Yeah this was surprising for me too.
There are things to like in Doom 2016 for sure, there's the powerful attitude fuck you and rip and tear that doomslayer shows in certain cutscenes. There's the music which is excellently well made and makes the fights pleasant at times, especially when it heightens after every glory kill. A lot of the mechanics on paper are well designed, with enemies using tracking moves that should punish strafing, and it does give freedom for player expression in certain avenues with gauss boosting and cool speedrun tech. There's also a few encounters with some genuinely well designed enemy waves, and arcade mode allows for more emphasized fun times to be had.
That being said, none of it was good to me overall. I could not garner much fun from the mechanics at all for longer than a minute. That has widely to do with how doom 2016 keeps shooting itself in the foot, from the start of the game all the way to where I stopped. You are so overtuned for fights, with weapon mods and powerups that break the game in twine, and even on those best encounters i mentioned there are invulnerability and quad damage powerups or even berserk there. All of that shit makes the game pathetically easy, and it isn't helped when you up the difficulty to Nightmare. In fact that generates more problems, because the game's audio and visual design for enemies is not well designed, with several enemies getting hits from behind or behind cover. Summoner shots can come from nowhere as well as imp fireballs that you can't see. I primarily played on ultraviolence, which is definitely easier than nightmare but it meant potshots wouldn't necessarily kill you.
But, even on nightmare, the game's balancing is trash. You'll never run out of ammo, so you can get off to just using one gun to breeze through shit, and strafing isn't perfectly punished with tracking shots anyway. Your capacity to just turn your brain off is high enough to where it almost becomes super boring. The best way to sum up everything in a nutshell is that the most often times I died was shooting a rocket launcher or a grenade shot in an enemy right in front of me close range because I was largely able to just coast on bullshit.
This may sound super scathing, and it is. I understand the ways Doom 2016 can be enjoyable, I have witnessed the times where it gets oh so close to being good. It just doesn't, and this back and forth tease where there are entire hours of content where not a single minute i spent I could describe as good left me frustrated rather than just a feeling of "it's alright." I still think though, after introspection, that in execution it's an alright game, that I do think is better than a lot of fps on the block. I'm sure that with a shitton of limits on what you can do going against the grain of the game design that you can craft a doom 2016 experience that is fun. But to me, it's still not a good game though, it gets SO close, but it's not. So I'm done playing it, but I can recommend trying it as a decent timesink. You're far more likely to enjoy it than me, and I think it's better than average at the very least.
There are things to like in Doom 2016 for sure, there's the powerful attitude fuck you and rip and tear that doomslayer shows in certain cutscenes. There's the music which is excellently well made and makes the fights pleasant at times, especially when it heightens after every glory kill. A lot of the mechanics on paper are well designed, with enemies using tracking moves that should punish strafing, and it does give freedom for player expression in certain avenues with gauss boosting and cool speedrun tech. There's also a few encounters with some genuinely well designed enemy waves, and arcade mode allows for more emphasized fun times to be had.
That being said, none of it was good to me overall. I could not garner much fun from the mechanics at all for longer than a minute. That has widely to do with how doom 2016 keeps shooting itself in the foot, from the start of the game all the way to where I stopped. You are so overtuned for fights, with weapon mods and powerups that break the game in twine, and even on those best encounters i mentioned there are invulnerability and quad damage powerups or even berserk there. All of that shit makes the game pathetically easy, and it isn't helped when you up the difficulty to Nightmare. In fact that generates more problems, because the game's audio and visual design for enemies is not well designed, with several enemies getting hits from behind or behind cover. Summoner shots can come from nowhere as well as imp fireballs that you can't see. I primarily played on ultraviolence, which is definitely easier than nightmare but it meant potshots wouldn't necessarily kill you.
But, even on nightmare, the game's balancing is trash. You'll never run out of ammo, so you can get off to just using one gun to breeze through shit, and strafing isn't perfectly punished with tracking shots anyway. Your capacity to just turn your brain off is high enough to where it almost becomes super boring. The best way to sum up everything in a nutshell is that the most often times I died was shooting a rocket launcher or a grenade shot in an enemy right in front of me close range because I was largely able to just coast on bullshit.
This may sound super scathing, and it is. I understand the ways Doom 2016 can be enjoyable, I have witnessed the times where it gets oh so close to being good. It just doesn't, and this back and forth tease where there are entire hours of content where not a single minute i spent I could describe as good left me frustrated rather than just a feeling of "it's alright." I still think though, after introspection, that in execution it's an alright game, that I do think is better than a lot of fps on the block. I'm sure that with a shitton of limits on what you can do going against the grain of the game design that you can craft a doom 2016 experience that is fun. But to me, it's still not a good game though, it gets SO close, but it's not. So I'm done playing it, but I can recommend trying it as a decent timesink. You're far more likely to enjoy it than me, and I think it's better than average at the very least.