This is a much-deserved re-evaluation. When I first played this, I was high off beating Doom Eternal. I was not impressed; I didn't like a lot of the ways it was different from Eternal and having not yet finished Doom 3 or 64 I didn't have the context to understand where the game fit in the series.
This is mostly a positive review but first I have to say something about the game's stability. This was far and away the buggiest Doom I've played, and one of the buggiest games in my Xbox library across the board. Falling through the floor, warping around in weird ways, enemy AI snafus like pathing into walls and just endless crashes. I mean endless.
This was a progression run and I died a LOT. And there were some checkpoints that would just consistently crash the game after a handful of respawns. The final checkpoint at the start of the last boss fight was the worst. I was lucky if the game would survive past 3 or 4 deaths. In a tough fight where I was trying to experiment with different tactics against a baddie that could kill me in literally half of a second, this was really frustrating. The bugs were a major hindrance to my enjoyment of the game and as a longtime id software fan I was very disappointed with this.
I also want to clarify that I'll be referring to this game as 2016 here and everywhere. Doom is one of the most successful, influential and important video games ever made. Can you imagine painting a picture of a woman and just calling it Mona Lisa and expecting everyone to take you seriously? Aside from the inconvenience to game enthusiasts and databases everywhere, how huge of an arrogant, stupid asshole does it take to full on pinch a household name like that? Turns out, a super nice guy and brilliant game designer named Hugo.
My own experience with artistic collaborations has made me pretty cynical toward anyone who stands in front of a team effort and claims the work as their own. Some charismatic man (it's almost always a man) fancies himself the visionary of the endeavor and, usually through some kind of emotional manipulation, squirms his way into a position where he gets to take the credit.
Informed by this, I don't normally like to talk about individual game designers. I don't believe in auteurs and I think art should stand on its own without conflating it with its creators. AAA games in particular are very much a team effort and I'm just not impressed with someone whose job is to sit in a chair and tell other people to make it good, even if his name is at the top of the credits.
But just this once I have to talk about Hugo Martin. I like Hugo; he comes off as a fun guy to hang out with and he's constantly bigging up his team members and the great work they do.
I was already thinking about giving 2016 another try anyway, but it was watching interviews with him that made me want to do it on Nightmare. He said straight up that's the difficulty the game was designed to be played on. I've been an Ultra-violence guy since the old days and I thought hey, if I'm going to give this game another chance I should meet it on its own terms.
It'd been a while since I finished The Ancient Gods, which was the last time I really had to push myself and sweat through an FPS. 2016 is kind of a creeper in this regard; it's not until several chapters in when the harder monsters start seeing play that the difficulty ramps up. By the last few chapters, I was retrying most checkpoints many times, in a few cases it was like several dozen. That's the kind of challenge I don't mind when I'm fully engaged; it's the same kind of stubbornness I get when playing Souls games.
That level of intensity meant that I was skin to skin with the mechanics much more this time, and it didn't take me long to realize what Hugo meant about Nightmare being the intended experience. It's like the difference between a walk through the forest and crawling through it on your belly; there's so much texture and variance that you miss when you're just sailing through it.
There's a lot of detail here to stop and appreciate, too. Plenty of environment details straight out of Doom, but painstakingly reproduced in 3-D. You can really see the love for the source material here. Where Doom 3 felt like they were trying to leave the past behind, 2016 feels much more like a loving homage. Like Doom 3, there are a lot of places with tons of environmental detail. However this felt inconsistently-applied; it seems like the farther you get into the game the more abstract and arcade-y the levels become.
In the context of bridging the gulf between the highly-naturalistic Doom 3 and the completely arcade-y Doom Eternal, 2016 threads the needle pretty much perfectly. As a game and cohesive experience, I sometimes found it lacking though.
