(This is the 89th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
If you are a fan of video games and of its history in particular, there is nothing I can add to the discourse around the original Doom that hasn't already been said by critics, fans, the original devs, damn politicians even, and you are likely aware how big a deal Doom has been and still is for the video gaming medium. By now, Doom is as old as it is iconic, having released on December 10, 1993 for MS-DOS originally. [Calling it old also makes my palms sweat as I'm typing this, considering how close we are getting to my birth date in terms of this challenge.]
Doom is not the first FPS game ever made, but it certainly is the most influential. I think it would be an apt comparison to think of it the same way you see how Souls-likes are discussed these days. "Soulslike" has become its own genre these days, and while Doom's genre is the FPS genre, for many years after its release, every FPS game would pretty much be looked at as "Doom-clones". Now there is a good reason for this beyond just the first-person view and shooting gameplay, which is that these games would often use the exact same style. UI blocking the bottom row of the screen horizontally, no vertical aim possible, 2.5D sprites and pretty much the same gameplay loop of a boomer / corridor shooter for all of them.
Doom is id Software's next FPS release after Wolfenstein 3D, and it won't take long to notice how much of an improvement Doom is over it in a lot of ways. Doom takes roughly 4-6 hours to finish (if you play the three main episodes) and has stayed relevant for a long time thanks to its mod-friendly nature and the countless fan levels that are available alongside the main game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
According to the manual, which gives you "the story so far", you are a space marine who got transferred to Mars. The "Union Aaresopace Corporation", your contractor, has been conducting secret projects on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, like creating portals or "gateways" that allowed for gadgets to be thrown into Phobos' portal and come back in Deimos' portal. Before the game starts, what happened is obvious. The experiments went terribly wrong, and demonic creatures started coming out of these portals, which is why you, later to be called "Doomguy", make your way to Phobos alongside a troop of other combatants, who all die while you're ordered to secure the perimeter of the base. Now you are on your own and need to get off the planet, which is where the game starts.
In-game, as soon as you start a new game, you load in with a pistol equipped and can start shooting. If you can appreciate the beauty of games that throw you straight into the action, that's all you need to know I presume. If you want to play games with stories, Doom doesn't offer much apart from the summary of the game's story setup in the manual I have just given, introducing us to an iconic video game character called 'Doomguy' and giving you another block of text at the end of each of the three episodes summarizing your achievement and telling you what happens next. When the first episode ends for example, the text tells you that you are not done yet and need to go into the depths of hell to fight even more demons and find a way out. During gameplay, there is no dialogue, no real environmental storytelling or anything of the sort.
Suffice to say, this is fine and not the reason people fell in love with Doom for.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Doom is THE prototypical boomer shooter. Just like in Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, you traverse through a labyrinth / maze-like level, shooting every enemy in your way. You can pick up items that give you health, armor, ammo, a map and weapons, as you go. Most items are in your way and are supposed to be found, while some are hidden in hard to reach or completely hidden secret areas.
Each episode you play contains 9 episodes with a boss fight at the end. The main goal of each level is to figure out the way to the exit, the way to which gets more and more complex as levels become more complex as well. The game has a clever way of trying to get you playing for a lot more than one playthrough however by introducing multiple side-goals. Whenever you finish a level, you see the percentage for how many enemies on the level you killed, how many items you collected and how many secret areas you found. On top of that, there is a "par time" for each level. I didn't stay below that par time once, but it's a great little thing that gives you a benchmark for testing your skill.
The gameplay in Doom is a lot more refined than in Wolfenstein 3D thanks to a faster pace, better sound to the weapons and more weapon and enemy variety. You start out with just a pistol, but soon after will find a shotgun that saved my butt on multiple occasions, a chaingun that plows through pistol ammo at a much faster rate, a rocket launcher, a more basic plasma rifle, the BFG 9000 which shoots a plasma ball that destroys everything in sight pretty much and a chainsaw, if you want to get up close and personal. It's a good variety of weapons and depending on the difficulty you set, you will want to or need to switch often, as some weapons are more advantageous in certain situations and because there simply is not enough ammo to stick with one or two weapons throughout. While I found the variety that these weapons and the enemies presented to be satisfying, I would have liked to have a couple more enemy varities in the game to be honest. Overall, I'm not sure what the exact number is, but excluding bosses, there are less than 10 different enemies in the game.
