An amazing single player game, let down by weak multiplayer components.
Doom is just as incredible a modernisation of decades-old gameplay as Wolfenstein: The New Order was 2 years ago. The games could go hand in hand with the kind of progression those original games they are updating in terms of what a revelation Doom feels like today when compared with the likes of other shooters, Wolfenstein included. Doom's single player campaign contains some of the best arena style combat of any first person shooter ever made. It's fast, tense, overwhelming whilst never confusing, and encourages the player's creativity and inventiveness above all else. The game throws enemies at you in ever-escalating scale, never giving you quite enough room to run, but never constricting you so much that you are trapped. You're never given enough ammo to fall back on any simple gun combo, and are given incentive to never hide, but always be moving. Doom is in many ways the antithesis to the boilerplate modern shooter, and it's ideas are realised amazingly well. The downsides to this are that the game will sometimes force you into a cutscene, which seems to be in complete contradiction to the rest of its ethos, and the weapon and armour upgrade mechanic are perhaps a little tacked on at times, but for the most part the game is incredibly fast, satisfying and strangely thoughtful. The single player game, that is. The multiplayer, developed by a different team, is a wholly different story. Comparatively bland, the multiplayer is done no favours being in a package with it's bigger single player brother. Slower, more traditional team based FPS modes, the multiplayer is completely serviceable, but in no way as honed or inventive as the single player component. The third mode, Snapmap, is much the same story, a fairly simple level editor that feels a little flat as of now. The single player is worth buying the game for alone however, with an excellent level of challenge available and definite replayability (especially in it's Diablo-esque "Ultra-Nightmare" mode), Doom is one of the best examples of FPS gameplay that's shown up this century.
