The Benchmark Shooter For The Benchmark Console of 1995
Remember Doom? The game that systems struggled to play back in 1993. The Super Nintendo struggled to play it, the 32x had problems with it, and heck, even the Panasonic 3DO shrugged at playing the game at a decent quality. But where there are bad versions of Doom there are also good versions of them as well. Doom on the Playstation is an example of this. Featuring almost every enemy and every level, Doom on the Playstation is literally the complete experience of the original game, and more. It features Ultimate Doom and Doom 2, enhanced visual effects, new enemies and a completely new soundtrack as well as new sound effects to accompany it with.
It is fantastic how smooth the port plays and feels. There are nearly no signs of choppiness on Doom for Playstation and the game looks sleek as it animates the surroundings around you. The levels are big too, and very similar to the PC counter-parts unlike some of the earlier Doom ports. There are many wide open spaces and secrets to uncover in Doom on Playstation which is a joy to realise every time you play it. Of course, there is no forgetting the real action itself that Doom offers as its gameplay.
Heart pounding gun pumping and rounds bursting is what Midway has to offer you in this game. Doom offers explosions from rocket launchers, hole bursting goodness of shotguns, chattering chaos from machine guns and incinerating carnage of plasma guns. And better yet, this version of the legendary Doom has the BFG - perhaps the best gun ever, in a game. Find a bunch of monsters, pull the gun out and let it rip boy. As for the new soundtrack and sound effects, they do a complimentary job of making the game more so eerie and mysterious than ever before, plus the new demon and gun sounds are just wonderful.
Doom on the Playstation does have its fair share of problems however. Mainly that the gameplay of moving back and forth to find keys may that appeal to some. Also, the game can be annoying in that the lighting in some areas can make the game too dark to see what you're doing. It is also unfortunate that Doom on the Playstation lacks a memory card save system and relies on passwords to choose what level you want to pick. Passwords are a lot easier to lose than memory cards after all and while it is nice to have them as an option, memory cards are really the way forward in Playstation games.
Also, while many of the changes on Doom for Playstaton are beneficial, the new sounds and visuals are not really true to the action packed setting the game had on PC and other systems. Sometimes it is just too dark with the new lighting, making the game at times almost impossible to play as you can't see what you're doing. Ad the fact that the original rock soundtrack of the original has also been reduced to nothing is a real shame. An option to choose the remixed or original soundtrack would've been a nice little improvement that Midway could have attended to. Another minor issue is the fact Doom on Playstation only has link play multiplayer as some kind of splitscreen multiplayer would've been preferred by most.
Despite these problems though, Doom is a great game. For a Playstation launch title it does a lot of things right, being a great game to showcase on the system. Obviously the developers have made some changes that perhaps aren't for the better, but that isn't the case really as it stands. This is still the fantastic shooter that shined on PCs back in 1993, complete with almost all of the levels possible on offer.
