DOOM: You Are The Boogeyman

"They are rage, brutal, without mercy. But you. You will worse. Rip and tear, until it is done."

I haven't yet completed id's Doom but from everything that I've played so far, it is about as phenomenal a shooter as one can make. What's even more impressive is that Doom is styled after the genre's golden years, back during the time when Quake's insane movement and Marathon's puzzle-like levels ruled the day. Quite a lot of that old blood runs through Doom's veins and it's a return to form after Doom 3 turned out to be a horror shooter that had more in common with, say, F.E.A.R. than it did with the franchise that it shared a name with. While not a bad game, it was certainly straying far and away from the fast movement and frenetic combat that defined the previous two entries in favor of a more measured and "mature" atmosphere. With the latest entry in the franchise, however, comes a return to form - almost a rejection of the previous entry.

In many ways, Doom 3 worked to remove agency from the player. Unlike the first two games, the player was explicitly on a "lower" tier than the demons that he was fighting. The gameplay was much more about scrounging and looting, and trying to survive the hellscape that enveloped the Martian base. Enemies would often spawn right behind you or right around the corner, meaning that the pace of the gameplay was hardly ever dictated by the player. Instead, the linear corridors and random enemy placement meant that the game constantly hounded you. For a horror game, this would have worked fine - but this was Doom, or at least it claimed to be, and so for the pace of the combat to be so squarely out of the player's control was not in keeping with the spirit of the franchise.

Doom fights back against what Doom 3 did. It is made clear from the beginning of the game that it places gameplay before story, and it does so in fist-pumping fashion. Instead of being made victim to demons, you make victims of the demons. The entire narrative significance of the "Doom Slayer" is that it presumes that you are the equivalent of the Doom protagonists of old - that is, a badass demon slayer who the demons are actually afraid of. You are so feared by these demons that they never managed to kill you, only seal you away in a sarcophagus that you are released from at the beginning of the game. The moment you wake up, you immediately set to punching demons in the face and shooting them and it never stops. Throughout the levels set in Hell, you are made aware of the legends that you have left in your wake, ancient tales told by demons speak of your unbridled rage and your ability to rip apart the legions of Hell. In short, you are made to feel powerful, which is something that Doom 3 sadly shied away from.

The entire point of the game is to tell you to just relax and let your inner madman lose as you kill demon upon demon in various fashions, aided by the game's weapon upgrade system. Indeed, Doom purists may loathe the addition of a weapon upgrade system at all, but its addition to the franchise allows the combat to have a massive amount of diversity. Because every weapon in the game is available to you at any given time (a genre trope that was standard in 90's shooters that has now fallen by the wayside), you are given an insane amount of tools in your quest to rid Mars of its demonic invasion. Pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers, gatling guns, chainsaws - every weapon you use and find looks unique, sounds unique, and - most importantly - functions differently from every other weapon. The shotgun is your jack-of-all-trades weapon that can be useful in most situations, your pulse rifle is for fast-firing and getting rid of a load of enemies, your heavy assault rifle is for long-range combat, your rocket launcher is for when you run into enemies for which bullets just won't do, and so on. The addition of weapon upgrades then allows for even further utility as each weapon has two different add-ons that can be attached that can further increase the usability of each. Once again, the theme of the day is allowing the player to control the pace of combat. The game also knows that you'll want pickups (more on that in a bit) pretty much all the time and so it grants you health using the glory kill system, which can be activated by staggering enemies and going in for a quick finishing move. It also knows that you'll likely use the chainsaw when you run out of ammo and so using the chainsaw on enemies causes them to drop ammo. Does it make sense? No. But it makes total mechanical sense and, as I've noted so far, Doom's mechanics are a thing of beauty. By giving them so many tools, the game affords the player to tackle any situation in whatever way that they want. It's freeing in a sea of shooters where you only have two or three weapons and you have to sprint everywhere.

Speaking of which, there is no sprint button. Much to my pleasant surprise, holding down the Shift key actually causes you to walk instead of sprint. Indeed, you zip forward and strafe swiftly much as you do in older titles. You feel like a freight train of pain as you go from one glory kill to the next. This also means that the game mostly avoids cover-based shooting since the main way you avoid being hit is by moving around as much as possible. Thus, the game encourages you to jump and swerve to avoid attacks; even though there has never been jumping in a Doom game before, it feels like a completely natural addition to the flow of combat, and is very welcome. Finally, the health and armor system. Just like in the old days, the game has absolutely no shame about shoving bright glowing pickups in your face. There will literally be neon green armor floating above the ground that you pick up that gives you armor. No regenerating health, either; you have to scrounge for your resources. It is such a breath of fresh air having to worry about your health in a shooter that one almost forgets that this used to be the norm.

Doom is a triumph, an absolute masterpiece of mechanics that feels like the sequel that Doom II never got, and a proper return to form for id Software, who in recent years had felt more like they were pumping out tech demos for their engines instead of actual video games. It's good to see that they've still got the old blood running in their veins and I sure do hope they keep going down this path, because it's been a hell of a ride so far.