Doom (2016) single-player review: Back to basics

Modern first-person shooter design can be a real drag. So many shooters these days layer on RPG-style character development or optional stealth abilities to let you take down enemies without firing a single shot. When a firefight does happen, you're too often hiding like a turtle, nigh-unhittable behind a corner or a bit of cover, waiting for a break in the fire to pop up and spray a few quick shots at the opposition before reloading. And don't get me started on the selective devotion to "realism" that often lets players hide and "catch their breath" to recover from dozens of bullets to the torso yet forces those same players to slow down when they run out of breath after sprinting for a few seconds.

Those elements can all be fine in their own way. But the new Doom says nuts to all that. Like the early '90s ur-shooter it draws its name from, Doom is about nonstop dodge-and-fire action. You're constantly running at full speed while relatively out in the open, sidestepping bullets and enemies that you can actually see coming at you and shuffling between overpowered weapons to fire back at the enemies. Sneaking around or hiding behind a pillar won't help you here, and your health and armor meters don't recharge unless you actually run over items sitting on the ground—a once-standard shooter feature that feels practically archaic these days.

There are just enough modern shooter touches here to keep Doom from feeling entirely dated, but the basic gameplay doesn't feel like it's changed much since the days of Quake. It's as if the makers of the new Doom saw a shooter genre weighed down by decades of complex and often unnecessary cruft and said, "Nah, that's OK, we think we got it right the first time." (even if the current id Software "we" no longer actually includes any of the company founders that worked on the first Doom).

Demons, demons everywhere

Unfortunately, taking inspiration from the original Doom means taking inspiration from its general aesthetic as well. The second half of the game in particular looks like it uses a disturbed 7th grader's idle doodles as concept art, full of the kind of occult symbols, flames, and blood-drenched surfaces that seemed a lot edgier when you were a teenager. You could argue that it's all intentionally over the top, but I found the ruddy, red and brown gore-fest to be more than a bit numbing after a while.

The story is similarly ridiculous, full of holograms and robots blathering on about how opening up the gates of Hell was worth it to power massive weapons and an unlimited solar-system-wide energy source or something. Most of this backstory is eminently ignorable—you can literally just run past those chattering holograms and get on to the action. The rare unskippable cut scenes only take up a minute or two out of every gameplay hour, yet the overly expository characters make even those seem too long somehow. The only saving grace to it all are the tongue-in-cheek human resources holograms, who give long-dead employees hilariously matter-of-fact tips on how to cope with the unstable evil they're trying to work with.

Story aside, all you really need to know is that there are demons (most of which are tarted-up versions of those found in previous Doom games) and you're there to shoot them. Though they never speak a word, these demons all impart a distinct character non-verbally through their fluid, animalistic animations. Some charge at you mindlessly, others lumber slowly under their own weight, still others hover or fly or teleport about the room. Some demons will jump to nearby ledges or pillars to get a better vantage point to lob charged energy balls; others will actively run from you if you get too close.

You'll see most of the dozen or so demon types hundreds of times in a single Doom playthrough, but taking them on doesn't feel nearly as repetitive or dull as taking on the nigh indistinguishable bullet sponges in many shooters. That's largely because Doom is constantly throwing all sorts of different enemies together in a single room, forcing you to make on-the-fly decisions about priorities.

Do you focus on the charging, horned Baron of Hell that's threatening to pin you to the wall, or first focus on the floating, round Cacodemon lobbing vision-distorting energy balls at your face? You'd better figure it out fast because they're not going to wait for you to make a decision (though the demons will occasionally decide to ignore you and fight each other in true Doom fashion). The few incredibly dull exceptions where you go mano-a-demono with a single, particularly resilient enemy go a long way to proving just how important a varied mix of enemy types is to keeping Doom fresh.

The varied terrain of the generally open battle arenas also helps keep the battles feeling exciting right up to the end of the game. Most all of them make great use of vertical space, with tiered platforms, ledges, ramps, valleys, and side hallways that allow for multiple angles of attack and multiple avenues of escape. Standing still for more than a second is almost always a recipe for instant death. It's a constant struggle to maintain a safe distance from enemies while also leaving yourself room to safely sidestep attacks without getting cornered or backing into unseen hazards (the few areas where you can accidentally step backward off a cliff can be quite annoying, though).

