Back from Hell
10/10 (single player)
I'll focus on single player for this review.
Holy shit, this is easily one of, if not the best game of the 8th generation that I've played so far. Fears that this game was only going to be Call of Doom have been put to rest. This is a return to form, a return to FPS's roots and about the farthest away from the Call of Duty formula you can get and remain an FPS.
To prepare for this experience, I played though the Inferno chapter of the original Doom, so I'd have a fresh reference point in my mind while I played though Doom '16.
Meet New Doom, same as Old Doom, and that's a damn good thing.
Once again we go back to having a health and armor meter, no longer does your health regenerate on it's own. No more do enemies take cover and try to pick you off. The result is fast and furious gameplay. Monster will now rush you, Imps are very fond of jumping and climbing walls to get to your positions, Knights of Hell are always charging at you to bash you, and if you stay put too long the huge new Baron of Hell with pound you into the ground. Hit, run, and serpentine is the key to survival, duck and cover is the fastest way to get killed. Given the prevalence of the CoD formula in today's FPS genre, this return to old school Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem style is a breath of fresh air.
Also returning, and further refined thanks to modern gaming technology, is that combat now has a 3D element. By that I mean, no longer are enemies confined to the ground. Sure in modern and sci-fi shooters you get the occasional flying unit that either comes in every once in awhile to dump a bunch of guys on you and leave, or serves as a boss. In Doom '16 you will run into flying monsters that are every bit as aggressive and dangerous as the ones that come at you from the ground. The further hammers the point that you need to keep moving. Stay in one spot and focus on one monster for too long, thinking your back is safe because you're by a cliff, NOPE, a flying monster like the Cacodemon might come in and literally bite you in the ass and take off a big chunk of life.
Not to go into Battlefield 1 territory, but around the era of WWI, there was a line of thought in naval design that resulted in the battlecruiser. A medium cruiser type vessel with battleship caliber armament. The design philosophy was "speed is armor". And that perfectly sums up the gameplay of Doom '16. Yes you do have armor pick ups that absorb light damage and mitigate mid to high damage, but you cannot just tank your way though this game. The tactic of shoot, shoot, duck for 8 seconds, shoot, shoot, duck for 8 seconds, rinse and repeat will not work in Doom'16. Just like in the original, you have to keep on the move and you have to be able to dodge what the monsters will throw at you.
Funny enough, if you are an experience Call of Duty Zombie player, getting into Doom '16 will not be too much of a jump. Just imagine the zombies with guns who move around more than just run at you in a straight line.
To facility this mad run and gun style of play, level designs have a lot of wide open spaces in which you can run around loose in with little obstruction. Very rarely did I get killed because I got stuck on an obstacle while pack peddling or circle-strafing. Even indoor locations, the hallways are wide and there are much of the combat takes place is big hangar like areas. The other "speed bump" in the road of running and gunning that the developers removed was the reload feature. While ammo pickups remain, the player essentially has bottomless magazines on all the guns. No longer do you have to take a 3 second break in your slaughter party to reload, except with the Super Shotgun, that just like with Doom 2, must be manually reloaded after each shot (until you max out it's upgrades, then you get two shots). Id has more or less taken out most of not all obstacles that would put a pause or slow down in pace.
There were some concerns that the Glory Kills would slow down the gameplay, but that turned out to not be the case. In fact it adds a layer of strategy to your rampage. The Glory Kill animations are fast and smooth, and Glory Killing will result in health, armor (with suit upgrades) and occasionally ammo pick ups. It doesn't break the flow of your unleashed rage, nor does it result in cheap deaths where you are killed mid animation. There are a variety of Glory Kill animations, for each monster, Pinky for instance, you can get behind him and rip him apart with your bare hands, or you can get him from the front, rip out one of his horns and stab him in the face with it. On a sidenote this was clearly influenced by the Brutal Doom mod, where executions will net you a 5pt health boost, even beyond the 200pt cap.
Because the game just craps monsters all over you, situational awareness is a must. As you are a running around you need to keep track of where multiple monsters are at once. While this doesn't seem too different from you standard CoD style fare, there's the added factor of the monsters, rather than taking cover, are coming at you. This makes you have to make snap decisions such has which monsters to engage first. Do you engage the long distance Hell Raiser, or the Hell Knight who's been chasing you around for the past 5 min? Should you use the chainsaw to insta-kill that Baron of Hell and use up all your fuel... wait, where did he go, shit did he get behind me?!
