The arcs and backstory are still given out at a good pace, making it clear what everyone wanted in this tragedy you treat with the tenderness of a bull in a china shop armed with a railgun.ĭemons from the old classics return in mass for this one, starting you off with zombies (the unwilling), imps, and new versions of possessed soldiers with energy blasters, shields, and a razer variant that has a cutting laser. The funny, subversive nature of the game is not saying story doesn’t matter, but giving you a character who cuts through the bullshit and gets to the point (with Gun). There’s also VEGA, the facility AI who helps you out, and Olivia Pierce, a traitorous scientist who set off a hell wave and is now trying to open a portal to the demon’s realm. It creates a fun dynamic, a guy you just love to piss off while you know he’s a few steps ahead of you. Samuel Hayden, only after it becomes clear he’s holding back important information from you and has tech you need to solve the larger problem. You have to listen to that facility head, Dr. The slayer has seen it all before and understands exactly who not to trust. You are now a badass who trained with an ancient society of hell warriors who rips and tears demons apart with his bare hands, described in the game as a vengeful hate golem with boiling blood out to shred every single demon for what they took from him. The start of Doom 2016 is not a rejection of narrative, but a defining of your player character: THE DoomSLAYER. Inner rage takes over, break your cuffs with the power of hate, smash a zombie’s head on the stone, grab a Quake II style blaster, headshot, get explained a few mechanics in a streamlined action set-piece, and every time the manipulative head of the facility tries to talk with you and downplay his role in the utter carnage you see before you, you destroy the device he’s sending his cowardly voice from, ending with you seeing through his crap by looking at a corpse during his monologue, shoving your elbow in an intercom, and a sick title drop where At Doom’s Gate blares and gets capped off with a shotgun pump. The game starts unlike most FPS games by having you in the middle of it, waking up on a stone slab, butt naked, as the room is exploding and zombies are coming for you.
It is easy to see where the confusion comes from, though. The game has unskippable cutscenes and an in-game codex as long as a short novel detailing a mess of lore and background detail.
There is also a common read of the game that it rejects narrative and that’s wrong. This game was so confident in its delivery that it opened with a quote from the Doom comic, a comic made specifically to make fun of Doom, and everyone went along with it! Turns out rip and tear is a pretty sick line, actually, but maybe less so the notably absent “I’ve gotta handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad!” In terms of complexity, it’s no Vanquish (that would be Doom Eternal), but it nailed the sense of fight for your life frenzy of the original classics long been missing from the scene. Not only that, its bucking of popular design trends started an entire movement in gaming, setting off the powder keg that would allow the likes of New Blood and their contemporaries to come forth and start a retro revival wave that gave us the likes of DUSK, AMID EVIL, Project Warlock, and Viscerafest. Doom (2016) had the entire deck stacked against it, and somehow it managed to floor just about everyone with one of the most polished and visceral experiences any FPS could possibly give. It had a deep mechanical core to it in the vein of character action games that didn’t quite gel with gamers more familiar with traditional first/third person shooters, leaving it as an overlooked cult classic.ĭoom (2016) is like that, except it became one of the most popular, non-multiplayer focused shooters ever made.ĭoom (2016) isn’t just one of the best Doom games, if not the best overall, it might very well be one of the best first person shooters that has ever been made.
It was surprisingly short, though, ending with a downer cliffhanger. In 2010, Platinum games released Vanquish, an action packed third person shooter that captured a great deal of attention for ignoring everything Gears of War codified and went hard on speed, chaos, and maneuvering over hiding behind cover.