The boss fights themselves could also have been better. There are three in the game. For the first two, all you need to do is dodge projectiles and fire back until the boss dies. For the third one, I didn't find another way to beat it other than to hide behind a structure at the center of the map and shoot it just as its legs came into sight. The boss has undodgeable, lock-on aim and can kill you in a couple seconds once it starts shooting. This game also has the same issue that the other id Software FPS games had, which is that if you die against a boss, you start on the same level but only have the pistol equipped. With what the level offers you in terms of weapons and ammo, it gets pretty tough to kill the boss without bringing all the other weapons and ammo with you from the previous level, so I recommend saving and reloading for every boss fight, if you do die.
Overall though, I had a lot of fun with the gameplay loop in Doom. It felt a lot more refined than Wolfenstein 3D and has aged well enough to still be a fun time today. Its length is also at a solid level and can easily be doubled, tripled or quadrupled through multiple playthroughs on higher difficulty levels and with a bigger focus on completionism.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting apart from some screams. The sound design in this game is great. While you have to judge this relative to sound in 1993, weapons sound a lot more realistic and have a lot more oomph to them and they sound miles better than the sounds of Wolfenstein. This applies to other sound effects as well, such as simply picking up items, which sounds a lot less obnoxious and discreet here than in Wolfenstein. Doomguy constantly moaning when you press space to interact with objects or walls is kind of an odd choice though.
The soundtrack to this game is great as well, with some pretty iconic tracks included that even someone like me who never played Doom instantly was familiar with, such as the Episode 1 Level 1 track "At Doom's Gate". The soundtrack has a few more bangers like this included, but I realized that it was overall a lot more atmospheric than I expected. I was expecting a bigger emphasis on metal music to emphasize the fast-paced demon-slaying that you are doing on-screen, but it was not the case for many levels. While I don't mind atmospheric sounds at all, I found that some tracks didn't fit so well at times.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
What id Software achieved for a first-person game at a time when no one else did is still commendable, even more so since Doom is the game where it visually comes together the best. Unlike Wolfenstein and especially Catacomb, Doom's visuals actually have variety. The game's levels also actually take place outside at times, giving you a view of the horizons. These don't look so great, funnily enough, but it's still something I appreciated. Enemy designs look better, weapon designs look better and the resolution is simply much higher here as well. The UI looks improved and cleaner too, though it's not what you would consider eye candy still. But the visual variety on display here is pretty encouraging after the jump from Catacomb to Wolfenstein wasn't as big as I had hoped. Doom seems like the step in the direction I was more thinking of, and it's a big step at that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
Thanks to each episode differing in design here, this is the first id Software FPS where there truly is a hint of atmosphere other than just using images from Hitler everywhere in Wolfenstein. You are a badass MF who is on Mars to beat the crap out of demons. That's it. Thanks to the game's visuals and the soundtrack, as well as the gun sounds and fast-paced gameplay, that feeling comes through pretty well.
CONTENT | 9/10
Tons of content here from official content to fan content, which officially found their way into versions of this game. Each main level also offers side-content to try to find, so you can spend a lot of time with this game. If you really click with the gameplay, you probably will.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
3 main episodes as well as one additional one. Each episode has 9 levels, the final one being a boss fight. Levels are actually pretty varied here and it will be rare for two levels to feel all that similar to each other in their design. Texture variety can still be improved and still will lead you to get lost here from time to time, but overall levels are complex enough without making it nearly impossible to find your way around. Finding maps for each level also helps a lot.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
Not much to say here about one of the most influential games of all time.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
Tons of replay value here after your first playthrough. There are 5 difficulty options, a 4th additional episode, endless fan levels and then there is the completionism aspect to the main episodes, where you can try to get 100% enemy kills, items and secret areas, as well as try to beat the par time. A speedrunner's dream.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 79/100
Doom is still a lot of fun to play. It didn't age as well as some other games of its time because the FPS genre simply evolved a ton since these early days, but you can still have a fun couple hours with it. I'm glad I played it and if you are someone who is curious about video game history, I'd recommend you to do the same.
