I finally got around to trying Doom 2016. I’m a huge fan of OG Doom, so I’ve always been curious to give it a go, but for one reason or another I’ve only just got around to trying it.

And… I… didn’t love it. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate it or anything, either, but I think I was just expecting something a little different. Something less annoying. Something a bit more like classic Doom.

Instead, what I got was a speedy, fluid first-person shooter that admittedly stands out from other examples of the genre these days by virtue of its pacing, but which had me gnashing my teeth in frustration more than going “wow, cool!” Join me after the jump and let’s explore why I ended up feeling this way.

Doom 2016 casts you in the role of the Doom Slayer, and being a 21st century game, it makes a whole lot more effort with the lore than the 1993 original did. In some respects, one can look on this as developer id Software exploring territory that they once thought about including in the original Doom — aside from the oft-mocked “talking to demons” aspect — but on the others, it’s fairly representative of a lot of sci-fi games developed from the seventh generation onwards: tons of background lore jammed into an in-game Codex and absolutely fuck all of it being relevant or interesting.

This is the first part where Doom 2016 struggles, I think. It wants so desperately for you to take it seriously, but its absolutely dire script comes across like it was written by a teenager who just discovered anti-capitalism online for the first time. The Union Aerospace Corporation, the company who has always been positioned as at least indirectly responsible for the forces of Hell spilling out into our dimension, is so cartoonishly depicted as “corporations bad!!!” throughout Doom 2016 that I found it actively distracting at times.

We’re talking about wandering through environments and hearing voice-overs mocking corporate orientation videos by talking about the benefits of submitting yourself to vivisection and dark rituals, and how the UAC definitely isn’t a cult, it’s doing all this for the good of humanity. It’s not even consistent about it; part of the reason Doom 2016‘s plot gets underway in the first place is down to a member of UAC pushing things much further than the company (presumably) ever intended in terms of interacting with the Hell dimension, but from the “corporate” material you’re subjected to throughout the game, it feels entirely in keeping with UAC’s mission, making it a little confusing as to why you’re being supported by a UAC head honcho in dismantling the entire situation.

I remember a good few years back — we’re talking early ’90s, probably — I found myself thinking “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if all games had stories“? Games like Doom 2016 remind me that this was a foolish thing to think, as Doom 1993 is considerably more appealing today by simple virtue of the fact that its attempt to tell any sort of story never gets any more complicated than “blast your way through the demonic hordes”. Doom 2016 has lore, and I found myself feeling actively repulsed by this aspect of the game by the time the conclusion rolled around.

Let’s say something nice about the game because, as I noted, I didn’t hate it. The gunplay is excellent — the lack of having to “reload” anything is bliss — and all the weapons feel nicely meaty, blowing chunks off enemies in a pleasing The House of the Dead sort of way. Likewise, the Glory Kill system, whereby you can melee a near-death enemy to get a pretty gross first-person kill animation and bonus pickups, gives the game a nice sense of paciness during combat. The implementation of the chainsaw and BFG-9000 are excellent, making them both worthwhile and meaningful but limiting your use of them to prevent you from relying on them. In combat, Doom 2016 feels pretty good.

But only during combat. For me, I think my biggest problem with Doom 2016 is that it’s constantly stop-start, going back and forth between being in “exploration mode” and “battle mode”. Doom 1993, meanwhile, meant that you always had to stay on your toes, even while exploring or looking for secrets; it’s what made it so exciting.

What I mean by this is that Doom 2016 becomes very predictable quite early on. You’ll wander through a bit of level, then you’ll reach a wide open area with lots of items scattered around. Upon entering that area or completing a particular objective, all the doors to that area will mysteriously slam shut and enemies will start teleporting in. You can’t get out of the room until you defeat all the enemies, and in many cases they keep teleporting in for quite a while.

I don’t like this at all. It feels like it undermines the good level design that Doom 2016 exhibits in some places. Exploring in Doom 2016 is interesting and enjoyable, but it also doesn’t feel exciting or dangerous in the same way as Doom 1993. Occasionally you’ll run into an enemy placed outside one of the obvious “combat arenas”, but for the most part, Doom 2016 is very much a case of just running from one of these arenas to the next — and once you’ve cleared all the arenas on the critical path to the exit, you can then go explore the rest of the level to track down secrets and collectibles pretty much unopposed.

Pacing within combat feels… a bit weird at times. Enemies deal heavy damage to you, making survivability quite difficult in the early stages of the game, and you seem to spend a lot of time either at absolutely no health, or full health, and nothing in between. I feel like one’s health bar shouldn’t be fluctuating this wildly during combat, but it’s clearly built into Doom 2016’s design, because when you’re low on health, enemies drop health restoration items when you kill them; when you’re full up, they don’t.

And I have mixed feelings about the secrets, too. There are several types of them over the course of the game: several that relate to progression systems, and one that is almost entirely “useless” aside from unlocking the ability to look at weapon and monster models. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

Progression systems are not what I want from a Doom game. I want to feel like my skill — and perhaps some lucky item finds — are what is carrying me through. But in Doom 2016 you spend a lot of your time unlocking weapon modifications, powering up those weapon modifications with tokens, powering up your suit with Praetor tokens and increasing your base maximum health, armour and ammunition counts with Argent orbs.

I get why these systems are there. They’re expected in 21st century games. And they feed into the level design, giving the player something “worthwhile” in mechanical terms to locate if they explore off the beaten track. But I don’t think they make the game better. I guess I should be thankful that they’re not experience point-based — though some of the “best” upgrades require you to complete particular challenges multiple times in order to unlock them.

If you’ve been reading MoeGamer for any length of time, you may well be thinking that a lot of the things I’ve described above sound like RPG elements, and boy howdy, have I ever covered a lot of RPGs on this site. So what gives? Well, Doom isn’t an RPG (except that one time it was, but that’s a special case) and thus shoehorning in progression systems, growth in power and an encounter-based structure just feels like it’s at odds with what the 1993 game did well.

I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to play it “properly”. And I liked the game enough to play it through to completion. But I also didn’t like it enough to play more than a level at a time, and there was more than one occasion where I was forced to repeat an annoying enemy encounter and I felt like I might just give up on it.

Ultimately, I’m glad I didn’t give up on it. I’m glad I’ve finally played Doom 2016. But so far as I’m concerned, Doom 1993 is still the one to beat. And with the recent new version of that from Night Dive Studios, I’ve got a lot more Doom waiting for me, in a format that I feel like I’m probably going to enjoy a lot more.

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More about Doom 2016

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