Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
I'm a decade late to the party, but I finally played through 2016's DOOM reboot. It's weird that it took me so long to get around to it, because I love the boomer shooter subgenre and have always had a soft spot for FPSes from the '90s, so you can imagine my surprise when I kind of… really disliked this game. Honestly, I'm surprised how much praise the game got, and I'm really not sure… why, exactly. My guess is that, for people who mostly just play Calladuty and the like, it was a breath of fresh air; but for those with even a passing familiarity with this style of shooter, there are a lot of problems.
The biggest issue – and I'm frankly a little shocked by this given that it's DOOM, of all things – is the combat. For a power fantasy, absolutely nothing in this game feels powerful. Enemies are overly bullet sponge-y, don't really react to being shot in most cases, there's no satisfying feedback to actually shooting a gun, and death animations aren't particularly cathartic. The pieces are there, but they didn't put any of it together. I knew there was an issue when I got the shotgun, fired it, and just thought "that's it?" It feels worse than the pea shooter in most games.
In practice, it also feels like they don't really give you the right tools to take on enemies. I frequently found myself entering a battle area with a swarm of enemies and then flipping through my arsenal to try and find something to cull the initial herd of mooks, but I couldn't find a single weapon that felt right for crowd control, let alone satisfying to use. Everything is just weak and takes multiple shots for even the most benign of foes. And I suppose it's just as well, because the glory kill system really encourages you to avoid killing enemies outright, and instead just pepper them with bullets so they start glowing yellow and you can justify the inclusion of this ill-considered mechanic.
And that's ignoring that the glory kills, themselves, are kind of incongruent with the rest of the combat since pretty much everything else is built around ranged attacks. There's little other incentive to close the distance, because you can't duke it out with the pathetically weak melee attack and the chainsaw's usage is limited (plus, you have to manually switch over to it, so it doesn't come across as a seamless part of your arsenal) so you don't want to waste that. There are a lot of times where you don't really want to dive into a crowd of enemies for a glory kill, either, because the game doesn't give you the tools to fight your way back out. There should have been more viable close-range options.
While more of a "death by a thousand paper cuts" issue than a glaring flaw, the other problem weighing combat down is that there are way too many minor pauses in action. Glory kills slow down the proceedings due to having to close the distance and let the same animation play out for the millionth time. So does the lengthy reload for all of the powerful weapons (which I know you can reduce for some), which is exacerbated by how sponge-y the enemies are. Then there's the cooldown on secondary attacks. Meanwhile, the BFG and chainsaw are treated as totally distinct items, so flipping over to those and deploying them in a pinch feels like another strangely inconvenient delay. I just wanna hit "Q" or something and immediately deploy a shot from the BFG, like it's a smart bomb. Hell, I just want to spin the mouse wheel and arrive at something powerful. No delayed animations, no spinning the barrel, no charge-up – just immediate violence. For a game so hyper-focused on action, they really didn't achieve a good flow to your ability to act.
Prodeus is a modern example of how to do FPS combat right and eschews all the problems I had with DOOM. Guns look good when you fire them, the blood flies everywhere when you hit an enemy, everything sounds powerful, and the violence is explosive when you land a kill shot. The first time I fired one of the powered-up shotguns, I just sat there thinking "oh, hell yeah." That's what you want. Hell, even Painkiller did this whole shtick far better back in 2004. Oh, and DOOM already did it better in 1993.
Level designs are also a mess. The game encloses most enemy encounters into a series of battle arenas, which makes sense for some types of games, but here, it feels like they're just gating your progression for no reason other than a lack of creativity. Towards the end of the game, I found myself dreading large rooms, because I knew I was going to spend the next 5+ minutes on another random horde of the same enemies. That constant start-stop flow became incredibly grating. Why not design enemy encounters to be more organic and actually make sense within the level layouts? Levels also got super confusing and I found myself wandering aimlessly looking for a switch or a key on several occasions, which is made worse by how much visually indistinct garbage is strewn around every room in the game. Obviously, you could get lost in older DOOM games, too, but the levels are so long and pointlessly labyrinthine here (and the platforming segments don't help) that the issue is magnified. And whoever designed that map system should be fired – it's unreadable.
It's frustrating, because the developers largely have the right framework, but for everything they get right in concept, they can't stick the landing in execution. You have an upgrade system that lets you modify your weapons and abilities, but none of the options are interesting or meaningfully change how you'll approach the combat. The levels are rife with secrets to uncover, but the levels are too damn big, and nobody wants to slog through the same-y looking corridors to hunt for relics. And to think I'll replay a 40-minute mission to try and find the items I missed? Not a chance. You have a decent amount of speed and mobility, but it's still not enough to sufficiently maneuver or juke out of the way of enemies that charge at you. Unreal Tournament, this ain't. It's all half-baked.
In the end, it's an almost hilariously clear-cut example of how inept Western AAA developers are when it comes to making a hardcore, action-centric game. They did a good job with the window dressing and overall presentation, but completely missed the nuance of what makes this genre tick, and instead delivered a pale imitation of what the series was 20 years prior to its launch. So obviously, yeah – I'm a little bit let down. As a silver lining… while I wouldn't necessarily credit the game as the spark for all the (significantly better) indie boomer shooters we've gotten in the last decade, it obviously informed the design of a lot of them and I suppose I can thank Bethesda for that. Even so, it's shocking just how overwhelmingly better games like Prodeus and Ion Fury are at delivering on DOOM's supposed forte.
