AKA Ranking of DOOMs Part Five

I’ve Made a Huge Mistake

In one of perhaps the funnier bits of good timing, I sat down to start messing with DOOM II for this entry into the Ranking of DOOMs shortly before going on a week’s vacation. This is not really what you’d call an obstacle in getting plenty of quality time in with DOOM II – just ask my brother and also my dear sweet mother, both of whom now have copies of Chocolate DOOM sitting on their computers because they were foolish enough to leave them unattended for the five minutes it takes to grab Chocolate DOOM and the DOOM II wad and drop them in a folder. I went with Chocolate DOOM for a very simple reason, which is that it is as close to DOOM as it was Played as you can get without going full sicko and throttling the framerate and stuff to be as bad as it would be on an old 486 or whatever. That and because GZdoom can be a little too fancy in a way that makes something like my dear sweet mother’s on-board intel graphics chip circa 2017 (maybe 2018?) choke. The moral of the story is play Chocolate DOOM, it does the thing you want, assuming what you want is to play DOOM and have it feel like you remember it feeling. If you want it to look good, gzdoom would have been my immediate suggestion except then DOOM I + II released in a surprise drop during the opening of Quakecon.

This is the other reason I ended up taking longer with this than I originally thought I might – not because I was particularly captivated by what Night Dive’s done (I’ll get into how I feel about it some other time, but cutting to the chase: I like the stuff they added (the new maps, the Hulshult soundtrack, the id Vault, the ability to just throw custom maps and mods in via the in-game mod browser) and also have some real reservations (the Kex engine feels slightly off in some ways I can’t articulate movement-wise, the game has weirdly hitched up on me a few times, the way that the ability to throw custom maps and mods in has resulted in roughly 200 different people uploading Nuts.wad among other things (the lack of proper credit in a lot of the mod descriptions is bad fucking manners at the least and in the case of just putting the Buckethead soundtrack version of SIGIL and One Humanity (whose profits all go to charity!) up there is downright dishonest and vile at the worst), the way that it is Bethesda attempting to bring DOOM modding - a thing which has always been wild and free - into its little walled garden feeling vaguely upsetting, and also the fact that there’s no way to search the mods by title yet (fucking criminal)). All that being said it’s the version I boot up on my Xbox and Steam Deck and Switch and also my PC when I want the new soundtrack and also those sweet, sweet, delicious Steam Achievements. It’s also the version I use when I want to be absolutely chumped by someone in deathmatch (although that’s been a little hitchy for me on xbox).

Anyway part of playing this package has led me to realize that it is, maybe, just a little bit impossible to talk about DOOM II without constantly referencing its predecessor, because it really is just DOOM, with Slightly More Stuff, and maybe that is a damn foolish thing to rank – perhaps, I thought to myself, I should just address these as a Total Package, a sort of… Ultimate or maybe Final DOOM.

I’m not gonna do that though, I wanna write separate entries if only because I do hold these two games in different positions of honor in my personal rankings.

A Quick History

DOOM II came out less than a year after DOOM did, releasing to a ravenous people on September 30^th, 1994. Development on it had already more or less started as DOOM got out the door, and it, unlike DOOM, would be a retail release – no shareware version, meaning the game is not split up into episodes. A fun fact about DOOM II is that it was in fact id’s highest selling retail release ever, cracking the two million copies mark, and would hold that title until the release of Rage, which is an impressive reign at the top of, you know, eighteen years.

Releasing a quick sequel was more or less id’s MO at this point – they’d done a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D (Spear of Destiny, which I don’t think I ever played) while Carmack developed the engine for DOOM, and he started working on the Quake engine while DOOM II was in development. Romero was also less involved with DOOM II’s release, because he was helping Raven software out with their games and generally doing what I will lazily refer to as “business guy stuff,*” although he does have several maps in DOOM II (including the penultimate level, which is a great level). The majority of the game’s maps were done by Sandy Peterson, and some of them are good and some of them make me wonder what the fuck is wrong with Sandy Peterson that he would do something like that.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that this would be the last time id made a game and then turned around and released a sequel less than a year later. The realities of game development no longer supported that kind of thing, and apart from Ultimate DOOM’s Thy Flesh Consumed, that was it for id designers putting out official DOOM content (until Legacy of Rust this year, I guess**).

