we now have all kind of social norms that you can't depict a character breaking lest you wish to taste the wrath of Twitter. But the Doom Slayer doesn't give shit about that, the game doesn't care about stupid concepts like toxic masculinity or male power fantasy, The Doom Slayer exists to empower the player, to make you feel like a god, and every aspect of him, from his backstory to his abilities to the physical copy's alternative box art serves that goal. You are the Doom Slayer, the most fearing creature in the universe, and you are unstoppable.Not that the game needs any of this to make you feel awesome because all it really needs is its responsive, intense arena combat, but the more the merrier, and it even goes further than the gameplay and story, it also includes the music. Doom's soundtrack composed by Mick Gordan is a work of genius, and I didn't even like metal, until Doom, but never has a soundtrack better fitted a game; it's a loud, intense, energetic, pulse pounding assault on the senses, already a perfect match for the gameplay, but it gets even better because the music is dynamic. It can and will respond to the player's actions in gameplay, cause a big enough explosion or go in for a glory kill and the music will notice, switching up its choruses, verses and build-ups on the fly as you play, this makes every action you do exhilarating; the glory kills never get old, even as you do the same animation for the hundredth time because each and every one becomes a dopamine rush thanks to the soundtrack, think when a movie or game trailer has music that's in sync with the visuals, and then times that by about a million and make it last ten hours, also make sure you have a good supply of kleenex because it'll get messy.
Mick Gordan's metal soundtrack perfectly accompanies the visuals and design of the game, since Doom is basically what would happen if you turned a metal album cover into a game. Doom will take you to hell and back, literally, through the labs and halls of the UAC facility to the barren Martian landscape, down to the deepest pits of hell and everywhere in between. And along this journey you will be encountering some nasty bastards, from the flimsy and abundant Imps to the disgusting Mancubus and all the way up to the imposing and heavy hitting Barons of Hell. It's all suitably hellish in its presentation. The UAC facility is dark and ominous like Doom 3, with a very neglected utilitarian feel to it, yet its arenas are huge, open areas that allow for a lot of movement and climbing unlike Doom 3. Hell is a similar story; it still looks very hellish with plenty of satanic imagery and architecture, blood and human bones strewn about the floors and walls and complete ignorance of the laws of physics, but again its areas allow for a lot of movement in combat and its presentation on the whole is less dark and creepy than Doom 3, though the Hell levels still have an atmosphere unique to them that you don't feel on Mars. The Demon designs are also very cool, which each design being visually distinct and reflective of the Demon's abilities, and most of them are a huge amount of fun to fight. Imps are speedy little gremlins who either charge and claw at you or throw fireballs from a distance, they also like to Spiderman their way up walls and ledges, but they are weak and the Doom Slayer makes short work of them at close range, which they make up for using numbers and accompanying bigger, more dangerous Demons. This is discernible from their clever design, with them being small and lanky with creepy little grins on their faces, they're cannon fodder, not a challenge but an annoyance, and that is presented though both the Imp's attacks and its design. This aspect of the game's design carries over to most of them; the Mancubus is a fat fuck with huge guns, reflecting its slow movement and ability to deal massive damage, the Hell Knights are huge, ripped Demons with powerful looking arms and legs, reflecting its high mobility and powerful melee attack, and this also applies to the Barons of Hell, which are like Hell Knights but bigger, and very visually distinct from them with their fiery red skin and huge horns. Demons like the Summoner and Lost Soul are more annoying however with the former's constant teleporting and the latter's kamikaze attack, but the majority of the game's Demons are wonderfully designed and a lot of fun to kill.
So the Demons are very well designed, but does the game give you fun toys to dispatch them with, yes it does. With the exception of the pistol, none of Doom's guns feel weak or useless, every gun has heavy, powerful sound effects and causes blood to spurt everywhere on impact. Initially all the guns are familiar in their function; the Combat Shotgun and Super Shotgun cause all kinds of chaos at close range, while the Machine Gun and Chaingun are better suited to medium and long range, the Plasma Rifle can bring the pain with a high rate of fire and the rocket launcher makes things go boom. Where things get spicy however is in the mods, because why not turn your shotgun into a grenade launcher or give your plasma rifle the ability to send out a devastating close-range heat blast. Every weapon has two available mods which you obtain by violently assaulting field drones scattered around the levels and swapping between mods is done with the push of a button. Every weapon and mod is also upgradable, and you upgrade them with tokens you are awarded based on your performance in combat, finding secrets and completing level specific challenges. Though you can only upgrade with the tokens so far before having to complete a challenge in order to max out the weapon, but these challenges don't take the piss, it's stuff like kill two enemies with one heat blast twenty times, or get twenty direct hits with the shotgun grenade, things that happen on their own as you rip and tear, keeping the mods simple and easy, so as to not bog down and over complicate the gameplay. It actually makes me feel a bit dumb now when I look back on my Doom Eternal gameplay post, a lot of the weapon mods from that demo are similar to mods in this game like the shotgun's full auto mod and this game's shotgun's burst fire mod, or the machine gun's scope attachment, it would seem my memory of this Doom was less clear than I'd thought. The Doom Slayer's magic armour is also upgradable with tokens that are hidden around the levels, and your max health, armour and ammo can all be permanently upgraded using Argent Cells, slowly and surely making you even more unstoppable as you play. Then there's the Runes, which give the Doom Slayer perks to, for example, have unlimited ammo if he has over one hundred armour, or causes Demons to drop armour when Glory Killed, very useful perks for sure, though unlike the weapon and armour upgrades, the game makes you work for them, you must complete very demanding time trials in order to obtain them, stuff like blow up thirty barrels before the time expires, starting with six seconds on the clock and two extra seconds per barrel. This makes them stand out amongst the rest of the game's progression systems simply because of how specific and demanding they are, almost always coming down to trial and error, and leaving no wiggle room whatsoever, removing your ability to experiment and make mistakes, and in a game where literally everything else the campaign offers is fun, they're the weakest link. The game does also have some less frustrating distractions in the form of the many little Doomguys hidden around the levels, which unlock character and weapon models that can be accessed from the game's menu when found, and these little guys are adorable, I want one, in real life, I want one.