Mars here is depicted as just red rocks with red dust, even a red filter is applied at some point. The interiors are much more interesting. The naturalism looks great, but doesn't always mesh well with the gameplay; you spend an adrenaline-pumping 10 minutes ducking and weaving and blasting demons, then 20 minutes poring over every inch of a level for a keycard that's literally a tiny little card hanging off some corpse's neck (and to make things worse, you don't pick it up automatically; you have to point the camera directly down at it and press an action button. Boooo!)
I think the most ill-advised vestige carried over from Doom 3 is the duck button. Duck makes sense in a horror game. But in a power fantasy where survival is only achieved by constantly moving toward the next kill, it makes no sense at all. As a combat mechanic, it's used in a single fight and is otherwise a dead button.
I would have unbound the duck action entirely and used the button for something else except that you have to duck to get into some of the secrets. Boy does this game have some diabolical secrets. The ones where you have to find a tiny, nondescript lever amid an entire massive level's worth of clutter gave me huge anxiety. Most levels are strictly linear, and often employ surprise gates that close behind you. I assume this was to aid in navigation, but it made secret-hunting an ulcer-inducing experience.
Once the naturalism gets left behind and we're firmly in Doom Eternal's lock-you-in-a-room-and-throw-waves-at-you-based combat loop, and the keycards are ditched for Hell's brightly colored skulls on pedestals, the gameplay really picks up. This is where it feels the most optimized, but also the most rote.
One of Doom Eternal's boldest design choices is the predictability of its arena-based encounter schema. You know that once the DMC walls goes up that you're now firmly in the combat part of the game, which will be followed by a more slow-paced platforming section for you to catch your breath, followed by another combat arena, over and over until the game ends. It never bothered me in Eternal--indeed, I found it to be a strength--because the combat in that game is so dynamic and tightly-tuned.
2016's combat just has a lot less going on with it. There's no sprint, dash or grappling hook so your mobility options are limited to environmental stuff like jump pads, which are pretty underutilized in the levels. Several of the weapons have pretty limited utility and the chainsaw isn't really part of your rotation. The super shotgun is appropriately overpowered, but even with reload canceling there's hardly any incentive to switch weapons. I think I played 90% of the last half of the game with the super shotgun + missile launcher. I feel like if you're going to strip your game down to its barest essentials, those essentials need to really stand out.
All that said, it did get my heart going every time that combat music kicked in. And then when it starts that riff that means "Ok, now the REAL nasties are coming" there were times when it was damn near euphoric. The monsters all look incredible and blasting and tearing them to pieces never stopped being satisfying.
My favorite by far is the lowly imp; he has so many incredible animations that interact so smoothly with the environment. Like you're trying to chase one down and the little bastard will be chucking fireballs over his shoulder while he dodges and weaves to get away, then as soon as you lose track of him he'll find some column to climb up and blast you from off camera with a charged shot. He's in basically every fight and he never gets old.
You know what does get old? Unskippable cutscenes. One of the selling points Hugo extolls, that I've heard echoed by many fans, is the first scene when one of the Plot People starts monologuing at you and your character knocks the video screen away. This is a great start, and in my opinion holds up as one of the strongest video game title cards of all time. Unfortunately this promise is almost immediately broken, as nearly every level has a spot where you're locked in a room with a Plot Person and aren't allowed to shoot anything while they sit there and flap their gums at you about god knows what.
I really wanted the full Hugo-brand experience with this playthrough so I read every codex entry and tried to pay attention any time someone was talking to me. It's just too much though; these things need to be skippable or simply entirely absent. I expect a giant pile of proper nouns if I'm playing a Dragon Age or whatever, but I don't come to a Doom game for its exposition.
My first review of this game was terse and dismissive: "A competent modernization of the classic." Ironically, after chewing through this thing on Nightmare and this whole reappraisal I still agree with that assessment. At the time I meant it negatively: they made a modern shooter, gave it some Doom flavor and called it a day. Now, though, I see it as a positive: warts and all; they did a good Doom! Simply meeting that standard is a feat in itself, and for all its missteps I think 2016 does a lot to move the series forward. It's obviously a labor of love, and it's so great to see that even 30 years later with a whole new crop of big brains, id is still making great Dooms.