So, what the hell did DOOM II have that DOOM didn’t? Well…

The Super Shotgun is All

Imagine you’ve just sat down to play your fresh new copy of DOOM II. You play through the first map, and maybe you don’t even get the shotgun in the secret area because you don’t know how to get it, but you get to the second map, the Underhalls, and instead of going into the big area with the building and all the shotgun guys you opt instead to go through the door that doesn’t require a key. Inside there’s some zombie men, some shotgunners, and… another shotgun, it looks like, but it’s smaller than the shotgun. You pick it up, and there it is.

The Super Shotgun. Two barrels, a total of 21 projectiles every time you pull the trigger, uses two shells per shot meaning it will one-hit anything up to a Pinky if you get them full-on with it, and the most satisfying firing and reload sound on god’s benighted earth. You feel it in your chest. They have yet to replicate it, and the only way they ever thought to improve on it was to add a grappling hook that lights enemies on fire to it in DOOM Eternal. It is, hands down, the Perfect FPS gun, often imitated but never beaten. It is stupidly powerful. It is my very favorite weapon in the whole wide world. I will never not use it – generally I never switch back to the normal shotgun once I’ve got it, unless I am very low on ammo and hoping for some lucky RNG to get me through a level. It was the only way you were ever going to make a better shotgun than the one in DOOM.

It is also the only new weapon in the game. There were two whole other weapon slots available, but id decided that if they were going to put new stuff into the game it was not going to be new weapons. Doomguy had plenty of ways to kill demons, and honestly it’s not like they were gonna top the super shotgun anyway.

Demons, however, needed new ways to kill Doomguy.

Demons Get Reinforcements

If you could level a single criticism at the original DOOM, it would be that by the time you hit the second episode, you’ll have seen all the enemies the game has to offer that aren’t bosses (the Cyberdemon is, at least in the original release, just a boss – same goes for the Spider Mastermind). At the time that DOOM II released, the idea of multiple Cyberdemons or Spiders Mastermind was out of the question, at least until Thy Flesh Consumed. Apart from those bosses, you had your Zombie Soldier, Shotgun Guy, Imp, Pinky, Specter, Cacodemon, Lost Soul, Baron of Hell, and that was it. Now, I might argue (and will argue, in fact) that if nothing else the beauty of DOOM itself (to say nothing of SIGIL and SIGIL II, Romero’s love letters to the game he helped make) prove you can do an awful fucking lot with that limited roster, but that’s for the next installment of this thing to get really into. The point is, id assumed (correctly) that the roster of enemies could do with some expanding in the sequel, and acted accordingly.

This started with the Chaingunner (or Heavy Weapon Dude, but I’m gonna go with Chaingunner because it’s easier to type) who is the worst fucking enemy in the game. It isn’t enough that they are hitscanners, but they are hitscanners who can melt your health in a matter of seconds – and they are often deployed in groups of four or more, meaning that no matter how good you are nothing short of a BFG shot is gonna take them out without you losing some health. Damned impossible, I think maybe the worst enemy DOOM ever deployed that wasn’t a Lost Soul. There’s a reason Chaingunners remain locked away in DOOM II, and it’s because it is universally acknowledged they fucking suck (I guess they are sort of in DOOM³, but those guys aren’t half as annoying). Fuck Chaingunners.

Revenants also made their first appearance, and they are some brutal bony boys – I love them to death, of course, but that is only in part because I think skeletons rule. In truth, their homing rockets are a massive pain in the ass, and unfortunately for the player, DOOM II likes to deploy these guys in large numbers too. Lots of rockets following you around is a Bad Time! They’re dogged little cusses too, like, you will have to get around a sharp corner to get the damn things to explode. Revenants will also punch you if you get close and they will scream more or less the whole time. It’s great!

