Overall an enjoyable experience, bugs are an occasional problem, making movement a bit awkward on stairs sometimes, or causing odd interactions when initiating a glory kill. Far too many of the beginning levels were extremely easy, playing on Nightmare instead of Ultra-Violence may have rectified that, needless to say though, the second half of the game had a much more enjoyable difficulty, needing me to think about how and when to use different weapons during fights. The chainsaw is criminally under-utilized, having too few pickups to make it a regular part of combat, making times where I had fuel available rare, and times where I remembered to use it rarer. If I didn't have so many times where I just got stuck on a slope, or initiated a glory kill and just kinda teleported awkwardly instead of killing the enemy, this would be an easy 5/5.

Liked this a lot more than i figured. The gameplay, while being fast and quite frantic at points, has a nice rhythm to it that's very easy to get sucked into. Has a zen sort of feel imo. The slightly more acrobatic movement than in older Doom is also fun to mess with, especially the double jump. Admittedly some of the later monster rooms can get a bit long in the tooth. Stages themselves are fine, but yeahhhhh. The soundtrack is at least a damn good time, rockin as all hell.
Oh, the story. Yeah it's fine, just the "UAC does stuff with Hell" stuff again. The addition of Samuel Hayden and Olivia Pierce as more proper characters compared to Doomguy is neat, the latter having a somewhat interesting angle with the cult thing. Also Vega is...there I guess, his ending is pretty sweet tho.

TLDR: Game is gud, probably my second favorite Doom game.

Muy bien, pues, he completado Doom con 11 horas de juego y habiendo encontrado prácticamente todo lo que había por los mapas, en la dificultad normal. "Hacedme daño"

Mi crítica es que es un muy buen juego, pero que sufre de carencias que rompen bastante la capacidad de subir de puntuación, por eso le dejo en un 7. Hablando primero de lo bueno:

Las mecánicas son variadas y agradables al uso, el aspecto audiovisual está muy bien cuidado, lo mapas son buenos (Aunque luego he de remarcar algo grave) y el doblaje castellano (No me dejaba ponerlo en inglés) está bien logrado, en general, es un videojuego divertido con diferentes mapas y mecánicas + visuales muy agradables a la vista que te sumerge en un mundo de caos, sangre, y mucho combate frenético, con alta capacidad de mejorar a tu personaje a lo largo de la aventura para así facilitarla, o si tú mismo deseas, no usar dichas mejoras y hacerlo más complicado.

Ahora bien, no todo es color de rosa, este juego tiene un problema... o más bien 2 problemas fundamentales, el mapa, y la narrativa. El mapa, sí, pese a no ser un mundo abierto y ser "lineal" es grande y con muchos sitios donde encontrar cosas, cosa que parecería algo positivo de no ser que estamos hablando de un shooter frenético, los momentos de asesinato masivo junto a los tiempos muertos de solo explorar el mapa hacen muchísimo contraste, simplemente no es divertido solo vagar por la zona para encontrar mejoras, toda la sensación bien lograda de frenesí y testosterona se ve eclipsada por momentos vacíos sin enemigos o apenas sin enemigos, y he de decir que el juego no representa un reto en dificultad normal, en la dificultad base, entonces, peor aún, ya que hablamos de mejoras que son perder el tiempo y que no te hará falta ni la mitad para ganar, y menos aún porque algunas te las encuentras por el camino, ni falta hace explorar. El mapa técnicamente es bueno pero para un juego como Doom, no.

Y siguiendo con la narrativa, pues, básicamente es tan mala que no te vas a enterar ni de un 1/4 de la trama si no te paras a escuchar los mensajes y a leer descripciones, EN UN SHOOTER DE COMBATE FRENÉTICO COMO DOOM, en un SOULS (Que también me parece muy mal) aún tiene un mínimo de sentido. Esto hace que la historia por más buena que sea, no valga nada, pues dudo que ni la mitad de jugadores hayan entendido todo lo que pasaba, y de hacerlo, es porque han leído todo y por ende, han destruido el ritmo por completo.