You're aided in this near-constant running and dodging by an enjoyably floaty jump (and eventually, a responsive double jump) that allows you to clamber up to better vantage points and away from swarming enemies. Amid the health and ammo items littered around most battle rooms (on the standard "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulty I played, at least), you'll also find frequent one-off power-ups that temporarily increase your damage, make you invulnerable, or let you take out the toughest enemies with a single punch. These pickups sometimes feel like a cheap excuse to balance what would otherwise be ridiculously overwhelming odds in a fight, but it's hard to care when they let you feel like an untouchable superhero cutting through the opposition like a holy knife through demonic butter.

An arsenal from Hell

From an initial pistol that's practically useless, the game slowly adds increasingly powerful weapons to your arsenal as you go, most of which will be instantly recognizable from the previous Doom games. You can't just rely on your best weapon, though; limited ammunition means you're practically forced to quickly cycle through your arsenal mid-skirmish. You'll want to do that anyway, since the most powerful weapons are overkill for the gnat-like Imps and Possessed Soldiers that bite at your ankles while you try to save the real power for the bigger threats. Be sure to save a bit of gas for the chainsaw, too, since killing enemies with that weapon refills your ammo quickly.

As the game progresses, you can find hidden secrets that give you a chance to customize those weapons to fit your specific style as well. That slow-firing rocket launcher might get a useful lock-on burst fire mode, or that assault rifle could add the ability to fire sticky explosive grenades, for example. I personally came to rely heavily on a plasma rifle modification that could freeze enemies in their tracks for a few seconds, letting me quickly switch to a rocket launcher or powerful gauss cannon to lay down some real damage. You might prefer a tactical scope for your assault rifle or a remote detonator for the rocket launcher.

The most annoyingly modern touch in Doom is the option to take out nearly dead enemies with a close-up melee "glory kill." The game encourages these extra-brutal, extra-gory animations by giving extra health and item pick ups when you pull them off, but that means suffering through the same canned kills countless times in a single playthrough. Worse, these glory kills take away your control of the game for a second or two, in a way that can easily disorient you or put you out of position to handle other demons nearby. The entire feature feels like a matter of presentational flash over smooth gameplay.

Old school

In between these set-piece firefights, you have a chance to explore every inch of the map for a wide variety of hidden collectibles (as well as some required keys that are usually pretty easy to stumble across). There's a well-rendered 3D map in the menu to help you decide where to look for these secrets, but it can still be a bit easy to get lost in labyrinthine passages that all sort of look alike. Even with handy green lights that point out many grabbable ledges, I often found myself misjudging jumps or missing vertical pathways. Some sort of mini-map on the heads-up display would have been convenient.

There were a few major technical glitches that got in the way of the action, too. The game crashed to desktop out of nowhere three times during my playthrough. Multiple other times, the frame rate got unplayably slow during the breaks between missions, forcing me to restart the game before continuing.

Other than those quibbles, Doom is a refreshingly focused and retro take on a genre that often feels like it's trying too hard to reinvent the wheel. It's a shooter where you constantly feel engaged with the action rather than simply darting between cover points as you march conveyor-belt-like down a corridor of threats.

The best sign that Doom was doing something right came at the end of many of the game's firefights. Only when the driving music faded away and the "checkpoint reached" message appeared would I realize my entire body had been clenched up with the nonstop, adrenaline-soaked tension of it all for the last few minutes. I'll be damned if it didn't take me right back to playing Doom on that old 486 in my parents' living room decades ago.

The Good

• Nonstop shooting action in the style of the original Doom
• Amazing animation on the enemy demons
• Varied enemy types mix well in huge set-piece battles
• Well-designed battle spaces make good use of the third dimension
• Clever weapon customizations for varied playstyles
• You can literally run past most of the story
• Tons of secrets to search for between firefights

The Bad

• Design aesthetic reminiscent of a troubled middle schooler
• "Glory kill" system is flawed and hard to ignore
• Navigation can be a chore without a mini-map
• Occasional crashes and game-wide slowdown
• The unskippable bits of the utterly forgettable story

The Ugly

• The way the BFG can still take out an entire room of demons in a single shot

Verdict: Buy it and remember what first-person shooters used to be like—and enjoy the modern coat of paint.