Mancubi are not quite like Revenants – they’re slower and their projectiles aren’t homing rockets – but they fill a similar role and also happen to be just big ol’ bullet sponges. A real pain in the ass when they get around you because of the sheer number of projectiles they can put out, but the most of the time they’re easy enough to dodge. Other times your will screen go red as a bunch slam into you and you begin hoping that you saved recently.

Arachnotrons: I hate them! I don’t know what it is about their damn plasma projectiles that I find so difficult to dodge, but I feel like they pretty reliably kick my ass. When I play Dead Simple, I usually manage to keep my health pretty high through the Mancubus assault, but once these little bastards show up it all goes to shit. It’s embarrassing to me as a person who plays a not-small amount of DOOM to get my ass beat so consistently. At least id made the wise decision not to give them small chainguns during development, because hoo boy that would have been even worse. Count your fuckin’ blessings, I guess.

Pain Elementals are here too and will make your life miserable! You should run up to them and empty some super shotgun shells into their face before they throw too many Lost Souls at you. It is a real insult that you have to deal with both Lost Souls out on their own and Pain Elementals, in my opinion. It’s mean! Rude, even! Bad fuckin’ manners! I do love their design though, the grumpy little grandpa waddle they do with their little arms and they sure do blow up good. A pity they also spawn Lost Souls when they blow up (unless you have them in a corner or a narrow hallway, in which case they get taken out by the explosion). Any time you are in a room and hear their little garbly wail it is a good sign that things are going to get Bad for you and you should switch to a chaingun or plasma rifle or BFG (but not a rocket launcher, because they’ll inevitably get a Lost Soul off that will fly in your face and take the rocket and also like 90% of your health).

The final addition (apart from the boss) is the Archvile, the one that can bring demons back from the dead. His little line of sight fire attack ain’t too bad, provided you have some corners to duck around, but when level designers use him right he can be a real vicious motherfucker. I think the Archvile rules, frankly, and DOOM II is nice enough not to overuse him (that’s for stuff like Plutonia). God help you if he shows up in the boss fight though – just restart the level at that point, it’s quicker.

The Soundtrack Rules

It’s your man Bobby Prince on the ones and twos (returning from his work on DOOM) to give you the crunchiest midi renditions of crunchy metal riffs and the occasional saxophone solo. It’s great! I am a big fan of it! The Andrew Hulshult remix of the DOOM II soundtrack in particular is one of the coolest goddamn things I’ve heard in my life, although he does not include the sax solos in Message for the Archvile.*** To be fair, he does some extremely cool shit instead but you know, farty midi sax sounds.

I mean sure a lot of them are just well-known metal songs with the serial numbers filed off, but when you’re as good as Prince is it doesn’t matter. There is a reason people love the DOOM and DOOM II soundtracks, and it is because they are fucking good! The Icon of Sin’s theme in particular is just a real fucking spooky time. I will admit here that I mostly remember DOOM’s soundtrack more than DOOM II’s, but whatever man, this shit owns don’t argue with me about how good Bobby Prince’s work is.

A New Environment

You’re running around on Earth in this one – meaning that they ginned up some new textures to build more outdoorsy levels. This is not to say that the textures are particularly good, I mean, they’re fine enough, but if there is one thing that you can pretty safely say about DOOM II it is that the levels which are meant to take place in Earth’s Cities do not uh, really resemble anything you would find on earth. Limitations of the engine, of course, I mean there was only so much you could do with it. You can feel them straining against the engine a little bit in DOOM II – there’s a lot of verticality to some levels, which makes the whole “Doomguy can’t look up” thing a more pressing issue. It’s hard to shoot back at demons in high buildings when you have to back up just to see where the fuck they are, which makes some levels way more of a slog than they need to be. Which brings us nicely to the next point, which is this:

