The New Doom Is Alright

If I had to go to a deserted island and I could only pick one game to eat, drink and have sex with, it'd be the original Doom. I probably said the same thing about GTA V at some point, but that was then and fuck past me. It's still a close second, though.
I was 11 years old when Doom came out and it scared the shit out of me. The dark corridors, where flickering lights would only illuminate the shambling monster hordes for very brief moments. The moans and screeches. Even the fucking doors sounded scary!

If you find it hard to believe that Doom was so horrifying, you have to understand that up to that point, most computer games used to look like this:

Commander Keen, also id.

I still have the Doom 1 and 2 cartridges for the Gameboy Advance, I've got Doom running on my PSP, my Nintendo 3DS and probably every other electronic device in the house, including our sandwich toaster. I'm not even kidding, Doom runs on absolutely everything!

And the game still holds up remarkably well, more than two decades later. There are so many different mods, total conversions and enhancements for Doom, it's absolutely insane. Heck, there's a version of Brutal Doom on my PC right now!

And then a brand new Doom was announced. It looked ridiculously over the top, but I'm in no position to complain about shit like glory kills, when I mod the exact same stuff into the original Doom. So I finally gave that a try.
Yeah, I know. I'm 4 months late. Because the Doom multiplayer demo looked shit. The singleplayer footage looked good, but not 60 Euro good. But what do you know, the game was half price this weekend. Yay me and a bit of a fuck you from Bethesda to anyone who bought it sooner, I guess.

I was absolutely blown away at first. The game looks pretty sweet on maximum detail settings, with the odd shitty texture here and there. I don't really understand why this sort of thing still happens in modern games. Optimization? Are they just lazy? It just throws me off a bit when I'm experiencing a realistic-looking landscape with sharp, crisp textures and suddenly I walk into a bunch of rocks looking like this:

"Ultra" graphics.

Still, the overall look and feel was fantastic, I cranked that shit up to 1440p and frame rates were stable, (almost) everything looked glorious and all in all, the game is really well-optimized. You get those insane, massive monster hordes attacking from every single direction and there's never even a stutter. Granted, everything happens inside relatively small, enclosed locations, so it's not like the game was rendering any massive open-world landscapes during fights.

So I was happily blasting my way through hordes of demons and zombies when I noticed something odd: All the big battles only happen in these locked arenas. Remember how in the original Doom every level was filled with monsters, which you'd encounter whilst exploring the halls and corridors? Levels in the new Doom are almost completely empty until you reach one of the four or five arenas in every stage, which spawn a shit-ton of monsters on your ass. What's up with that?

And there was an even bigger problem. The original Doom has no jumping. The new one does. And it has WAY TOO MANY FUCKING PLATFORMING SECTIONS! Yes, the Quake games had sections like that, but I'm not playing fucking Quake, I'm certainly not playing Half-Life and I really thought this was supposed to be Doom. There's this incredibly annoying section where you have to climb up a massive tower, where one wrong jump can instakill you. It's not super difficult, the whole thing is perfectly doable, it's just that I don't fucking want to.

To make the whole thing feel even more "modern", they added a bunch of annoying minigames. Sorry, "trials". There's a trial where you have to shoot some 30 or so baddies in six seconds. Sure, you get an extra second per kill, but enemies spawn all over the place, so you have to fail the trial a few times and memorize the spawn locations before you stand a realistic chance at beating this crap. Not all trials are that awful, but you have to complete them in order to unlock powerful buffs. Most of them are well-hidden, so if you miss too many of them on a playthrough your character will end up seriously gimped at the later levels. Same goes for hidden pickups, which permanently increase your health, armor and ammo.

You'll want all the bonus stats you can get. Trust me.

Doom's biggest flaw is that it massively overstays its welcome. Five or six hours into the game you will have encountered every single type of enemy there is in Doom, save for a few (terrible) boss fights. There isn't much variety here. Unfortunately, the game will drag on for another six hours and the only thing that changes from here is the amount of monsters thrown at you in every arena. The fights get bigger, longer, you get more and more of the ever-same hordes of baddies up to a point, where shit gets frustratingly unfair. I completed the campaign on 'Hurt Me Plenty', but I absolutely hated the final two levels and I was actually glad when it was over.

The game turns from a power fantasy into a run for your life, where you have to cheese your way through major fights with the chainsaw, the BFG and quad damage powerups, because all the ammo upgrades in the world won't give your rocket launcher enough oomph to help you blast your way through the game's final stages on regular weapons alone.

Doom is a good game. The annoying platforming bits, an overstretched campaign with a dumb leap in difficulty towards the end and the utter lack of mod-support or a proper co-op campaign prevent it from being really great. And 40 Euro for a fucking season pass? The first DLC is a bunch of worthless, overpriced crap for a multiplayer mode, which hardly anyone even touches. Because we now live in a day and age where developers charge lots of money for Doom maps.