Doom '16 also throws in some light platformer elements, which adds another level of strategy to many areas. Jumping and climbing ledges is smooth and fast. Do you want stay on the lower level and circle-strafe the monsters, or do you want to keep to the high ground and jump around the area?
Now I know I started off with describing the Doomguy coming in and murdering two major characters from Modern Warfare as a creative way of saying that Doom '16 murders Call of Duty, and while Doom '16 does completely and utterly blow away CoD in terms of single player experience, they're both different enough experiences to stand side by side.
Ok, so with a nonstop, Hell-coke fueled, demon slayer rampage (on that note the original Devil May Cry soundtrack really works for this game), you need to have a control scheme that facilitates that. While Doom '16 lacks a custom control set up, like many games do today, the settings they have are very intuitive and and leave nothing of want. No more of this 2 gun shit, you now carry an arsenal of 7 guns, accessed via a Resistance style weapon wheel by holding down Triangle. Tapping Triangle will return you to your most previously equipped weapon. Accessing the map on the PS4 is via the touchpad button (which acesses the menu in general, though the map is the default) and you can use the touchpad or the sticks to navigate the map. The super weapons like the chainsaw and the BFG 9000 get their own button so when things are going side-ways you can quickly shift to either one and either chainsaw insta-kill the biggest threat in the room, or BFG everyone in the room.
Behold! The PC of the future, as big as PC of the past.
Now on to the technical aspect. On the PS4 Doom '16 runs at a nice, smooth, constant 60fps. I never noticed any drops in frame rate, even with a dozen monsters running around loose in a large arena like area with shooting, flying and shit blowing up. Very rarely have I seen any visual glitches. I had one glitch that happened only once where I climbed a ledge and the view was blurry (like when they model distance) but it went away after pressing the touch pad and going into the menu and leaving.
As with visual glitches very rarely did I have any glitches that caused me to get stuck somewhere and have to reload a checkpoint. Though I did have a crash that kicked me out of the game and I had to reload the game. Not sure if that was because of the game or because I was using the media player in the background to play remixes of classic Doom tracks (personally I didn't much care for the game's music). But fortunately the game isn't stingy on the check points so I didn't have to retrace too much of my steps. Certainly not enough to get pissed off over it.
Aside from that crash the game ran flawlessly.
Welcome to Hell. Please don't feed the Cacodemons and direct any concerns to the local Baron. If you encounter an angry green armored human with a big gun, DO NOT approach him, he is extremely dangerous and promptly notify the nearest Knight.
Visually the game is very appealing with the art style going from Alien style industrial sci-fi with the UAC Argent Facility on Mars, to a kind of medieval fire and brimstone/fantasy style for Hell. While the the UAC has a kind of "hard" look to it, Hell has a slight sepia filter that gives it a very slight hazy look, like a kind of a fire-got-put-out-and-the-ash-is-floating-around-a-little kind of look. It doesn't look like everything is on fire, but it does look like a very desolate and unpleasant place to be in.
Personally I really loved the art style. Especially with Hell's art style, with it's medieval/fantasy look, making it very distinct from the sci-fi facility on Mars. Naturally with a game that features Hell as a location, a lot of the demonic imagery from classic Doom returns, you'll find blood runs scrawled on some of the walls in the UAC base and in Hell you'll find the return of the skull switches.
Meet New Doomguy, same as Old Doomguy...
The Doomguy himself looks like a revamped version of the classic Doomguy. This time around his armor is full body rather than just upper body armor and helmet over a sleeveless BDU. While updated, you can look at him and right away tell he's the guy from Doom. Just like the original his character development is very limited since he's supposed to be the player. But we do see some aspects of his personality. He has a tendency to break stuff, for instance after upgrading your gun at a service droid he punches the droid hard enough to seemingly knock it out of commission. He'll also smash terminals that get used to communicate with him. When you pick up the little bonus action figures, when you find the one that looks like him, he swivels the figure's hand out and gives him a little fist bump, then shakes his hand like the figure bumped him too hard.
The monsters are for the most part instantly recognizable and close counterparts to their classic Doom originals. In terms of design, even more so than their Doom 3 incarnations. Personally I prefer the monster designs here to Doom 3's. A lot of them actually attack the same way as they did before, since there are quite a bit, I'll just go over the guys that got a big overhaul.