It's Just More DOOM

The gameplay of DOOM II is the same as the gameplay of DOOM: kill demons, collect keycards, find switches, rinse, repeat. At some point you might have to solve some light puzzles, but it usually boils down to “there is a switch you need to flip.” This isn’t meant as a criticism, mind you: DOOM II (and DOOM) have a singlemindedness to them which is downright admirable. Making the game compelling is solely on the shoulders of the level designers, who have to come up with ways to make fights challenging but not frustrating, and unfortunately I have to say that the success rate is not quite as high as you’d want it to be.

Some levels just take too fucking long, or have just a few too many acid/lava pits for me personally to feel more than a sense of relief than accomplishment. “Oh good,” I think to myself as I play through The Pit for the hundredth time, “I can’t wait to ride up and down these elevators again,” and the less said about The Chasm the better (it sucks! Sorry Sandy! You made a bad fucking level!). If you have ever watched Brad’s quest for the Ultraviolence achievement on this website, you will have heard Jeff Gerstmann point out that the game goes on too long, and I think he is probably on to something there. You spend the first eleven levels trying to get a ship full of survivors off Earth, then you go to the city (nine levels) to journey to hell (ten levels). Unless I am really focused on beating the game (i.e. I want an achievement or something) I inevitably tend to peter out somewhere around level 10 or 11 and then when I go back I just kinda start over again. I have only ever beat the game properly a couple of times, and it is 100% because I just can’t be arsed to slog through some of the more tedious levels (seriously, I hate the Pit, and the less said about Downtown, the better. I have already said the Chasm sucks, but I am saying it again here just because I want to be clear the Chasm fucking sucks).

It's kind of a shame because the hell levels are some of my favorite levels, I just have to play through the first two-thirds of the game to get there! Not really a ringing endorsement, but there’s just a lot of game and there are only so many rooms full of Revenants and/or Imps that a dude can take before he starts to lose his will to live. Some of the fights slide by exciting and careen into tedious (looking at you, Tricks and Traps), and that’s no good! It’s bad, actually! There are moments where the game really fucking sings, don’t get me wrong – there’s a trigger in Suburbs that results in a giant fight in an open space that is peak DOOM, to me – but the lows start to detract from the highs.

Speaking of lows, the final boss is a wall texture that spits demons. Now, I would hate to give the impression that DOOM had a particularly compelling boss fight (if you have enough BFG ammo for like two shots you can kill the Spider Mastermind without breaking a sweat), but at least it was an enemy that moved around. The Icon of Sin’s design is cool, and the whole “it’s actually John Romero’s head on a pike” thing is fun (as is the message Romero recorded), but like… you just have to run around and hit a switch and ride an elevator and time your rockets three times while hoping an Archvile doesn’t spawn and fuck your whole shit up. Now DOOM Eternal, that was an Icon of Sin fight. It would have been nice to have the Icon of Sin do something more than shoot little boxes out of the hole in its head, is what I’m saying, but I can’t fault them for it too badly because I mean they were working with limited technological capabilities back in 1994. They did their best with what they had! It just isn’t particularly satisfying!

Let’s Talk Additional Content

Final DOOM’s release was the end of official id Software support for DOOM II (id also released The Master Levels, a curated group of fan-made levels) and they each have their own bit of infamy. TNT Evilution has a bizarre Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference in it, which amuses me but also a lot of the maps are just a bunch of zombiemen and shotgun guys that you can hose down with the chaingun. It can get a little boring. I’ve never finished it.

Plutonia has the reputation of being the hardest of the DOOM II releases and it comes by that honestly. It’s got really fucking devious traps and it uses archviles and chaingunners to extremely good effect, which is to say that it kicks my ass into the dirt every time. I think I have maybe gotten out of the first level like once or twice, and every other time I fire the thing up I just kind of sigh and give up after about 40 minutes. I am not built for it, I guess, although I always hold out hope that one day I will buckle down and actually play through the damn thing. Not today, though!