This is mostly a positive review but first I have to say something about the game's stability. This was far and away the buggiest Doom I've played, and one of the buggiest games in my Xbox library across the board. Falling through the floor, warping around in weird ways, enemy AI snafus like pathing into walls and just endless crashes. I mean endless.
This was a progression run and I died a LOT. And there were some checkpoints that would just consistently crash the game after a handful of respawns. The final checkpoint at the start of the last boss fight was the worst. I was lucky if the game would survive past 3 or 4 deaths. In a tough fight where I was trying to experiment with different tactics against a baddie that could kill me in literally half of a second, this was really frustrating. The bugs were a major hindrance to my enjoyment of the game and as a longtime id software fan I was very disappointed with this.
I also want to clarify that I'll be referring to this game as 2016 here and everywhere. Doom is one of the most successful, influential and important video games ever made. Can you imagine painting a picture of a woman and just calling it Mona Lisa and expecting everyone to take you seriously? Aside from the inconvenience to game enthusiasts and databases everywhere, how huge of an arrogant, stupid asshole does it take to full on pinch a household name like that? Turns out, a super nice guy and brilliant game designer named Hugo.
My own experience with artistic collaborations has made me pretty cynical toward anyone who stands in front of a team effort and claims the work as their own. Some charismatic man (it's almost always a man) fancies himself the visionary of the endeavor and, usually through some kind of emotional manipulation, squirms his way into a position where he gets to take the credit.
Informed by this, I don't normally like to talk about individual game designers. I don't believe in auteurs and I think art should stand on its own without conflating it with its creators. AAA games in particular are very much a team effort and I'm just not impressed with someone whose job is to sit in a chair and tell other people to make it good, even if his name is at the top of the credits.
But just this once I have to talk about Hugo Martin. I like Hugo; he comes off as a fun guy to hang out with and he's constantly bigging up his team members and the great work they do.
I was already thinking about giving 2016 another try anyway, but it was watching interviews with him that made me want to do it on Nightmare. He said straight up that's the difficulty the game was designed to be played on. I've been an Ultra-violence guy since the old days and I thought hey, if I'm going to give this game another chance I should meet it on its own terms.
It'd been a while since I finished The Ancient Gods, which was the last time I really had to push myself and sweat through an FPS. 2016 is kind of a creeper in this regard; it's not until several chapters in when the harder monsters start seeing play that the difficulty ramps up. By the last few chapters, I was retrying most checkpoints many times, in a few cases it was like several dozen. That's the kind of challenge I don't mind when I'm fully engaged; it's the same kind of stubbornness I get when playing Souls games.
That level of intensity meant that I was skin to skin with the mechanics much more this time, and it didn't take me long to realize what Hugo meant about Nightmare being the intended experience. It's like the difference between a walk through the forest and crawling through it on your belly; there's so much texture and variance that you miss when you're just sailing through it.
There's a lot of detail here to stop and appreciate, too. Plenty of environment details straight out of Doom, but painstakingly reproduced in 3-D. You can really see the love for the source material here. Where Doom 3 felt like they were trying to leave the past behind, 2016 feels much more like a loving homage. Like Doom 3, there are a lot of places with tons of environmental detail. However this felt inconsistently-applied; it seems like the farther you get into the game the more abstract and arcade-y the levels become.
In the context of bridging the gulf between the highly-naturalistic Doom 3 and the completely arcade-y Doom Eternal, 2016 threads the needle pretty much perfectly. As a game and cohesive experience, I sometimes found it lacking though.
Mars here is depicted as just red rocks with red dust, even a red filter is applied at some point. The interiors are much more interesting. The naturalism looks great, but doesn't always mesh well with the gameplay; you spend an adrenaline-pumping 10 minutes ducking and weaving and blasting demons, then 20 minutes poring over every inch of a level for a keycard that's literally a tiny little card hanging off some corpse's neck (and to make things worse, you don't pick it up automatically; you have to point the camera directly down at it and press an action button. Boooo!)