Imps now like to scurry and jump around, but they still like to throw fireballs at you, but they now travel along a ballistic arc, and I have noticed that they will lead you to an extent when they fire their charged fireball at you.
The Demon/Pinky is back, but now he acts like this kind of raging bull enemy that charges at you rather than run up to you and bite you repeatedly. His face is armored so now you have to side step him and shoot him in the flanks and back to to efficiently kill him.
Hell Knights got a complete revamp, now instead of just a pallet swap of the Baron of Hell, they're these big hulking brutes that charge at you and engage you in melee combat. Gone is their green fireball.
The Mancubus now comes in two varieties but they're not too terribly different from each other, not enough to require different tactics. They both behave the same way as the classic incarnations, only now they also have this close range continuous flamethrower attack that will sap you health and armor if you stay too close to him.
The Cyberdemon now has a sword that he can sling these energy waves at you along with his rocket launcher. He also has an attack where he raises rows of stone spikes at you and traps you in a shooting gallery for him, where you have to dodge his attacks, but it works the same way for you and he doesn't bother dodging your attacks, opening him up for guaranteed BFG hit.
The Spider Mastermind now has a fully organic look, rather than being a giant Krang sitting on a quad-legged wheelchair. It now looks something between the Widowmaker from Resistance 3 and Phantom from Devil May Cry. Now it does more than just standing there holding down the fire button on it's chaingun. It still has the chaingun but now it also has a laser attack that the player must jump over and duck under. The other attack it also has is an area electrical attack that must be evaded by standing on pillars that the Spider forces up from the ground, however stay on these pillars too long and spikes extended from it damaging the player. You need to jump off at the right time. Lastly, after you damaged it enough, the Spider will also start throwing said pillars at you.
From top to bottom: BFG-9000, Chainsaw, Plasma Rifle, Chaingun, Pistol, Super Shotgun, Combat Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, Heavy Assault Rifle, Siphon Grenade, Gauss Cannon
Now, I can't talk about your victims without talking about the tools of the trade. To tell you the truth, I'm not super fond of the designs of the guns, but they don't feel out of place with the rest of the game's art style, and in terms of function they are damn fun to use. They pretty much threw out all pretenses of realism when they designed your tools of carnage, that's both in terms of art and in function.
The BFG-9000, as previously stated gets it own dedicated button (L1 for the PS4) and it functions largely the same way as the classic BFG-9000. Fires a big green blast that hits everyone.
The Chainsaw got a complete overhaul. No longer is it an infinite use weapon, you now need fuel to use it, but there's a catch. It is now an insta-kill weapon and will kill just about all non-boss monsters in one gory Glory Kill style attack (against a Baron of Hell, you'll saw off his right leg and while he's lying on the ground you'll saw off the top of his head from the jaw up), so long as you have enough fuel. The bigger the monster the more fuel you'll need.
That's it for the super weapons. Each of the normal weapons are accessed on the weapon wheel and have multiple attachments that you can switch out (except for the pistol and Super Shotgun) for different secondary fire abilities.
The Plasma Rifle comes with a secondary heat blast, that works by building up heat as you fire and releasing it as an attack. The other secondary fire a stun blast that'll put monsters in the stun state and open for Glory Killing.
The Chaingun can have either an faster spin up time, or can deploy TWO chainguns, almost like KOS-MOS's triple chaingun from Xenosaga.
The Pistol comes with a charge shot that lets you power it up for a stronger attack. It is also the only gun in the game that has infinite ammo.
The Super Shotgun can be upgraded blast though monsters and to allow for two consecutive shots before reload.
The Combat Shotgun can be upgraded with a three shot burst, or an explosive shell attachment.
The Rocket Launcher gets a remote detonated drone and lock on feature, so now your rockets can do the same thing the Revenant's can.
The Heavy Assault Rifle, which is really more like a belt-fed general purpose machine gun, gets a sniper scope, and a mini-rocket launcher. In sniper mode not only do you move at almost the same speed while scoped in, but the Rifle remains full auto and there is just about no recoil.
Lastly the Gauss Cannon. The Gauss Cannon also gets a sniper mode, and has a charged shot secondary. Initially you cannot move while charging the Cannon up, but that can be upgraded to allow movement.
