DOOM (2016)

DOOM is a welcome throwback to the shooters of old, benefiting from all the technical advances of today. The game does away with pre-rendered cut scenes and heavy exposition. Instead, it goes with dynamic story-telling and heavy demolition. Remember at the beginning of Half-Life when they made you sit through a train ride and really set a mood before you shoved a piece of stool through the fan? DOOM does away with that too. Straight and to the point like a shotgun blast to the head seems to be the agenda here. The game simply hands you a gun and throws you into a playground populated with toys for you to blow up. And boy, is it fun.

The general idea is that guns go BANG and make the demons go SPLAT. The guns and the demons get more impressive as the game goes on, but I found that the SPLAT peaked a little early. This is probably the harshest criticism I have for DOOM: the way the demons die gets a bit boring. It's both a genuine unsettling problem and an easily overlooked detail, depending on where and how closely you look and I intend to explore both angles. I wanna get the SPLAT out of the way now, so I can gush all about the BANG later. The combat is dynamic and encourages a good mixture of long and short range tactics. Bringing enemies' health down to a bare minimum stuns them and creates an opening for one of the finishing moves, which is a short cut scene where Doomguy obliterates a demon. There's a small variety of these based on the angle you take on your victim but I only really remember maybe five different ones.

Using these finishers almost always yields health packs, encouraging players to be aggressive and dive right into the hordes of hell. Add to that movement speed three times that of an average modern shooter and you have a recipe for infernally fun mayhem. Everything happens at neck-breaking pace, so it's lucky really that Doomguy has no neck. It's also lucky that the finishers merely punctuate a symphony of death and destruction. Thanks to a high damage yield and relatively small amount of placed health packs, the player is forced to either dodge bullets or punch the shit out of demons and both are as fun as they sound but one without the other soon becomes tedious.

The bad, then. These cut scenes can take up three or four seconds at a time and even though every demon type gets its own personalised death, the sheer volume of enemies means you'll be re-watching the same cut scene hundreds of times. Note that I keep calling them cut scenes and not animations. See, the game kind of stops for a moment while Doomguy does his thing, removing player agency – I felt more a spectator than a participant. Sure, DOOM is just a dumb shooter and not an artsy game designed to make you feel as one with the character and force you to think about how difficult their job is (hint, hint). It's just a game that asks you to point the crosshair and pull the trigger. Still, whenever it wrested control from me it felt like the protagonist rebelling in some way, really letting his anger out. I felt that Doomguy was annoyed with me for going easy on these arseholes from hell and just blowing them up, like they deserve to be dismembered instead. But every time Doomguy raged out and had his fun, mine briefly stopped. The SPLAT becomes a mere formality somewhere along the way and what early on in the game would bring a massive maniacal grin on my face, within about six hours wouldn't even merit a smirk. You kill a lot of demons in DOOM, and I appreciate that resources were needed elsewhere, but just a few more (say, twenty or so) death animations for the hell-fiends would have made all the difference for me. When the SPLAT ceases to be a distraction, you might pay more attention to the gunplay and that is lacking in many aspects from hitboxes to damage output. Probably the reason why the game hasn't been a massive multiplayer hit.

The good, then. The BANG. It starts with a laser pistol and ends with a total annihilation launcher. The shotgun becomes a machine gun, the machine gun becomes a rocket launcher and the rocket launcher becomes a better rocket launcher. All weapons in DOOM are customisable, although that customisation only extends to two predetermined mods per gun. I'm underselling here, a shotgun that shoots explosive shells or a machine-rocket-gun never boring. This is the area where DOOM truly shines, taking mundane, been-there-done-that, run-of-the-mills guns and making them exciting.

Your first proper weapon – the shotgun – can become a rapid-shot shotgun or an explosive shotgun and I don't think I need to tell you which I went with. You get a Plasma rifle that can have an AOE shot that stuns or damages enemies and both come in handy at different times. The assault rifle can either get zoom or a mini rocket launcher (a mini rocket launcher that after a few upgrades doesn't need to reload and basically has the same rate of fire as the default setting of the rifle). You do, of course, get a rocket launcher. But DOOM's rocket launcher isn't just your regular RPG – no, no – DOOM's rocket launcher lets you detonate your rockets mid-air and even add splash damage to them. The sniper rifle is a super-powerful laser cannon that can also be turned into a turret if you ever get tired of the running around. The only two 'boring' guns are the Super Shotgun and the minigun. Now, the Super Shotgun has some redeeming qualities (mainly the fact it's an absolute beast of a cannon) but I must concede that the minigun was genuinely boring. And then comes the BFG. Ah yes, this one gets very limited special ammo, no more than three shots at a time and obliterates basically everything in view. There only four kinds of ammo for all these guns though: shotgun shells for the two shotguns, plasma for the plasma rifle and the gauss cannon, assault rifle bullets for the rifle and the minigun and rockets. Once you've run out of ammo it's chainsaw time – the classic melee weapon makes a return as a special one-shot-kill weapon that also makes its victim drops ammo.

DOOM has a plot if you're into that. It's about how demons are shit-scared of Doomguy and how he hates their guts. Or loves them. Loves ripping them out, anyway. It's also about authoritarian manipulation, fanaticism, dangers of experimentation and GUNS.

Level design and level art fall somewhere between the good and the bad. The art is beautiful throughout and Hell is really pretty to look at but the skeletal design isn't always great. Each level has its own secrets, some better hidden than others. These secrets can often be found just by looking at the mini map and there is an unlockable perk to have all collectibles and secrets revealed on the mini map from the beginning of a level which does kind of defeat the whole 'explore to find goodies' angle. Each level is fitted with a secret area taken straight from the original Doom, 480p graphics and all. These are fun to find but a couple are nothing but dead ends with a bit of ammo and I can't help but feel like Id really missed a trick there.

DOOM is the most fun I've had with a game released in 2016 – it's fast, brutal, unpretentious, humorous and, most importantly, fun. There is still much I haven't tried (because I don't really care) like the map building mode, Snap Map, which is basically Mario Maker but DOOM. The game brings back memories and creates new great ones of its own, I won't be forgetting DOOM (2016) anytime soon.

DOOM is: your 25-year-old dog finding its long-lost childhood toy/10