I think it's a smart design, implemented to force aggressive play. I personally feel the criticism towards them are a bit overblown, they go down so fast it's hardly an issue.

I like the glory kills but if they make another Doom game I feel they need to expand on it or add something with gunplay. I honestly would welcome bulletime just to add to the variety of combat shooting limbs off in slomo never gets old.

Glory kills are not at all necessary (thank god). They're very good for casual players who are just going to play through the game once on a relatively low difficulty (i.e. Ultra Violence or below, since that's all that's unlocked on a first playthrough). They give some easy visceral thrill and encourage aggressive play, which is crucial to enjoying DOOM. However, on repeat playthroughs, glory kills, as fast as they commendably are, become tedious. Thankfully, by that point is also becomes apparent how unnecessary glory kills actually are because you learn the enemies so you can avoid taking damage (no hitscan means all attacks are avoidable), you learn the levels and secrets (so you realize how packed every level is with health and armor powerups), and you optimize your suit upgrades to get efficient free refills of health/armor. It also happens that on higher difficulties, glory kills will kill you as often as save you during a dangerous fight, since enemies can still launch attacks during your glory kill animation i-frames, and if an enemy attack is about to hit you as your control-free i-frames run out, you'll take unavoidable damage (often more than cancelling out whatever bit of extra health the glory kill just got you).

I finished the game 8 times, including once on Ultra Nightmare, and I rarely used glory kills after my first playthrough. I primarily avoided glory kills because it was more fun to shoot enemies while retaining full control than to keep watching the same control-free animations I'd already seen a million times. Playing fast (with a mouse and keyboard) and using the right gun for the job, you can kill enemies far more quickly with guns than with glory kills. Additionally, using glory kills would have also made the game harder on the highest difficulty settings by causing unavoidable deaths, which are not tolerable in a perma-death mode like Ultra Nightmare.

Good, flexible mechanic. The issues with Nightmare difficulty (like random barrel instakills you because one pixel of your shotgun crosshair hit it through five imps) are kind of independent of Glory Kills; that's usually where the criticism pops up. Could probably put the faster Glory Kills rune earlier in the game, other than that no real issue.

I wish enemies didn't get staggered so frequently and that when they were staggered a single shot from any weapon would kill them, instead you can sometimes get into a situation where they take 2-3 more shots while staggered and STILL survive. Let me gun down fools more often and not force me to melee them because I think the RNG will screw me over otherwise.

Also, weapon specific glory kills would be nice.

I loved it. By the end, having started playing it as hard as possible, it was reliant on it but it lasted me all the way through. I would need something added for a DOOM 2 I think. I will say though that even a lot more variety alone would help though.

@wheresderrick: rng? It’s that way because you didn’t do enough damage to kill them and if you miss the glory kill they can come back and give you another chance later.

Personally I really thought it was well balanced. I didn’t GK too often once I got over the joy of doing it over and over and over. He game works fine with sparse use of them, they’re just shiny and hard to resist.

The complaint I saw the most was that Glory Kills broke up the fast pace of the combat. I actually liked it for that reason. Each area encounter is so over the top the whole time that the Glory Kills are you only chance to recollect your thoughts and take a breath, and it's only for a split second. And then there were times with many weak enemies where you could chain Glory Kills together. I enjoyed those moments for their own reason.

I think they where a smart way of changing up game play and added some depth of strategy when combined with the different runes.

From a gameplay perspective, yay. I think there needs to be more of them though. Some animations you see over and over again, and that gets repetitive. I think how it is implemented is good, especially with how it gets you to jump around and not stay still.

Only yay with as many speed runes as possible. No time for breaks, rip and tear so you can rip and tear even faster.

Very yay. I like the unique pacing it gives the combat, especially on Nightmare where you risk death every time you go for one but they can also save your ass.

Just needs more variety. It's a shame that the bigger enemies only have one or two animations a piece. I also wouldn't mind if it were (optionally) set up a bit more like Brutal Doom, where the game doesn't push you to do them.

@undefined: only reason I don't jump back in is cause I already platinumed it. I would change nothing about that game except to add more levels so I could keep going.

Glory kills were terrific, mainly because they were so short, and were well contextualized. If you aimed towards an enemys legs, you'd do something horrendous to them by means of their leg. Your relative position to them, be it infront, behind, or to the side, also mattered. As such, it felt as if you were often seeing something new, just due to the sheer plethora of animations. And that health was ever a boon, especially on the higher difficulties, where you were NEVER at full health save a few rare occasions.

The truly, truly gruesome glory kills were saved for Berserk and the Chain Saw, which was the one time I really didn't mind a longer animation that involved ripping someone plain open, be it via teeth on a metal chain, or my bare, god damn hands.

Doom is REAL good.

I don't really care for them. They got really repetitive.

You can grab an imp and rip him in half with your bare fucking hands. I never get tired of doing that.

It's a cool mechanic, I love how they're integrated into the gameplay design. Plus there are ways to spec in a way where you don't need to use them often, or where you can use them all the time (and make them super fast, if that's a concern). Sure the animations get somewhat familiar after a while, but your gun always fires the same way and that's not considered an issue (plus, as mentioned, you can speed them up so much that they're faster than the reload on a super shotgun, for example).

Yeah that was my problem with them too. Also I find gunning down an imp or whatever while it's slumped over to be pretty lame. Ninja Gaiden 2 had a system where once you had cut off a limb you could execute them but they were far more lethal in that state. If they did that in DOOM it would be great, imagine having a furious armless hell knight charging at you.

I also wish there some sort of skill involved, not a qte or anything. Maybe a melee that you had to charge that would cause a glory kill on a viable enemy? Or is that not DOOM enough?