If you are a fan of video games and of its history in particular, there is nothing I can add to the discourse around the original Doom that hasn't already been said by critics, fans, the original devs, damn politicians even, and you are likely aware how big a deal Doom has been and still is for the video gaming medium. By now, Doom is as old as it is iconic, having released on December 10, 1993 for MS-DOS originally. [Calling it old also makes my palms sweat as I'm typing this, considering how close we are getting to my birth date in terms of this challenge.]
Doom is not the first FPS game ever made, but it certainly is the most influential. I think it would be an apt comparison to think of it the same way you see how Souls-likes are discussed these days. "Soulslike" has become its own genre these days, and while Doom's genre is the FPS genre, for many years after its release, every FPS game would pretty much be looked at as "Doom-clones". Now there is a good reason for this beyond just the first-person view and shooting gameplay, which is that these games would often use the exact same style. UI blocking the bottom row of the screen horizontally, no vertical aim possible, 2.5D sprites and pretty much the same gameplay loop of a boomer / corridor shooter for all of them.
Doom is id Software's next FPS release after Wolfenstein 3D, and it won't take long to notice how much of an improvement Doom is over it in a lot of ways. Doom takes roughly 4-6 hours to finish (if you play the three main episodes) and has stayed relevant for a long time thanks to its mod-friendly nature and the countless fan levels that are available alongside the main game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
According to the manual, which gives you "the story so far", you are a space marine who got transferred to Mars. The "Union Aaresopace Corporation", your contractor, has been conducting secret projects on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, like creating portals or "gateways" that allowed for gadgets to be thrown into Phobos' portal and come back in Deimos' portal. Before the game starts, what happened is obvious. The experiments went terribly wrong, and demonic creatures started coming out of these portals, which is why you, later to be called "Doomguy", make your way to Phobos alongside a troop of other combatants, who all die while you're ordered to secure the perimeter of the base. Now you are on your own and need to get off the planet, which is where the game starts.
In-game, as soon as you start a new game, you load in with a pistol equipped and can start shooting. If you can appreciate the beauty of games that throw you straight into the action, that's all you need to know I presume. If you want to play games with stories, Doom doesn't offer much apart from the summary of the game's story setup in the manual I have just given, introducing us to an iconic video game character called 'Doomguy' and giving you another block of text at the end of each of the three episodes summarizing your achievement and telling you what happens next. When the first episode ends for example, the text tells you that you are not done yet and need to go into the depths of hell to fight even more demons and find a way out. During gameplay, there is no dialogue, no real environmental storytelling or anything of the sort.
Suffice to say, this is fine and not the reason people fell in love with Doom for.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Doom is THE prototypical boomer shooter. Just like in Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, you traverse through a labyrinth / maze-like level, shooting every enemy in your way. You can pick up items that give you health, armor, ammo, a map and weapons, as you go. Most items are in your way and are supposed to be found, while some are hidden in hard to reach or completely hidden secret areas.
Each episode you play contains 9 episodes with a boss fight at the end. The main goal of each level is to figure out the way to the exit, the way to which gets more and more complex as levels become more complex as well. The game has a clever way of trying to get you playing for a lot more than one playthrough however by introducing multiple side-goals. Whenever you finish a level, you see the percentage for how many enemies on the level you killed, how many items you collected and how many secret areas you found. On top of that, there is a "par time" for each level. I didn't stay below that par time once, but it's a great little thing that gives you a benchmark for testing your skill.
The gameplay in Doom is a lot more refined than in Wolfenstein 3D thanks to a faster pace, better sound to the weapons and more weapon and enemy variety. You start out with just a pistol, but soon after will find a shotgun that saved my butt on multiple occasions, a chaingun that plows through pistol ammo at a much faster rate, a rocket launcher, a more basic plasma rifle, the BFG 9000 which shoots a plasma ball that destroys everything in sight pretty much and a chainsaw, if you want to get up close and personal. It's a good variety of weapons and depending on the difficulty you set, you will want to or need to switch often, as some weapons are more advantageous in certain situations and because there simply is not enough ammo to stick with one or two weapons throughout. While I found the variety that these weapons and the enemies presented to be satisfying, I would have liked to have a couple more enemy varities in the game to be honest. Overall, I'm not sure what the exact number is, but excluding bosses, there are less than 10 different enemies in the game.
