Doom

A couple of things to know about me up front: 1) I've never played a Doom game before, and 2) I'm not a fan of shooters. The only Call of Duty I've played is the first Modern Warfare, and I only found it decent. I tried Wolfenstein: The New Order a few years ago and couldn't get into it. I like the Bioshock games, but more for their environment and stories than their gameplay. I don't inherently dislike shooters, but other than Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4, I wouldn't consider any of them among my favorite games.

While I wouldn't list Doom as one of my favorite games ever, I have to admire it for not being afraid of what it is: a fast-paced shooter that takes modern action-game conventions and throws them out the window. When you shoot demons, they drop health and ammo. There's no cover system; if you need to dodge a laser coming toward you, you just get the hell out of the way. You can run super fast, jump high, and there are powerups you can grab when things get hairy. You can carry as many weapons as you want, and you don't have to reload them. If you run low on ammo, just cut a demon up with a chainsaw and he'll drop plenty. Doom is fully aware that it's a video game, and it revels in it.

There's something satisfying about managing your weapons against hordes of monsters, saving your standard shotgun blasts for the low-level grunts, bringing out the assault rifle when you need to clear crowds, then busting out the rocket launcher when the big guys show up. When you're low on rockets, it's time to get out the chainsaw and destroy one of the big guys in one hit to take some pressure off, but gasoline is limited, so you better pick your targets wisely. All while doing this you're blazing around the arena at full speed, dodging fireballs left and right and running away like a wimp when things get too hairy. The enemy types are nicely varied and make for interesting encounters, and the different environments you fight them make battles feel consistently fresh. All while listening to some amazing music that gets your blood pumped to the point where you're running purely on instinct. I like to stream video games online, and normally when I play games I tend to outline my thought process so viewers can follow my actions, but there's no time for that; in Doom, once you get going, you don't get a chance to breathe until everything's dead. It's magnificent.

On top of that, I absolutely love the game's art style. Having never played any of the Doom games before, I always assumed it was another macho beefcake shooter, and while it does love its carnage and blazing guns, it's also an interesting juxtaposition of sci-fi and sorcery. The base you start the game off on is located on Mars, with plenty of high-tech equipment not too unlike something you might see in Star Wars, but considering you're fighting demons and the scientists in the game are literally extracting energy from hell, the game is also full of Satanic imagery. Several rooms are lit with candlelight and pentagrams on the floor painted with blood, and demons love to step through portals as they're trying to kill you. Some parts of the game give you glimpses of the tortured souls of the afterlife, and while I wouldn't call Doom scary, it does give off a horror-game feel at parts.

Honestly, I could end the review right here and just recommend the game, as it's easily one of my favorite games of 2015. That said, I do have my issues with it. With how clearly gameplay-focused Doom is, and how it has a sense of humor about itself, it's a shame just how many cutscenes there are. Initially, you're lead to believe that Doomguy doesn't care at all about the events of the story, considering in the first minutes of the game he takes an expository computer screen and rips it off its handle, throwing it on the floor. Yet, there are several parts of the game where you're locked into unskippable cutscenes, watching characters explain their motivations in the plot while I'm sitting there waiting for the next action sequence. There are a ton of codex entries in the game that you can read in order to find out more about the story and characters, and I did not read a single one of them. Not only that, but the game encourages you to explore in order to find secrets that you can upgrade your character with, but aside from the occasional detour, I never bothered to go out of my way to find them. I felt like I was flat-out skipping a ton of the game's content (especially the multiplayer mode, which I didn't touch at all), but at least I enjoyed the core combat.

Sadly, I do think Doom starts to drag towards the end. Eventually the game runs out of ideas for unique enemies to fight, and as a result, later encounters become repetitive, especially once you've learned all their tricks. The final boss of the game feels anticlimactic, even if the fight itself was still fun. The game reaches a point where I kept thinking each chapter was the last one, and started to get exhausted as I thought "When is this game going to end?" Considering the game was in development hell for so long, it's not hard to imagine that they kept a lot of the content from earlier builds of the game in order to pad the length, even if not all of it fit cleanly into this one.

But having said all that, Doom is still fantastic, even for someone who doesn't normally enjoy shooters. Go play it.