Doom isn't your typical first-person shooter, I mean this in the sense that if you're a Call of Duty player who's going into Doom thinking that it's just a shooter and you'll kick arse, you won't, Doom will be doing the arse kicking, and you'd better adapt. I said in my post about the Doom Eternal gameplay reveal and Astrid Johnson's ridiculous article about it that this Doom was the antithesis of the modern FPS genre. I can now go into detail and explain that. I said in that post that games have undeniably been getting easier; your average noob could probably set the difficulty to easy and blast through a Call of Duty or Halo game in three hours or less, and like I said in my post about Trash Ops 4, recent Call of Duty games have been trying to phase out any sort of skill gap in gameplay by rewarding the skilled players and the noobs in equal measure, which fails to disincentive and thus perpetuates mediocrity; why bother gitting gud when you and that guy who's going 40/0 on kills will both be getting participation ribbons. Yet when it comes to noobs, Doom's campaign doesn't give a fuck, it throws you in at the deep end from the first mission all the way up to the final boss, and it will force you to git gud because if you don't, it'll destroy you. Doom is projectile based arena combat; it's running around at very high speeds, dodging enemy attacks and thinking on your feet. Doom has no sprint, because the Doom Slayer's default walking speed is sprint, there are no iron sights like Call of Duty or Halo 5 and weapons don't need to be reloaded, and you don't just regenerate health when hurt, you need to heal up or a Demon will come along and rip you apart, literally. The game is very fast paced because standing still for longer than a few seconds will get you killed, enemy attacks are vicious, but are almost always avoidable, meaning that even in areas where I died multiple times, I was never pissed off because the game never felt unfair, I didn't die because the game was cheap, I died because I failed to minimise my damage taken or because I misjudged the demonic threat, and I would subsequently change my strategy for the next attempt, and it only made that moment when I beat a particularly challenging arena all the more gratifying. And this game will challenge you, even its easy mode is hard if you don't know what you're doing, but its heavy reliance on player skill and attack dodging also makes even its hardest modes accessible provided you're up to the task, which speaks volumes to the amount of polish this game has. And once you've beat the game, you can replay all the missions with all your end game gear, making replaying the missions and hunting down the remaining secrets and challenges feel like less of a chore.
This also involves the chainsaw, which you can use to insta-kill demons, provided you have enough fuel to kill the demon in question, which then explodes into a fountain of ammo drops, making the chainsaw not just very gory and fun to use, but a strategic move. Though you don't get ammo drops for the chainsaw or BFG9000 which, like the chainsaw, has limited ammo but is incredibly powerful, able to kill every demon in the room in a single shot. The game's projectile based arena combat still holds very true in the game's boss fights of which there are three, each one naturally harder than the last as you take on the behemoth Cyberdemon and the scuttling bastard Spider Mastermind, who are both incredibly ugly, it's kind of strange that the only new boss, the Hell Guard, is comparatively tame in appearance, but each boss, like all the normal enemies, has learnable attack patterns and dodgeable attacks, making learning how to beat and then subsequently beating them very enjoyable, and finishing them off with a glory kill is amazing, and like every other glory kill in the game, it's earned, and what is more badass than taking a BFG9000, shoving it down a building sized Demon's throat and blowing their body apart with it.
Rip and Tear Until it is Done
Doom is, in many ways, a giant middle finger to what gaming and gaming culture has become over the years; it's hard, unforgiving, unapologetic, and badass at practically everything it does. Doom somehow pulls off simultaneously being a genuinely hard game and making the player feel like an unstoppable god, its arena combat is fast, frantic and addictively enjoyable and the challenge never comes at the expense of the fun because the game never cheats, even the most insurmountable task is perfectly doable provided you're manly enough. The game's hero is a physical embodiment of rage and power and being in his shoes is enough to put hair on even the most meekly of chests, and turns entering a room full of demons from a moment of fear to a moment of sadistic anticipation, so much ripping and tearing to be done. The game is also beautifully designed and has very certainly the most effective and well incorporated soundtrack I've ever heard in a game. Going in for the last secrets with all the end game gear is also a lot of fun, but it's a shame that the Runes have a habit of taking the piss. But in the end, when you're standing victorious over the mangled corpse of the final boss, having violently dispatched thousands of demons, there's only one thing you're left wanting; more. Doom is one of the most exhilarating games I've played in years, and it's absolutely a must play.
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