DOOM is a really interesting game, a product of a gone area brought back into this century with a flurry of new mechanics, systems and updates over the original arena-based single player first person shooters. I was looking forward to playing it and while I'm not the biggest FPS fan in the world, it didn't disappoint me. I'm really happy that DOOM exists and it does exactly what some other games - Serious Sam, Bulletstorm - have tried to do in recent years, but better. I feel that this game is going to be on everyone's mind for a good while.
DOOM presents its story in the background, allowing you to run and double-jump to mission objectives that mostly just involve you killing a bunch of stuff. There are platforming segments and they work because of the care they've put into highlighting the correct paths to get from A to B, but you're usually not watching unskippable cutscenes or making choices. The DOOM Marine just goes. You are encouraged to explore levels to find suit upgrades, rune challenges, collectibles, stat upgrades and gun modifications and there are even suit upgrades that allow you to find these more easily but I felt that this didn't work, the level map is in 3D and I've found it very confusing. Even trying to find every secret, I just couldn't do it, so after a few levels I've just dropped that idea.
One of my issues with DOOM is the difficulty, even at the base level, I felt like it was a bit too tough for my taste. The checkpoint system, while really helpful in most situations, makes it really frustrating when you die at the last enemies of a huge wave and then you need to restart the whole encounter. The enemies have a good variety, you fight classic DOOM monsters - although I haven't played the original, so I wouldn't know - and they all offer their specific challenges. There are health and armor packs to pick up around, but your life doesn't regenerate on its own. Where the game shines is with the Glory Kill system, when an enemy gets low enough on health, you can perform a special move to kill them and recover some of your health - and with the specific upgrades, armor. I thought it would get annoying, but it didn't. It incentivizes a more aggressive playstyle. You can't just hide somewhere or hunt life packs forever, you need to kill to get back in shape.
Similarly, you never need to reload your guns - which is funny since I kept mashing the R button from time to time - but ammo can get scarce, to compensate for that, you get a chainsaw (with limited ammo itself) that, when used will make enemies explode into ammo. The gun selection is fine, but I found some problems with a few aspects of your arsenal. Some guns - like the plasma rifle - feel like you need to fire forever into an enemy to kill them, some guns have weird ammo situations where they use a bunch of ammo every time you use them, why not reduce their capacity and have them shoot one at a time? Some guns are rarely used - like the default pistol - and it feels weird to land on them when I'm scrolling through my weapons. And while they upgrades are neat - and having to complete a challenge to unlock the last one is a great idea - some of them feel uninteresting, like having rockets detonate in mid-air.
Runes trials - challenges to obtain runes, which give you special abilities when you equip them - are an interesting part of the game, and I wish there would have been more of them, or that they would've been easier to find, because I didn't get enough to unlock three runes slots for my character. I also didn't find all the stat upgrades - which allow you to raise your maximum health, armor and ammo - nor do I desire to go back through the whole game to do so. It's a really well developed story in a way that works and the environments are varied and interesting, I've only had a few spots where I needed to look at a website to figure out what to do and I only fell to my death in unmarked spots once or twice. It just feels like too much work to go back to all levels and find everything, especially if I find the map unhelpful.
With cool boss fights and interesting mechanics at each layer of play, DOOM is a great game. My personal feelings towards first person shooters probably diminished my experience a bit, but it still was a great game and I'm happy to have gone through it at least once. I didn't look at the multiplayer or the map creation tools but I don't think they are that integral to the experience, if you want a solid singleplayer arena-based FPS, DOOM is a really good bet, feeling like an old game made new with almost all the right choices made where things matter.