The boss fights themselves could also have been better. There are three in the game. For the first two, all you need to do is dodge projectiles and fire back until the boss dies. For the third one, I didn't find another way to beat it other than to hide behind a structure at the center of the map and shoot it just as its legs came into sight. The boss has undodgeable, lock-on aim and can kill you in a couple seconds once it starts shooting. This game also has the same issue that the other id Software FPS games had, which is that if you die against a boss, you start on the same level but only have the pistol equipped. With what the level offers you in terms of weapons and ammo, it gets pretty tough to kill the boss without bringing all the other weapons and ammo with you from the previous level, so I recommend saving and reloading for every boss fight, if you do die.
Overall though, I had a lot of fun with the gameplay loop in Doom. It felt a lot more refined than Wolfenstein 3D and has aged well enough to still be a fun time today. Its length is also at a solid level and can easily be doubled, tripled or quadrupled through multiple playthroughs on higher difficulty levels and with a bigger focus on completionism.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting apart from some screams. The sound design in this game is great. While you have to judge this relative to sound in 1993, weapons sound a lot more realistic and have a lot more oomph to them and they sound miles better than the sounds of Wolfenstein. This applies to other sound effects as well, such as simply picking up items, which sounds a lot less obnoxious and discreet here than in Wolfenstein. Doomguy constantly moaning when you press space to interact with objects or walls is kind of an odd choice though.
The soundtrack to this game is great as well, with some pretty iconic tracks included that even someone like me who never played Doom instantly was familiar with, such as the Episode 1 Level 1 track "At Doom's Gate". The soundtrack has a few more bangers like this included, but I realized that it was overall a lot more atmospheric than I expected. I was expecting a bigger emphasis on metal music to emphasize the fast-paced demon-slaying that you are doing on-screen, but it was not the case for many levels. While I don't mind atmospheric sounds at all, I found that some tracks didn't fit so well at times.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
What id Software achieved for a first-person game at a time when no one else did is still commendable, even more so since Doom is the game where it visually comes together the best. Unlike Wolfenstein and especially Catacomb, Doom's visuals actually have variety. The game's levels also actually take place outside at times, giving you a view of the horizons. These don't look so great, funnily enough, but it's still something I appreciated. Enemy designs look better, weapon designs look better and the resolution is simply much higher here as well. The UI looks improved and cleaner too, though it's not what you would consider eye candy still. But the visual variety on display here is pretty encouraging after the jump from Catacomb to Wolfenstein wasn't as big as I had hoped. Doom seems like the step in the direction I was more thinking of, and it's a big step at that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
Thanks to each episode differing in design here, this is the first id Software FPS where there truly is a hint of atmosphere other than just using images from Hitler everywhere in Wolfenstein. You are a badass MF who is on Mars to beat the crap out of demons. That's it. Thanks to the game's visuals and the soundtrack, as well as the gun sounds and fast-paced gameplay, that feeling comes through pretty well.
CONTENT | 9/10
Tons of content here from official content to fan content, which officially found their way into versions of this game. Each main level also offers side-content to try to find, so you can spend a lot of time with this game. If you really click with the gameplay, you probably will.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
3 main episodes as well as one additional one. Each episode has 9 levels, the final one being a boss fight. Levels are actually pretty varied here and it will be rare for two levels to feel all that similar to each other in their design. Texture variety can still be improved and still will lead you to get lost here from time to time, but overall levels are complex enough without making it nearly impossible to find your way around. Finding maps for each level also helps a lot.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
Not much to say here about one of the most influential games of all time.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
Tons of replay value here after your first playthrough. There are 5 difficulty options, a 4th additional episode, endless fan levels and then there is the completionism aspect to the main episodes, where you can try to get 100% enemy kills, items and secret areas, as well as try to beat the par time. A speedrunner's dream.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 79/100
Doom is still a lot of fun to play. It didn't age as well as some other games of its time because the FPS genre simply evolved a ton since these early days, but you can still have a fun couple hours with it. I'm glad I played it and if you are someone who is curious about video game history, I'd recommend you to do the same.