I think the most ill-advised vestige carried over from Doom 3 is the duck button. Duck makes sense in a horror game. But in a power fantasy where survival is only achieved by constantly moving toward the next kill, it makes no sense at all. As a combat mechanic, it's used in a single fight and is otherwise a dead button.
I would have unbound the duck action entirely and used the button for something else except that you have to duck to get into some of the secrets. Boy does this game have some diabolical secrets. The ones where you have to find a tiny, nondescript lever amid an entire massive level's worth of clutter gave me huge anxiety. Most levels are strictly linear, and often employ surprise gates that close behind you. I assume this was to aid in navigation, but it made secret-hunting an ulcer-inducing experience.
Once the naturalism gets left behind and we're firmly in Doom Eternal's lock-you-in-a-room-and-throw-waves-at-you-based combat loop, and the keycards are ditched for Hell's brightly colored skulls on pedestals, the gameplay really picks up. This is where it feels the most optimized, but also the most rote.
One of Doom Eternal's boldest design choices is the predictability of its arena-based encounter schema. You know that once the DMC walls goes up that you're now firmly in the combat part of the game, which will be followed by a more slow-paced platforming section for you to catch your breath, followed by another combat arena, over and over until the game ends. It never bothered me in Eternal--indeed, I found it to be a strength--because the combat in that game is so dynamic and tightly-tuned.
2016's combat just has a lot less going on with it. There's no sprint, dash or grappling hook so your mobility options are limited to environmental stuff like jump pads, which are pretty underutilized in the levels. Several of the weapons have pretty limited utility and the chainsaw isn't really part of your rotation. The super shotgun is appropriately overpowered, but even with reload canceling there's hardly any incentive to switch weapons. I think I played 90% of the last half of the game with the super shotgun + missile launcher. I feel like if you're going to strip your game down to its barest essentials, those essentials need to really stand out.
All that said, it did get my heart going every time that combat music kicked in. And then when it starts that riff that means "Ok, now the REAL nasties are coming" there were times when it was damn near euphoric. The monsters all look incredible and blasting and tearing them to pieces never stopped being satisfying.
My favorite by far is the lowly imp; he has so many incredible animations that interact so smoothly with the environment. Like you're trying to chase one down and the little bastard will be chucking fireballs over his shoulder while he dodges and weaves to get away, then as soon as you lose track of him he'll find some column to climb up and blast you from off camera with a charged shot. He's in basically every fight and he never gets old.
You know what does get old? Unskippable cutscenes. One of the selling points Hugo extolls, that I've heard echoed by many fans, is the first scene when one of the Plot People starts monologuing at you and your character knocks the video screen away. This is a great start, and in my opinion holds up as one of the strongest video game title cards of all time. Unfortunately this promise is almost immediately broken, as nearly every level has a spot where you're locked in a room with a Plot Person and aren't allowed to shoot anything while they sit there and flap their gums at you about god knows what.
I really wanted the full Hugo-brand experience with this playthrough so I read every codex entry and tried to pay attention any time someone was talking to me. It's just too much though; these things need to be skippable or simply entirely absent. I expect a giant pile of proper nouns if I'm playing a Dragon Age or whatever, but I don't come to a Doom game for its exposition.
My first review of this game was terse and dismissive: "A competent modernization of the classic." Ironically, after chewing through this thing on Nightmare and this whole reappraisal I still agree with that assessment. At the time I meant it negatively: they made a modern shooter, gave it some Doom flavor and called it a day. Now, though, I see it as a positive: warts and all; they did a good Doom! Simply meeting that standard is a feat in itself, and for all its missteps I think 2016 does a lot to move the series forward. It's obviously a labor of love, and it's so great to see that even 30 years later with a whole new crop of big brains, id is still making great Dooms.