Doom 2016

Doom 2016 was a disappointment, at least for me.  I know it was praised as a return to roots for the franchise and a return to form for the FPS-genre, but I can’t help but disagree on both accounts.  Doom 2016 isn’t a return to its roots, it’s just as much a far cry from classic Doom as Doom 3 was.  Doom 2016 certainly isn’t a return to form for the genre.  The FPS-genre had gotten along just fine before Doom 2016 came around and enjoyed its fair share of run-n-gun shoot ‘em ups, both with and without some modern conventions.  Even BioShock: Infinite, was doing the kickass triple-A take on arena combat and did so with a lot more style and substance and with an even greater emphasis on momentum.  If you’re still with me and you aren’t lighting your torches and sharpening your pitchforks, let’s really get into exactly why I think Doom 2016 just isn’t the second coming.

Alright, so those still with me, are probably wondering how the hell Doom 2016 is just as much a far cry from the classics as Doom 3 was.  Well, it’s actually pretty simple really, classic Doom was about labyrinthine maps with myriad monsters wandering around and color coded doors keeping you from getting from A to B.  Doom 2016 is about occasionally sprawling mazelike maps, with a few combat arenas, a couple color coded doors and some shit platforming in between.  Sure, it’s got more emphasis on combat, but it’s still just as different from the Doom formula as the now maligned third entry was.

You see, where Doom 2016 fails, is that it borrows from Serious Sam and Painkiller in how it approaches combat.  Rather than filling a map with monsters and leaving it to the player to learn the most efficient way around the labyrinth, Doom 2016 takes a different route by occasionally locking the player in a room, spawning waves of monsters and then returning to exploration.  That’s not to say there’s a problem with arena based combat, titles like Painkiller are fucking awesome, but, unlike Doom 2016, Painkiller’s arenas are larger, more open and far more interesting than the cramped arenas Doom 2016 offers.  The number of active enemies at any time is also rather disappointing, with a max of about ten or twelve at a time.  Maybe the cramped arenas and small enemy count were a limitation of developing for consoles or something, I dunno, either way, it’s disappointing.  What I will give Doom 2016, however, is its emphasis on verticality.  The added level of strategy that the double jump and platforms bring is quite welcome and does lend itself to some fun on-the-fly strategy.

Speaking of arenas, the boss arenas really showcase the worst aspects of Doom 2016’s design, compared to the classics.  The game literally just drops the player in a glorified boxing ring and has them go at it with a bullet sponge for a few minutes.  There’s no room to creatively use the environment while fighting the monster, no points where the player is forced to retreat to find and top-up on some health and ammo; you just run around your tiny arena and pump bullets into the big thing until it falls over and it’s time for the glory kill.

While Doom 2016 is praised for its labyrinth level design, it’s missing the key component that made navigating the classic maps so exciting.  They’re just empty, there’s maybe the occasional zombie or cannon fodder enemy lumbering some of the halls, but that’s it.  There’s nothing exciting to the exploration, because there’s nothing happening between the monster arenas.  You just traverse a big ass map with nothing going on, perform some shitty first person platforming, come across an obvious arena, you take a ten minute break from dull exploration, rinse and repeat.  You do this for fifteen goddamned hours.  For all the hubbub about fast movement and combat, the game is a bore.  Even Doom3 had more going on and that was slow as balls.

My biggest gripe, and really, this is by far the most subjective of my reasons, is the combat.  It all works, but there’s no weight to it, everything just feels flat and very boilerplate, especially the weapons.  Even the glory kills feel lacking in weight and visceral satisfaction and the game is practically built around them.  No matter how many hours I spent killing demons, the combat just never really clicked for me.  Even while battling through the most hectic arenas towards game’s conclusion, I never felt absorbed in the combat, my adrenaline was never pumping; it just felt like a slog.  I was finishing the game, not because I enjoyed it, but out of obligation to get my money’s worth.

This is getting long and redundant, so I’ll bitch about one more thing.  Fuck the upgrades and other RPG-lite elements.  It’s a shooter, the only time my health should be at 200 is when I pick-up a Supercharge, not because the game decided to implement half-baked stats for me to sink points into.

I dunno, maybe I’m a victim of hype, but I just couldn’t get into it, I’d rather just boot up Painkiller or Serious Sam for this kind of thing.  Set my house aflame if you want, tell me I’m just some CoD fag who doesn’t appreciate “old school” design, I don’t care.  Nothing anyone says is going to change my mind about this bland cookie cutter game, masquerading as an old school shooter.