Fuera de todo esto, pues sí, también hay que decir que como te plantees jugar este juego mucho rato, te vas a cansar, al final todos los niveles constan en lo mismo y se vuelve repetitivo, con los mismos enemigos todo el rato, la variedad tampoco es muy buena en eso, en escenarios tampoco pero eso es justificable por el mundo en el que nos encontramos y la historia.

¿El juego es bueno entonces pese a eso? Pues sí, el juego en lo que hace bien no es la tercera venida de Jesucristo pero sí es más que bueno. Recomendado sin duda.

Do you want to feel like a badass!? This is the game for you. I can't remember the last time I felt this cool playing a video game (relatively speaking... sitting at a desk and yelling at your monitor can only get you so far).

I almost quit playing this game entirely because I found the first few levels kind of slow and boring. Although, in all fairness to Doom, I attribute most of the slowness to my achievement whore ass and my incessant need to search "every nook and cranny" (real achievement name) for every collectible in existence. If you can avoid slowing down your gameplay to instead focus on popping baddies, at least for your first playthrough, I promise it'll be worth it.

Once I finally made it to Hell and had access to all of the weapons, my experience was immediately elevated. This game became a real power fantasy after a while. When you begin to realize that you are the threat, and demons have prophesized your return like the second coming of Christ, it gives you a real reason to say "Fuck Yeah!"

The story was nothing too interesting, and barely gave you a reason to pay attention to it. There were also a few tedious/repetitive moments, but the game wasn't long enough for these to be too impactful. Overall, this is a great game with lots of action... and lots... and lots... of blood.

almost a good game, held back by memes and insecurity

doom (1993) is a game entirely focused on level design. you are 'exploring the level' at all times. combat encounters are part of the exploration. weapon pickups are part of the exploration. secret hunting is part of the exploration. every single action you take, sans the minutiae of combat (projectile dodging, bfg trickery, etc), is you engaging with the design of the level. you can beat every map in the game launched directly, with just the starting pistol and health. this is not an accident. levels are not scenes in a movie, or episodes in a show, but songs in an album. in this sense it (and doom 2, and quake) is much like an early mario, or sonic, or dungeon crawler. that hint of dungeon crawl is extremely important to doom; many spaces are designed to mess with you. you need to master the spaces to even finish the level. they're called "maps" for a reason!

doom 2016 is a game about systems. encounter design, weapon pickups, and secret hunting are all constrained based on how they want you to engage with the combat and progression systems. levels get cleaved into two modes: "looking around for stuff to unlock" and "boxed off combat." let me explain.

this game is structured around upgrades. in order to fully kit out doomslayer, you need to find all of the:
-weapons
-points to unlock weapon mods (hot-swappable altfire modes, two per weapon)
-points to upgrade weapon mods (2-3 per weapon mod)
-"mastery" upgrades for fully upgraded weapon mods
-points to upgrade the praetor suit
-second type of points for second type of praetor suit upgrade
-runes (think CoD perk system, or old LoL runepages), unlocked for doing specific instanced challenges
-slots for runes, unlocked for doing an amount of instanced challenges
-"mastery" upgrades for runes

that's nine different types of unlock. nine. for reference, the only one of these systems in the original games is "finding the weapons."

these upgrades aren't tiny, either. there's no Path of Exile "+1.3% Shock damage to Undead type enemies (Melee only)" here. instead you're unlocking things like "weapon switch speed." "immunity to explosive barrels." "bullet penetration." "reload speed for your altfire." "maximum health." these aren't minor things, they are the fundamentals of the actual combat system, the sort of thing you argue about in a competitive game. and because the game is entirely focused on its combat system, this means you only get to start playing The Actual Game - juggling weapons with the actual swap speed, using the various types of weapon mod, being able to double-jump with proper air control, or do glory kills from full range - once you find the right number of these upgrades. it's maddening.