Oh, and then id had Nerv put together No Rest for the Living for the Xbox 360 release of DOOM II, which is a phenomenal campaign. Extremely tight level design, and maybe some of the best encounters in any DOOM game period. The first level alone is a masterclass in level design, and unlike DOOM II it doesn’t have any fat to it. It’s just the stuff you like, assuming you like being stuck in an arena with an archvile and a bunch of revenants and shit. I do, sometimes!

DOOM II’s release was when the modders and amateur level designers really got to work – meaning that most of the wads and megawads you know and love require DOOM II. The expanded enemy roster allows for more variety in encounter design, and gives designers more tools with which to ruin your day. You should find some and play them, it was never particularly hard to do in the first place but it is even easier now (I recommend Thatcher’s Techbase).

The wildest thing is, people are still making levels and it seems like a thing people will do fucking forever, or at least as long as there are computers that can run DOOM II and an internet to put .wads on. It’s great! I think that rules!

Unfortunately for the purposes of this ranking, we’re focusing on vanilla DOOM II, mostly because otherwise I would have to go play like every big .wad/megawad and I don’t have that kind of time.

Rank the Damn Thing Already

I am positive that this is gonna get my ass kicked one day, but here’s where DOOM II ranks for me:

1. DOOM Eternal

2. DOOM 2016

3. DOOM 64

4. DOOM II

5. DOOM³

At the end of the day, I just can’t get past the way the game sags in the middle. The maps of DOOM II are some real feast or famine shit – you are either playing one of the best maps ever or you are playing something that should have just been cut from the game and never talked about again. DOOM II is a land of contrasts, and unfortunately for it, I think the level design in DOOM 64 is just better for the most part, which is why it doesn’t quite replace it. I love DOOM II – I mean I love all these fucking games, I reckon that is pretty obvious by now – but it’s the new number four. That Super Shotgun is hard to argue with, and the new monsters (except for the Chaingunner, fuck the Chaingunner) all add variety to a game that would have otherwise struggled to stay interesting. I shit on the Icon of Sin fight a little back there for being a wall texture, but let’s be clear: it is an extremely fucking cool wall texture.

Next up is, well, DOOM. The end of this little journey I have dragged you on, dear reader, is in sight. No, I am not going to add SIGIL or the new episode from DOOM I+II or anything like that, although I have talked about how good SIGIL and SIGIL II are before and will do so again. Maybe I will take a trip through some of that stuff later and write something about them in particular, but for now we’re gonna talk about DOOM**** and call it good.

*For more on that you can read Romero’s book or Masters of DOOM, or maybe both if you wanna get multiple perspectives.

**I guess you could also count No Rest for the Wicked, except that was a Nerv Software thing, not an id thing. Actual id devs worked on Age of Rust, is my point here.

***I’m aware that it is not actually supposed to be a sax, I am pretty sure it is supposed to be a guitar solo. Trouble is, my young brain heard the midi version and interpreted it as a sax for some reason, so that’s what it is.

****Yes, including Thy Flesh Consumed, since it was part of DOOM’s retail release. I thought about not mentioning it at all, but it has some goddamn good maps (and also Perfect Hatred) that have an influence on how I feel about the whole thing. Plus I mean I talked about Ancient Gods 1 and 2 in the DOOM Eternal discussion, so I might as well follow up with that since it is an official episode four.*****

*****Yes, I know that SIGIL and SIGIL II being authored by John fucking Romero makes them as official as you could really hope for. I’m trying to be fair here, which is to say I am trying to stick to stuff that will run on stock DOOM – SIGIL and SIGIL II both need gzdoom in order to pull off some of their tricks (you can get SIGIL to run in Chocolate Doom for about five seconds before it crashes). Rest assured, I’m already considering writing up an article just about them because they are like some real Favorite Games of All Time shit for me – SIGIL II was almost my game of the year last year, after all.