Now the mechanic behind the upgrades work like this. Most of the guns have two secondary add-ons. Those are unlocked by finding supply drones scattered though out the game at various locations. Then each of those add-ons can be upgraded with weapon upgraded points that are acquired after clearing out rooms of monsters, finding collectibles, and at the end of the level if you killed everyone.
So... who gets THIS reference?
Now one of the things that sets Doom '16's campaign mode apart from other's in the genre is the replay value. There are a whole host of weapon and armor upgrades scattered through out the game. Armor upgrades come in the form of completing challenges throughout the game. Challenges vary from killing X number of monsters within the time limit using only a certain gun, to running and jumping down a track to reach the end before the timer runs out. Hidden in each level are two collectible figures, there are also rooms in each map that are taken from levels from classic Doom, right down to the old low rez graphics and 2d item and environment sprites. It's unlikely you'll find everything on the first go, not without looking online, so you'll have a reason to come back and replay each level.
Without getting into plot related stuff, that's pretty much it. It is a fucking awesome game and a return to the frantic pace of classic '90s FPSs. It's a breath of fresh air in today's increasingly stale FPS market. At the same time, those who grew up on the CoD formula may get a bit of "culture shock" in that it is nothing like anything they're used to, and I can see why they wouldn't be so hot for this game. But if you're looking for something old school style, or you're just looking for something different from the tired, played out shoot-shoot-duck for 8 seconds-rinse-and-repeat formula, then get out and get this game. In fact here, now you don't even have to leave the house to get it.
Final Ruling: 10/10
Yes I give it a perfect score. Id set out with a clear goal in mind when the restarted the Doom 4 project, and short of the multiplayer issues, they executed it perfectly.
Now onto the plot.
There really isn't much going on plot wise, it's pretty much something that you would expect out of '90s sci-fi horror film like Aliens. You have an energy crisis happening on Earth so enter the Union Aerospace Corporation, who sets up a research facility on Mars to study some artifacts, lo and behold from these artifacts they find a way into Hell and as it turns out Hell is rich in resources, so they being harvesting energy from Hell and solve the crisis.
As you'd expect if we can get into Hell, they can get into out dimension, and that's exactly what happens. Now unlike the previous Dooms, this Doomguy isn't just some grunt who was stationed at the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead on one of the UAC's expeditions into Hell they found a chamber with a stone coffin imprisoning the Doomguy and storing his armor. The soldiers brought him back to Mars and the facility boss released him to help fend off the invasion.
From various tablets you encounter, it turns out that this Doomguy is rather infamous in Hell, the same way someone like Jack the Ripper and Attilla the Hun are infamous in our world. In the past he had slayed legions of demons and went on a rampage across Hell, earning the terror of everyone who lived there, until they were able to seal him away. It's kind of sketchy but he was also associated with an order of knights from another realm that went to war with Hell and lost, and subsequently was absorbed and corrupted by Hell. But there is something interesting about this, while the knights have armor that look both futuristic and medieval, Doomguy's armor looks purely futuristic and military.
It is mentioned in testament tablets you find in Hell that the Doomguy traveled a great distance and hints that that was across time and dimensions. There is speculation that this Doomguy is indeed one and the same as the Doomguy from the original games. The end of Doom 64, which takes place after Doom 2, has the Doomguy going back into Hell and sealing the portal behind him, opting to stay in Hell to prevent them from invading the human dimension for good. Now being who he is what is he most likely to do? Rampage across Hell of course, and that's exactly what the tablets describe. Now if we take the view of Hell as a sort of nexus dimension that ties all the different dimensions and parallel universes together, it's plausible that the classic Dooms and Doom '16 are parallel universes and the Doomguy traveled across universes via Hell. One tablet states that his armor was made for him by "she who shall not be named", it could have easily been the case that this woman rebuilt his old UN Marines armor into the suit we see him with now, as it does bear a strong resemblance to the classic Doom armor.
Overall the plot isn't anything all that complicated. It's straight forward and serves only to really move things along and provide an explanation of why you're moving from Point A to Point B, why you go from a industrial sci-fi looking location to barren medieval/fantasy Mordor looking location. Things do get kind of weird, with the addition of a cult element within the UAC. Apparently the branch that was tasked with going into Hell had become a cult with the Division leader having either become possessed or simply corrupted by demonic influences, and it was this cult faction that caused the invasion into the human dimension to happen.
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