note i am saying "find." not "get," but "find." because, yes, the obsession with upgrade systems infected the secrets too. the upgrades , or the challenges you have to do to get the upgrades, are scattered around the levels in random dead ends, or vents, at the end of "platforming" segments, or occasionally in actually optional chunks of level. you are often given three paths, two which lead to objectives (sometimes the same objective) and one slightly hidden one which leads you to the body of an Elite Guard with a Praetor Token, or an Argent Cell, or a portal to a Rune Trial, or one of 48 collectible Funko Pops, or some other nonsense. i think this is done to make secrets "Feel Rewarding," compared to the original Doom, where you'd usually just be given full health and armor, or maybe a temporary powerup. but really, it does the opposite. you have to find secrets, or else you are going to be behind on upgrades, and the secrets can't be too secret or else people won't be able to find them. the automap marks them on the map screen before you even find them, because they know you are going to need them. so, you are not engaging with the design of the level. there is no feeling of solving a puzzle, or "getting the joke," or just finding something interesting. you are just checking things off a list in the corner of the map screen.

i can imagine some rebuttals to this. "you can just not get the upgrade points," etc. sure. they can also "just" not make me unlock half of the mechanics in the game. this is one of the oldest complaints about Devil May Cry (a game these designers are clearly enamored with), or God of War, or any other Action-First Action Game w/ this sort of system - "the game doesn't start until you unlock a bunch of moves," "why can't you just start with Enemy Step," etc. I am not really fond of DMC in the first place, but it does eventually become a very good game once you get over that hump. i do not understand why idsoft decided to triple down on this, instead. and either way, these "you control the buttons you press" type responses ignore the actual incentives set by the progression systems, which the designers were clearly quite excited about having come up with, what with it dictating every part of the game. nobody would make a complaint like this if they hadn't built the game in this way!

anyways, while you're scrounging for upgrade points, you will eventually find yourself in a Combat Zone. these are (either functionally or actually) boxed off areas where enemies spawn, repeatedly, for a certain amount of time, much like DMC, or Serious Sam, or Painkiller, or other games I don't really enjoy specifically because of this "boxes connected by hallways" format. but at least the actual combat you do in here is pretty good. ultraviolence difficulty forces you to do a lot of weapon swapping, a la Quake 3 rocket/clan arena mode, with the positioning dances of Quake 1 or a Halo. the glory kill system is cool and gives fights a nice ebb and flow. it's pretty fun! at least, once you unlock the fun version of the game, where you're able to do the weapon swapping and do glory kills from full range and take more than 150 damage before dying and and and...

actually, no, let's talk about the combat. it's the only thing this game has going for it, so i have to give it more than two sentences. i want to compare it, again, to doom 93, because its the only way to explain the differences between the two.

the combat in the original doom is extremely similar to arcade scrolling shooters - gradius, xevious, eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package, etc etc. you can strafe, you can fire hitscan weapons, you can fire projectile weapons, you can fire slower projectile weapons that explode on impact. some enemies shoot hitscan, others shoot projectiles, others do melee stuff. the game mostly boils down to dodging projectiles, circle strafing, and occasional cover peeking. this is not a problem. it's simple, it's fun to handle, and given good level and encounter design, it can be incredibly fun and interesting. your ammo economy decisions happen across the entire level: "i won't use this weapon in this fight because i want to have ammo for it in the next fight, which has these enemies," etc. this is, again, a strategic decision that can be fun, or interesting, or stressful, or whathaveyou, in the hands of the right designer. in this way, Doom is closer to an older dungeon crawler than a modern first-person shooter. remember that the original inspiration for the id FPS games was Carmack seeing a demo of Ultima Underworld at a trade show, and going "I could do that, but faster!" Ultima Underworld is a very slow, simulationist game about having to survive in a locked dungeon. It was a direct response to Dungeon Master, which itself was a real-time, semi-simulationist take on the Wizardry/Bard's Tale/Might&Magic style of first-person party-based grid-movement dungeon crawler (if you've played Legend of Grimrock, you've basically played Dungeon Master). With this info, we can start to understand these early id games as a type of dungeon crawler. The first of the "real" FPS games they made, Catacomb 3D (Hovertank is a tech demo shut up), lifted heavily from Gauntlet, an early arcade Action RPG. Wolf3D is faster, more refined Catacomb. Doom is faster, more refined Wolf3D. Quake is... etc. This is why the level design is like that. This is why the item economy is like that, why Wolf3D had "meaningless" rooms where you pick up treasure, why you were meant to get lost. Even the "bumping into walls trying to find the last secret in the map" bullshit is lifted directly from Wizardry.

