Doom (2016)
“Unlike everything else in your life, your work here…matters.”
Bright green armour pickups. No reloading. Power-ups. Health spewing from downed foes. Not your thing? I’d be tempted to say “look away now!”, but don’t. Look here. Right here. Because against all the odds, id Software have rebooted their own classic series into one of the freshest experiences around.
In my fervent youth, I was a Quake 3 kid, sold on the zippy pace, high skill-ceiling and face-melting graphics that only the late nineties could provide. The arena shooter had grown naturally from the FPS titles of the time: Doom, Unreal, Tribes etc.; all similarly fast-paced and frantic. Alas, as the turn of the millennium brought its Call of Dutys, its Battlefields, its Medal of Honours, the traditional FPS fell out of favour.
Slow-paced, stolid, and increasingly focused on set-pieces and cinematic experiences, these games have dominated the last decade. I don’t say these things to be negative; I’ve played and enjoyed entries from each of these series over the years. But what it does illustrate is just why Doom comes as such a shock: our brains have been retaught, tuned to duck behind cover, take a couple of pot-shots at an entrenched enemy and wait while our limited hitpoints auto-recover. Instead, Doom asks “Why aren’t we sprinting up to these guys and ripping the jaw from their heads?”
Doom puts you in the hulking space-boots of a man of mysterious and questionable origins, waking up within the remnants of an occult ceremony and surrounded by…things. It’s no spoiler to say that, true to series form, you’re on a facility on Mars overrun by the ejaculate of Hell and you’re going to shoot the shit out of anything that moves until they’re all very, very dead. You’ll uncover more about what went wrong, who’s responsible, and how exactly you’re involved, but this is all secondary to the main order of business: killing stuff — with style.
Lesson one: In combat, if you don’t move, you’re probably going to die. The threat may start out minimal, with just a mix of Possessed (zombies) and fireball-flinging Imps to deal with, but before long you’ll have a horrific cocktail of floating acid spewers, giant leaping beasts with massive fists, and demons with frickin’ laser beams attached to their arms to send back from whence they came. To help achieve this noble goal, you’ll accrue a 10-strong arsenal of varied weapons over the course of the campaign, almost all of which can be modified and upgraded (plus some grenades on a cooldown). Oh, and you’re fast. Really fast. As in, on-a-par-with-modern-military-shooters’-sprint-speed fast. And so you run, you shoot, and then you run and shoot some more. This is the foundation of the game, and that in itself is Just Fine. The guns are weighty and impactful, the enemies distinctive and intelligent enough, and you’d still have a grand old time if that’s all there was to it.
Except, it’s not. Via the joyous inclusion of Glory Kills and the series stalwart chainsaw (albeit in a more interesting form), Doom is blessed with a remarkably strategic combat system. Like a popular, football-playing school kid who secretly plays tabletop miniatures games on weekends, it’ll surprise you, peeking out during every skirmish from beneath the ceaseless gore and viscera that you already expect. Most encounters are broken up into small arena sections, around which will be scattered insufficient ammo, armour and health drops to deal with the (literal) spawn of Hell. Given that you’re perpetually on the verge of being punched inside out, running out of health and bullets is a problem. Glory Kills, then: weaken an enemy enough, and they’ll be vulnerable to a brutally-animated melee kill that’s guaranteed to drop health. Similarly, one-shot any enemy with the chainsaw, using up incredibly scarce fuel, and their corpse will spew forth bullets, like a pink, fleshy piñata.
With these systems in place, you’re no longer just pointing and blasting the closest thing to your face. You’re assessing the entire area, prioritising, calculating what can be temporarily disregarded and what needs to be taken out immediately. You’re constantly weapon-switching depending on who needs to be shot and where they are; deciding if you can afford to whittle them down to Glory Kill territory, or if they’re too dangerous to keep around for that long. Now you need ammo, so someone’s getting the chainsaw, but who? The lowly Imp, hardly a threat but one that’ll only use up one chunk of fuel? Or the lumbering, fire-spewing, bullet-sponge Mancubus, that requires five fuel but removes a powerful enemy piece from the board?
I’ve spoken a lot about the combat, but for good reason. It’s not that the other aspects of the game are poor (far from it), but it’s the focus and the highlight, and deservedly so. As far as the plot goes, it’s serviceable sci-fi/horror bollocks, and most interesting when dipping into the Doom lore or playing with the origins of your avatar. The Doom Marine (or “Doomguy”, if you’re so inclined), though never viewed onscreen, exhibits occasional bursts of personality, bringing wonderful levity to interactions with the other, posturing NPCs. He rips consoles from their connections, punches the cute little weapon-mod droid for NO REASON, and bullishly ignores allies, choosing in one mission to stomp objectives into tiny pieces rather than carefully deactivating them as instructed. It’s one of a series of lovely touches which echo throughout the rest of the game’s presentation. Coloured keycards, one of gaming’s classic tropes, are wonderfully reinstated to the series in the form of security passes (that need to be found and ripped from the corpses of dead personnel, naturally), and subtle green lighting is regularly used to point you in the right direction. Doom knows it’s a game, not a movie, and remains steadfastly unashamed of that fact throughout.
A few sticking points try to spoil the fun, mostly technical, but I’m really scraping the bottom of the (exloding) barrel here. Playing on PS4, loading times are long enough to be irritating, and there’s a bit of texture pop-in from time to time. Most annoyingly, I encountered an odd bug on a semi-regular basis where all but the ambient audio would disappear for a few minutes at a time, meaning all weapons, enemies and even Doomguy’s grunts were completely absent. At best it’s distracting, but at worst, you’re missing core exposition from the Big Bad’s latest monologue. The plot may be secondary, but I still want to know what’s going on.
Additionally, the campaign is much longer than I was expecting. Subjective, I know, but pretty much the main consideration of No Time to Game! You’re looking at anything between 15 and 20 hours in total, depending on ability and your desire to seek out secret areas and collectibles, and when you’re as tight for time as we all are, it does start to drag towards its concluding chapters. A couple of its weakest missions are present in the closing stages too, when there are fewer new ideas to stir into the pot, so chucking a couple of these in the bin would’ve done wonders for both the pace and my own clock-watching. Even the worst mission in Doom is still better than those found in other, poorer titles, though, and I definitely need no excuse to show off my sweet double-jump 180° lock-on skills again.
I didn’t mention the double-jump, did I? It feels awesome, and along with your ability to mantle ledges, further adds to your mobility in those multi-layered arenas (Doomguy must be amazing at yoga). I haven’t mentioned the Rune Challenges, either: short, timed gauntlets secreted around the mission areas which afford you upgradeable passive abilities. Oh, and the map! The glorious map. If there’s an award for Cartographer of the Year, Doom’s map designer deserves it hands-down: a clean, clear 3D level layout which can be twirled and zoomed to your heart’s content, and contains all the info you need without being even slightly busy.
I love that map, and I love Doom. After the dour 3rd entry brought the franchise to its knees over a decade ago, Doom manages to deliver when no-one expected it to. It’s a wonderfully self-aware, gloriously violent cartoon of a game that knows what it is and makes damn sure you do as well. It’s presented in such a way as to be reverential to its forebears without being afraid to implement new ideas. And, critically, it does the unthinkable: discreetly introduces real strategy into a seemingly straightforward combat model, giving us one of the most adrenalising, passionate and fun shooters we’ve had in years. I’d suggest stopping what you’re doing and letting that sink in, but don’t stop. Stop moving, and you’ll probably die.
