Y'all Hear About That New DOOM?

Every once in a while a game comes along that makes you think “damn, what an interesting twist on a familiar classic! I should play the absolute hell out of this thing,” and damn if that’s not what we’re talking about today. It’s to be celebrated, I think, that the simple formula of DOOM (demons + shotgun + fast = Perfection) still has legs, provided you have the right people working on it. It also helps to have an engine that holds up visually and also runs on, let’s be honest, a shocking amount of PCs including ones where you think “you’ve got no business running anything.” So after hearing about this thing myself, I thought it was probably important to take a look – perhaps a quick one – at just what it had going on. I should stress that I haven’t finished it – I might more accurately say I’ve barely scratched the surface – but what I’ve experienced so far has been, quite honestly, a real fucking delight. So without further ado, let’s get down to it. Let’s talk about the clever, the creative, the absolutely delightful new DOOM release.

Let’s talk about Amalgoom.

That is what we were all thinking of, right?

A Twist on an Old Favorite

Amalgoom is a recently-released (it came out last week!) megawad for DOOM II which you can play in the usual source ports (I’ve been using GZDoom myself, but I think any Boom-based port will do the job), although it’s not currently available in the latest Bethesda release so you’ll have to do a little legwork to get it. The concept of the game is simple: what if the levels from DOOM and the levels from DOOM II were squished together? An amalgamation of DOOM, if you will?

It's a simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of ways it could go wrong. For starters, what does it mean to mash two levels together, anyway? It’s a difficult question to answer, at least for me. The team behind Amalgoom seem to have figured it out though, taking bits and pieces from each game and putting them together in a way that makes sense. This means that for people like me who have played through DOOM a million times (and DOOM II a couple of times) every level becomes suffused with a feeling of déjà vu. This is doubly true when it comes to secrets – I don’t have many secret locations memorized in DOOM (apart from maybe the first four levels) and I know even fewer in DOOM II, but playing the early levels of Amalgoom it was delightful to have half-remembered locations which ended up still guiding me in more or less the right direction.

Special shoutout to the music for this by the way: just like the levels, the team took the original music from both games and slapped it together. I mean I say “slapped,” but that sounds a lot more haphazard than what they actually did, which is harmonize the two pieces into a coherent and pretty cohesive whole. It’s an extremely good listen, and again, if you’ve put a lot of time into the original games, it’s a pleasant surprise to see how the level music adds to and enhances the overall feeling of “wait I’ve been here before, haven’t I” that the whole experience has been giving me since I started playing. Enemy counts are reasonable, and the game ramps up its complexity with a relatively easygoing two maps before it really starts to pour it on (which is to say you start seeing a lot more chaingunners, DOOM II’s curse.

I’m only about a third of the way into its campaign , but I’ve been having an absolute blast with it. The level designs have all been fantastic, marrying the sensibilities of both games together in a way that feels like something both familiar and wholly new. I’m big into it!

Okay but What if I’m Not a DOOM Sicko?

Most of what I’ve been saying has, I’ll admit, been focusing on the novelty of merging levels together. What about players who haven’t played through DOOM a million times? What about their needs, huh? If you aren’t constantly being hit by a sense of déjà vu, is it still good?

Well, I can’t exactly answer that, being as I am in fact a DOOM sicko, but I do feel like I can tell when a level design is good versus, you know, crap. I feel pretty comfortable saying the level design in this one is very good. They use the tools of DOOM well (yes, even the chaingunners are used well, although it pains me to say so). Nothing I’ve played has strayed into the annoying level of enemies where it feels like they’re just throwing demons at you to say that makes you hardcore or something.

Some of the areas have felt a little slaughter-mappy (a “slaughter map” is more or less what it sounds like: an enormous amount of enemies and not much else. The best example of it in the original games is Dead Simple in DOOM II, the ür text of it is Go 2 It, the second secret map of Plutonia), but only for limited encounters. Still, dropping into a room with I Don’t Even Know How Many Fuckin’ Creatures And Also It Is Dark was surprisingly fun! Sure it took me like ten tries, but it's DOOM, man, you are in and out so quick it doesn’t matter (Tony Hawk Pro Skater rules apply here - doing a challenging thing is no sweat as long as you get back in quickly. This is not a post about DOOM The Dark Ages, but the load times in that basically don’t exist and I still don’t know how the fuck they pulled that off and probably never will. Another thing about it that is similar to original DOOM I guess!).

It's About Community, Man

The project was, like all megawads, a passion project – but this one brought in a bunch of different members of the Doomworld forums not just to do the level design, but multiple composers worked to make the music sound right as well. The release candidate (they’re already up to RC3) includes a text file with everyone’s contributions, and you also get the level designer names up front at the beginning of each level which is, I think, an extremely nice touch.

From the sound of things, getting the megawad together and out the door was an arduous process. Here’s one of the project leads on the release (you can read the whole post – and also watch an interview two of the team did with none other than Sandy Peterson himself – on the Doomworld forums:

“Working on this Community Project was really hard. We've all learned many valuable lessons that we'll probably carry from this for the rest of our lives. Lessons that we hope can be useful in future endeavors inside and outside of the Doom community.

But it was ultimately fruitful. We can say We're very proud of the maps in this megawad. Even with the way the project started, most of the maps were miraculously able to achieve a more cohesive vision. Some maps diverge a bit from that vision, but even these maps are not bad maps at all. I think for a first project, we've done a good job.”

Doomgappy

Frankly if this is a first project for the team, I’m gonna be fascinated to see what they do next; if, in fact, the team chooses to do another big project like this. Sometimes one is enough – and if this is all we get from them, well, it’s a hell of a fucking statement. You can feel the love for the original games playing through this wad, and that’s really to its credit.

We Are Not Ranking DOOM .wads

Kind of like my posts on SIGIL and SIGIL II, I’m not ranking these or anything (although I am on record as saying SIGIL might be my favorite DOOM game, period). I wanted to start doing these writeups on community maps, and Amalgoom’s release just happened to catch my eye in between playing through DOOM The Dark Ages (which I will talk about eventually, but I’ve still got six levels to go and then I will need to go back and replay bits and bobs to give it a proper ranking (yes, I’ll update the Ranking of DOOMs for it, I think that’s only fair).

You know I thought I had written my last article on this site (and was looking at what I needed to do to pull the Ranking of DOOM stuff at the very least off and host it elsewhere), but hey then we got a little miracle! I’m so glad Giant Bomb’s back and I am so glad that now I do not have to re-do all the images in those posts, let me tell you.

Anyway, see you next time – I’ve got a couple other megawads in mind to look at (there are so many Cacoward winners out there, more than enough to keep me going for years at this point), as well as some more one-off maps that are historically interesting if nothing else.