unfortunately, while making their weird arcade-action dungeon crawler, they also decided to give it a gory, hypermasculine speed metal aesthetic to complement its Blazing Fast Graphics. this opened them up to controversy, reinterpretation, and controversy-fueled reinterpretation. Doom, a game where you stumble your way through weird pitch black corridors filled with nonsense monsters, became something you played to prove you were a Real, Hardened Man of a 17 year old. (yes, it always had the chainsaw, the rampage powerup, the gore sprites - i've played it dozens of times, I know). this feedback loop brings us to the doom comic.

in 1996, which I want to remind you was four years after doom came out, Marvel released a one-off Doom promotional comic. it cold opens with Doomguy punching a bunch of demons while dropping bad one-liners. "I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!" "Knock knock, who's there? ME!" etc. on page 3, Methguy finds himself a cyberdemon. he exclaims, "You are huge! That means you have huge guts! Rip and tear! Rip and tear your guts!" And then he, well, who cares. Nobody cared at the time, at least. Only a few more people cared after Lowtax (eugh) dug it up for a Planetquake article 5 years later. But eventually, through the power of memetics, the phrase "Rip And Tear Your Guts," a dumb one-liner from a comic nobody had ever read, became the soul of Doom, to a certain kind of person. When the mod "Brutal Doom" came out in 2010, and added fancier gore, headshot mechanics, Mortal Kombat fatalities, and a bunch of other superfluous dumb shit, that impression of Doom went well beyond the Doomworld shitposters and landed straight in people's Youtube recommendations. That, I'm fairly sure, is how Doom 2016 ended up more inspired by a line from an ad than the actual game it's actually meant to "reboot."

The opening cutscene of 2016 ends with the line "rip and tear until it is done." The glory kill, the game's Clever Mechanic, is a "rip and tear" button. That's not to say it's not fun. Being able to turn enemies into health is cool, and keeps the game from feeling as bland as other "boxes in a row" shooters. But it serves that meme revisionism just as much as it serves the game design. This game is not in conversation with Doom. It is not building on what id was doing with Doom. It does not "bring Doom forward to a new generation." It is an adaptation of one single panel from a shitty advertisement comic book the creators had no hand in, by way of mechanics from "Character Action" games and the worst Eurotrash shooters of the mid 2000s. This frustrated me in 2016, and it frustrates me now, years after the initial disappointment wore off.

so. the level design sucks. the cutscenes suck. (have i mentioned this game has unskippable cutscenes? they're bad!). the sections where you have to stand around and listen to someone tell you that someone is trying to access someone's secret files through the Vega terminus in the ruins of the Archon reprocessor core or whatever before you can start playing the level, suck. they even do that Whedon thing where the protagonist, in world, gets mad that someone would have the gall to make him sit through an exposition dump in a Doom game, in the first five minutes of the game, and then they keep fucking doing it! the platforming, something they stuck in here even having eighteen years to take a semicritical look at Half-Life, also kinda sucks, until halfway thru the game when you find the challenge to unlock tier 1 of the perk that gives you vaguely Quake air-control instead of Halo floatiness. really, every part of the game, outside the boxes where you're doing combat, is either bland, or annoying, or Actively Bad. and the combat's only good once you've spent a few hours dealing with the upgrade system, which also sucks. the most fun I've had is cranking the difficulty in arcade mode, which lets you skip most of that fluff. not all, just most. i dunno, man!

I am sure the people who were peeing their pants over this game in 2016 were doing so sincerely. but i find myself wondering how many of them had played the original game, or how long it had been since they'd done so, and what they would say they liked about it if asked, because absolutely none of what's kept that game fun, interesting good for thirty years is present here. just download some mods for that instead.