So, I'm guessing I should probably skip Eternal and The Dark Age.
The biggest issue – and I'm frankly a little shocked by this given that it's DOOM, of all things – is the combat. For a power fantasy, absolutely nothing in this game feels powerful. Enemies are overly bullet sponge-y, don't really react to being shot in most cases, there's no satisfying feedback to actually shooting a gun, and death animations aren't particularly cathartic. The pieces are there, but they didn't put any of it together. I knew there was an issue when I got the shotgun, fired it, and just thought "that's it?" It feels worse than the pea shooter in most games.
In practice, it also feels like they don't really give you the right tools to take on enemies. I frequently found myself entering a battle area with a swarm of enemies and then flipping through my arsenal to try and find something to cull the initial herd of mooks, but I couldn't find a single weapon that felt right for crowd control, let alone satisfying to use. Everything is just weak and takes multiple shots for even the most benign of foes. And I suppose it's just as well, because the glory kill system really encourages you to avoid killing enemies outright, and instead just pepper them with bullets so they start glowing yellow and you can justify the inclusion of this ill-considered mechanic.
And that's ignoring that the glory kills, themselves, are kind of incongruent with the rest of the combat since pretty much everything else is built around ranged attacks. There's little other incentive to close the distance, because you can't duke it out with the pathetically weak melee attack and the chainsaw's usage is limited (plus, you have to manually switch over to it, so it doesn't come across as a seamless part of your arsenal) so you don't want to waste that. There are a lot of times where you don't really want to dive into a crowd of enemies for a glory kill, either, because the game doesn't give you the tools to fight your way back out. There should have been more viable close-range options.
While more of a "death by a thousand paper cuts" issue than a glaring flaw, the other problem weighing combat down is that there are way too many minor pauses in action. Glory kills slow down the proceedings due to having to close the distance and let the same animation play out for the millionth time. So does the lengthy reload for all of the powerful weapons (which I know you can reduce for some), which is exacerbated by how sponge-y the enemies are. Then there's the cooldown on secondary attacks. Meanwhile, the BFG and chainsaw are treated as totally distinct items, so flipping over to those and deploying them in a pinch feels like another strangely inconvenient delay. I just wanna hit "Q" or something and immediately deploy a shot from the BFG, like it's a smart bomb. Hell, I just want to spin the mouse wheel and arrive at something powerful. No delayed animations, no spinning the barrel, no charge-up – just immediate violence. For a game so hyper-focused on action, they really didn't achieve a good flow to your ability to act.
Prodeus is a modern example of how to do FPS combat right and eschews all the problems I had with DOOM. Guns look good when you fire them, the blood flies everywhere when you hit an enemy, everything sounds powerful, and the violence is explosive when you land a kill shot. The first time I fired one of the powered-up shotguns, I just sat there thinking "oh, hell yeah." That's what you want. Hell, even Painkiller did this whole shtick far better back in 2004. Oh, and DOOM already did it better in 1993.
Level designs are also a mess. The game encloses most enemy encounters into a series of battle arenas, which makes sense for some types of games, but here, it feels like they're just gating your progression for no reason other than a lack of creativity. Towards the end of the game, I found myself dreading large rooms, because I knew I was going to spend the next 5+ minutes on another random horde of the same enemies. That constant start-stop flow became incredibly grating. Why not design enemy encounters to be more organic and actually make sense within the level layouts? Levels also got super confusing and I found myself wandering aimlessly looking for a switch or a key on several occasions, which is made worse by how much visually indistinct garbage is strewn around every room in the game. Obviously, you could get lost in older DOOM games, too, but the levels are so long and pointlessly labyrinthine here (and the platforming segments don't help) that the issue is magnified. And whoever designed that map system should be fired – it's unreadable.
It's frustrating, because the developers largely have the right framework, but for everything they get right in concept, they can't stick the landing in execution. You have an upgrade system that lets you modify your weapons and abilities, but none of the options are interesting or meaningfully change how you'll approach the combat. The levels are rife with secrets to uncover, but the levels are too damn big, and nobody wants to slog through the same-y looking corridors to hunt for relics. And to think I'll replay a 40-minute mission to try and find the items I missed? Not a chance. You have a decent amount of speed and mobility, but it's still not enough to sufficiently maneuver or juke out of the way of enemies that charge at you. Unreal Tournament, this ain't. It's all half-baked.
In the end, it's an almost hilariously clear-cut example of how inept Western AAA developers are when it comes to making a hardcore, action-centric game. They did a good job with the window dressing and overall presentation, but completely missed the nuance of what makes this genre tick, and instead delivered a pale imitation of what the series was 20 years prior to its launch. So obviously, yeah – I'm a little bit let down. As a silver lining… while I wouldn't necessarily credit the game as the spark for all the (significantly better) indie boomer shooters we've gotten in the last decade, it obviously informed the design of a lot of them and I suppose I can thank Bethesda for that. Even so, it's shocking just how overwhelmingly better games like Prodeus and Ion Fury are at delivering on DOOM's supposed forte.
So, I'm guessing I should probably skip Eternal and The Dark Age.
, guilty as charged, with Origin's, Odyssey and Valhalla, although a few of those Stone Cairns are a nightmare.