I can't make up my mind if it's a good mechanic done poorly or a bad mechanic done well. But I'm fairly sure it's one of those.

@savage: During the boss fight against the Hell Knights, I got killed by an attack started while I was in the middle of Glory Killing the first Knight. So that was a pretty big bummer.

Glory Kills are great on the lower difficulties, but they leave you so vulnerable that good footwork and gunplay become much more vital to staying alive than some dinky health drops. They're fun to look at and empower the player in early stages, but can be surpassed with just being good at the game later on. I'd say it's a pretty great mechanic in how it trains the player.

I think the Glory Kills were originally a turnoff for me, but I found as I played they were a smart addition and made the combat flow. A part of me just wants to play a DOOM(2016) where I could just use the chainsaw like a normal weapon though...

I will admit I didn't love them as much as everyone else. The first thing I did when I got the game was turn off the highlighting of enemies when staggered. Toward the end of the game I didn't mind them as much I guess. But, I feel like it should have been a feature less available than what it was.

I liked it, especially as the way to force you into combat, because it's the main way that allows you to gain more ammo, health, and possibly shield. Replaying on Nightmare last month, I came to love the game and saw that glory kills as an awesome way to make it more challenging and intense. It makes the combat stand out in the myriad of cover shooters today. You can't survive if you don't do glory kills, and yet going right up in dudes faces is also a good way to die, so it's cool. Very late in the game, you won't have to really use it anymore though, which was very rewarding as long as you have searched the world for upgrade collectibles. If you're looking at it from the animation perspective, I thought they were pretty good as they do it differently depending on where you aim at the body (or if you jump on them), but yeah there could have a wider variety of moves. When playing on Nightmare though, to be honest, the lack of variety on any one body part isn't an issue.

Actually, you can play all difficulty settings from the get-go, you just can't select it from the options menu; you have to select it when you start a new game. The font is red instead of white. Also, there is no new game plus, and you can't play through the game on the one file again, only go back through the same stages with all your equipment (so, yeah, kind of new game plus, but not really).

Seemed like a great mechanic to me and made the game playable to me as a poor shot.

Plus it fit thematically as it made "rip and tear" central to what you actually do

I thought they were fun. Never really got tired of them which surprised me a bit.

They helped create a good flow to the gameplay, rather than just circle-strafing, they gave me something to move towards if they lit up, which often kept my movement more forward moving than it may have otherwise been. Hopping from GK to GK was great. If a big monster got into GK state, I'd book it over there.

Plus they look awesome.

There were several times I would shoot an Imp or other demon near point blank who was staggered and they still didn't die. I'm talking they are already staggered and then I shoot them, blood comes out, the hit marker appears, but they don't die, just continue to animate until they wake up. It was uncommon enough to not ruin the game but common enough that it made the weapons feel weaker than they were and that I had to use glory kills.

That actually sounds like a great evolution of this system. They have great animations and things like the demons jumping off railings, walls, etc organically while in combat, so combining that with crippled demons and weapon specific executions sounds like a great sequel addition.

Now give me Archviles, way more Barons in the levels besides at the end of fights, Cyberdemons and Masterminds as more than just single boss fights, and Arachnotrons? Mmmmmm buddy

@undefined: Honestly, the ramp up in this game is good enough that first of all, it never felt like I could or should be doing "something better" than a glory kill. Enemies always felt just strong enough that I wanted to tear their hearts out for health, because I needed it. Second, GKs always felt fun to pull off. I suppose this is more of a difference in a player's individual preference, but I loved doing these every single time. When I found out about the "speed up glory kills" rune, I actually didn't want it. A GK had become something of a short breather for me, a moment to collect myself and roughly plan my next target.

I can't really say any one element is what caused me to love this game so hard that I finished it in two sittings (which is rare for me), but I definitely think the flow of the game had a lot to do with it, and the GKs are a huge part of the flow. I feel like Doom needed something to keep it from just being "shoot demon until dead, keep eye on health, collect health, repeat". Turns out the solution was cutting out the health middleman. Well I mean, it didn't NEED to be the glory kills, but I think they worked fabulously. It's probably what kept me from playing the game by peeking around corners and pot-shotting everything. I know it's been said before a lot, but encouraging aggressive play can really make the difference.

I just recently played through the game for the first time this summer. I liked the glory kills. The thing is, the animations were quick enough that they never got in the way, and they actually were an interesting gameplay strategy.

If something was tuned slightly off, they would have been obnoxious. But to me they worked. If they were slightly slower animations, or didn't give any bonuses, ect.

I am someone who never really cared for "oh cool look at that gory mess I made that demon ect" in games, but they were quick enough, and looked cool enough, while having very fun gameplay implications.

They're awesome and add strategy to the game. Oh and why would you not like shoving a mancubus' heart in its mouth?

Only negative is it interrupts the music. Is there an option to make it not do this?

It is totally core to the gameplay loop, I don't think it would be as good without it.

Glory Kills have replaced health pack hunting or ducking behind cover waiting for health to regen. It has helped reduce combat downtime and makes combat move along at a faster pace overall. It's a welcomed change for me.

There fast enough to not hinder the combat if they where like a second longer it would have being a other point.

I liked the glory kills. They let me feel like I was stringing together a combo with my shooting and punching in a really unique way.

I get why some people would think they got a little repetitive, but honestly I thought the whole game got a little repetitive toward the end. I stopped playing for like a month just because I was bored of it, only to come back and realize I had like an hour left in the game.

They're alright. I prefer simple and quick melees, though.

I like the glory kills. It helps to set apart from other shooters out there; gives DOOM an identity. Plus, it's so bloody satisfying to implement each time, especially the chainsaw kills.