DOOM (2016 Reboot) Reviewed on Xbox One Released: 5/13/16 Trailer 9/10 DOOM, the game that started a franchise of FPS games, has recently acquired quite the name in the gaming community with the reboot of the series by id Software (RAGE) and Bethesda Softworks (Fallout, Elder Scrolls). First news of said reboot was back in 2013, but the game went into development hell shortly afterwards, making the future of the game unclear. E3 of 2015 brought gameplay of the reboot and it seemed to awe the crowd with the same gore and shoot ’em up mechanics that made the same game so popular. Today, I’ll be breaking down the DOOM reboot into its great and not-so-great parts. 1. The Amazing DOOM starts off in a familiar and amazingly brutal way. This is the series we have come to love. You start in a hospital bed, unsure of what is going on, and immediately slam an “unwilling” head into the side of the bed, jump out, and start shooting demons like the badass you are. Once you get past the first three demons, you find yourself putting on a very, very familiar suit of armor. Of course, I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’m bound to keep details vague - but this game never feel short on level depth. In fact, it feels just as replayable as any of the franchise’s previous installments. Bethesda made sure to include every single demon from the original three games you remember and make them that much more badass. This game looks amazing. “Glory kills” are the game’s new execution type system that allow you to gain more health and ammo back than you would from a normal kill with your gun. Once you do a certain amount of damage to an enemy, they will highlight blue, notifying you that you can now perform the kill. As soon as you are in range, the color will change to orange. To perform the kill, you hold down your melee button (or key, for PC players) and watch the gore commence. Glory kills are completely contextual though, meaning you get a different style depending on where you are looking at the enemy’s body. DOOM even has some newer demons that you haven’t seen before, so keep your eye out for those. Dropping the mechanic from DOOM 3 that actually requires you to reload your gun and returning to the old school arena-style shooter feel makes the game even more deeply reminiscent of the original. Console gamers also received the option to screw with their field of view - so props to you, Bethesda, for hopefully starting a new trend! Let’s not forget to explore the music that makes DOOM what it is today. The retro/arcade-y metal is one of the things that just makes the game badass, upping the adrenaline of demonslaying during toppling arena battles in the campaign. Overall, old-school players will feel completely at home with Mick Gordon’s soundtrack. Lastly, “Snap Map,” the new co-op mode for the game, is amazing, allowing you to build anything from campaign missions to custom missions for you and your friends to enjoy. It adds something new and very welcome to the DOOM franchise. I found myself playing user-created maps with a few friends more than I had expected to when I originally heard about the feature back at last year’s E3 press conference. Surprisingly, even making maps for you and your friends to enjoy is not all that hard. Bethesda was sure to implement a very well-designed set of tutorial missions in Snap Map to help you find your way. Snap Map feels somewhat like the community maps from Trials Evolution, an arcade-style racing game from 2012, which actually helped save the game more than once. 2. The Decent DOOM has some features that are honestly hit-or-miss, and not surprisingly, they are all new features. Throughout the campaign you will unlock weapon upgrade coins and Praetor suit chips which allow you to upgrade both your armor and your weapons. Unfortunately, the upgrades were put in the game to help with the difficulty, but feel very bland. Some are indeed helpful, but others are really unnecessary. Secrets are such a great new addition to the game, but then there’s the issue of the map. Yes, secrets should be hard to find, but if you have the automap that reveals all of them for the level it should be easy. Sadly, that’s not the case and it’s very hard to spot some of them. Bethesda did manage to pack a bunch of old school DOOM levels into the newer ones which you can find on each level of the single player campaign which is easily the best part of the “secret” system Overall, the map system is so vague it makes it hard for players to figure out where the secret passages are to collect the reward, which is odd. Ammo is very scarce on DOOM’s higher difficulties, or so it feels, which is completely okay by me - except when both the Gauss Cannon and the Plasma Rifle share the same ammo, making it hard to use either without repercussions in sticky situations. We can’t forget the new boss battles. I’m on the fence about these, but I will say that the Cyberdemon was one amazing homage to the original games. I just don’t want to dive into too much depth on these for the sake of keeping this spoiler free. Suffice to say that they felt very repetitive and strenuous. Multiplayer also falls into this category, but I have a very love/hate relationship with it. It seems to me that there only are a select few weapons in the multiplayer section that help save this, along with some of the newer game modes we haven’t seen from other first person shooters. DOOM’s player vs. player seems all too weak unless you have one weapon: the combat shotgun. Now, keep in mind that the super shotgun is also very effective, but the combat shotgun raises the bar a little higher because you don’t reload it every time it is fired. Character customization almost completely saves multiplayer because it is at-to-above-par for other games, like Call of Duty and such, that are on the market now, without ruining it with a microtransaction system (at least for now). 3. The Terrible Firstly, Rune Trials. Yeah, that thing Bethesda showed off that's like a perk system in the stream? It’s godawful. Some of the runes themselves are not bad. The challenges just put their difficult over the edge, which makes playing on Ultra-Violence feel like playing Nightmare. I wouldn’t recommend stressing over the hard ones since you only need a select few to get the job done. Lastly for the bad are the field drones that deliver your weapon mods. Weapon mods were a fantastic addition the game, but you can only change between them at a field drone, and you can only do one mod at a time, making it painful if you put on a bad mod. Conclusion Overall, DOOM is worth the $60. Skip the multiplayer and take the nostalgia trip they call a campaign. DOOM ran me about 13-14 hours on my first playthrough, but the time should go up with the difficulty. Everyone pull out their mouse and keyboards: it’s time to party like it’s 1993 all over again.
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