Doom

One might have thought this iteration of Doom, to be, well... Doomed from the start. Apologies for making you groan, but id Software has seemingly been in its own dark age for over a decade, and everything we knew about Doom before its release would suggest that id would remain there. It's been through several delays, rebuilt from scratch, had poor showings at events, its beta was poorly received and the critic embargo suggested that Bethesda might not believe in it anymore. But this 2016 incarnation of the legendary shooter has somehow crawled out of Limbo and through development Hell to us no worse for wear.

I find one of the key reasons Doom became successful in the first place is its emphasis on staying mobile and being in the thick of it. This new Doom has returned to its arena shooter sensibilities. Hiding away to reload and regenerate health is a shooter staple these days. Doom rips those staples out and tosses them aside for glory kills. While the concept of executing enemies in the same few ways over and over sounds repetitive and dull, it's anything but. There are several different and brief animations depending on the angle at which you execute your enemy, and because health (and ammo if you use a chainsaw) drops with every glory kill, these kills become necessary and rewarding, whereas if they were just frivolously for show, they would grow old and no one would perform them after a certain point.

There's plenty of minor and clever touches that make it Doom play like a labor of love. Id seemed to make all the right design decisions to retain what made the original Doom the classic it is. They've injected its formula into the modern era to keep the experience approachable while adding modern depth to it. The stuff surrounding a lot of modern games is all here, upgrading guns, acquiring perks, completing challenges and changing loadouts. In the context of most games, this is hardly exciting, but when the guns aren't slightly higher firing rate and slightly lower damage versions of each other and the upgrades aren't a suppressor and laser sight, but are more "do you want to shoot 3 rockets at once or do you want the ability to detonate your rocket in mid air," it makes for a helluva good time.

While it's not the visual spectacle Rage or Doom 3 were at the time of their releases. It seems id learned from the tepid response to those games and put the focus on gameplay. That isn't to say the game looks bad. It looks great, and the art direction is suitably metal. My biggest gripe with Doom is with the audio, but not the also suitably metal soundtrack. The audio is just off to me in a way I can't put my finger on. I had the feeling that many of the guns and explosions didn't sound quite as powerful as they should. And while the Glory Kills have a good crunch to them, they also sound a bit weak. Audio cues however are used to great effect, and my working theory is that they detract from the "realism" of some of the sound effects. As with the visuals, the focus of the sound design is to better the game design.

What little story that's present within Doom only builds on the action. Doom Guy gets his own mythology, and there's a light mystery to everything, but judging by Doom Guy's attitude towards the whole ordeal, you should probably just worry about killing demons. Of which, there are plenty, and all the classics, from imps to cacodemons and barons to pinky demons make their return. I'd say it's one big nostalgia trip (there's even stuff for Doom 3 fans, few that you are), but I wouldn't want to suggest that the Doom of 2016 is anything but a good in its own right. While it certainly benefits from being a new Doom game, I don't think it's used as crutch and as such, it seems as good of game as any for newcomers to make their first foray into Hell on Mars.

The Multiplayer and Snapmap are serviceable additions to the game, but hardly noteworthy. Aside from its more classic arena-styled action, the multiplayer does little to distinguish itself. It's a simple derivation of the multiplayer shooters that have taken over the genre since Halo and Call of Duty burst onto the scene. Snapmap is a neat feature with a lot of room to grow. People with big ideas might feel limited, but there is still a fair amount to tinker with. Suffice it to say, if you're going to be playing Doom, you're going to be playing the campaign, and if that somehow fails to fill that First Person Shooter sized hole in your heart then maybe these features are worth delving into. Even then, you might be better off playing the campaign again.

I question just how much I enjoyed that campaign, because of just how low my expectations were, but the more I think about it, the better it seems. Doom is not just another romp, it's an evolution of the romp. It's undoubtedly the finest such game since Bulletstorm or before that, Painkiller. By taking a few steps back, and putting the right feet forward, Doom shoots the genre in a familiar, yet refreshing direction. After a decade of believing I couldn't believe in them, I've begun to believe that Doom is only the beginning of id Software's retro future Renaissance.