K-SCORE: 65
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Director: Marty Stratton, Hugo Martin
Designer: Jason O’Connell
Writer: Adam Gascoigne
Spoiler Level: None
“biggest gameplay innovation... none of the guns need to be reloaded”
It’s possible Doom is actually more fun to watch than it is to play. I was soon desensitized to the horrific dismemberment of the wide variety of demons that the game shoves in your path as you play through its short campaign. After a hundred or so, the fountains of gore spewing forth every few seconds become common place, or did for me. My brother seemed shocked when he’d walk into the living room and see me shoving a chainsaw into the gaping maw of a giant floating head though. My time with this Doom revamp was more about squinting to read the tiny text that told its story, and scratching my head as I tried to plan out how to upgrade all the runes and weapon mods with the appropriate points and challenges without accidentally getting too far through the levels.
That’s not what you want, right? At no point in the development of a game should you find a way to encourage players who have succeeded to restart and replay the same section they just dominated but this time killing three or more enemies with remote detonated rockets even more times. It’s possible that I should have played on an even higher difficulty. I noticed on the second-from highest difficulty level that the enemies aren’t actually smart enough to shoot at where you will be, so if you keep running in a circle, you’ll probably be fine. I also noticed that nearly any of the guns work at the overall goal of turning the functioning demons inexplicably infesting Mars into nonthreatening piles of organs, blood, and bones. So tactics weren’t a big deal. Rocket launcher? Sure. Haven’t used it in a while. It’s not as good as the minigun or the plasma sniper rifle, but it works. Too many demons in the area to snipe? That’s okay. They gave me a gun that obliterates everything in a room with a single poorly-aimed shot. But what is a “death from above glory kill” and why do I have to perform it 25 times to enhance my dazed and confused rune. I’m already dazed and confused.
Doom’s kind of harmless. It’s biggest gameplay innovation is that none of the guns need to be reloaded. That’s a big deal, actually. The developers actually had the thought to not include reloading, an absolute staple in first-person shooters, and it makes the whole experience more fun. It’s kind of like saying, “fuck it, spray and pray,” but for every single weapon that they designed. And the art is great, the movement is really smooth, the level design is intuitive but not purely linear, so the whole single-player mode works pretty well. It’s not revolutionizing the genre or anything though.
“don’t talk to me about the inner workings of the artificial intelligence that guards something called The Crucible”
The story is pathetic. I know I’m not supposed to be playing for the story, but they took the time to include one, so I’ll take the time to review it. The tone of the story does not match the extreme senseless violence that the franchise is built on, going instead for something ripped off of Dead Space or Gears of War or any number of other sci-fi shooters. It even looks the same, with data logs that read like something from another game - all bullshit science, needless background information, and no sense of humor. If you’re going to make a game where you can pull a tooth out of the mouth of a demon warthog named Piggy and use it to garrote the very beast it came from, don’t talk to me about the inner workings of the artificial intelligence that guards something called The Crucible. Your story should be a demon massacre of innocent people and the one guy who is even more violent than beings that literally poured out of hell. And you should tell that story with a big shit-eating grin on your face.
Want to spend 20 hours shooting grotesque monsters and tearing through them with your bare hands? Try Doom. Don’t want to do that? Shoot me an email letting me know what it’s like being a healthy, productive member of our society.
Here’s a fun side story. Before writing this review, I went to IMDB to check to see if any of the voice actors were famous and I just didn’t recognize them in the game. (There totally is. Darin de Paul, who plays Samuel Hayden in this voiced Chef Pepper Jack in Skylanders: SuperChargers AND Exarch Othaar in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor) Anyway, while there I saw this in the parental guide section:
“Overall, depictions of realistic violence in the game, such as killing, maiming and/or causing other serious injury to humanoid characters are featured, but the violence itself is not sadistic, cruel and/or abhorrent.”
Yeah, content advisories can be a little tone deaf. Or maybe I have a different definition of abhorrent.