Imperfect Game: Doom 2016

Hello and welcome to Imperfect Game less of a review blog and more of a personal legacy, and today am covering Doom 2016 while being late to make reviews of this game with the sequel Doom Eternal being out for a least a year or so now. But I recently got a PS4 of my own and this game carried over from my old sony account back when my brother still had a PS4 and I was also playing on it so I figured I may as well review it while am able to. Doom 2016 is a reboot or at least I think it’s a reboot, not much reason to call it plain Doom otherwise. Doom 2016 is a retro-styled First Person Shooter game made with for its time AAA polish and visuals as well as an Industrial-metal soundtrack where you rip and tear demons on mars much like the original Doom games.

While the story and lore seemed barebones the long list of database items paints a clear picture of a lot of story content for those willing to read through and collect database entries found in the levels hidden as one of the many collectible items in Doom 2016. Other items included are little doomguy figures which unlock 3d models in a gallery.

The main gameplay loop of Doom 2016 is “explore, collect and shoot.” While it may require a keen eye to collect all the doomguy toys and the rest of the optional collectibles like database entries there are also tons of ammo, armor, and health pickups laid around the many arenas you fight in over the course of the game’s campaign. These arenas offer tons of height variance as you run, jump and shoot demons. Sometimes you’ll even encounter one of a few dozen powerups like the powerful berserk, quad damage, and maybe even a haste power up. The Berserk powerup lets you instantly kill demons in one punch while restricting you to unarmed attacks only. The Quad Damage makes you deal increased damage with all weapons and the Haste powerup makes you move much faster. But the best collectible items are the argent cells which permanently increase health, armor, or ammo, I personally maxed out my max health and then put the rest of the cells I found into max ammo. The last collectible I know is the weapon upgrade drones, they are well hidden and grant important upgrades to your weapons.

The Combat encounters are the highlights of the game, you make use of a wide range of weapons that you collect over the course of the game’s progression. While the main workhorse of the arsenal is the Super Shotgun and its double-barreled goodness other weapons such as the Gauss Cannon which acts similar to a sniper rifle and it can charge up to deal more damage, making the Gauss Cannon a perfect tool to burst down high health enemies like the Mancubus and the Baron of Hells with two fully charged shots to the heads (Not sure if locational damage is even in this game but it works so am still going to aim at those heads)

The Minigun and assault rifle are both good at dealing consistent damage over time. When you add upgrades into the equation you can do cool stuff like stun bomb enemies making them easy to pick them off with the super shotty or a beefer double-barreled turret mode for the minigun. But there was one weapon I barely ever used and it was the rocket launcher, due to the risk of self-damage and the lack of solutions this weapon could solve that's also solved by other weapons I deem the Rocket Launcher sadly not worth using unless you're completely out of ammo with your our weapons. Sense your switching weapons often it's great that the in-game weapon wheel works so well, just press the right shoulder button and use the right stick to select a weapon. There are also two special weapons namely the Chainsaw and BFG which are bound to two of the face buttons on a console controller. The Chainsaw makes any enemy used on die instantly and drop tons of ammo for when you are running low and the BFG is just a beast of a weapon that gibs whole rooms of monsters per shot and you can have up to three BFG shots and it’s also possible to find more BFG ammo in Arenas after your access the BFG.

The enemies you face in Doom 2016 come in a bunch of varieties, from the lowly imps who either flee or charge at you to melee while throwing fireballs at the range to the big bulk hell knights who keep charging and leaping at you forcing you to keep on the move during encounters. You also have the fat mancubus enemies that shoot either fire or green plasma at you. At the very top of the food chain, you have the super huge Barons of hell that throw plasma or leap and charge at you. These enemies all offer their own challenges in combat and depending on the situation may force you to pick off high priority targets first before finishing off the weaker enemies. There are also some challenging bosses like the Cyberdemon and double rock golem fights (I don’t know the official names, Sorry.)

The level design has me a bit conflicted on one hand I enjoyed the huge arena fights and the light platforming sections and how the levels use the green lights to guide the player through the level so it makes me just a bit more frustrated with the levels (Mostly the early techbase levels) were still confusing for me to navigate even with the automap and waypoints the game provides. Other than the hard-to-navigate areas I quite enjoyed the levels visually though they are mostly two themes techbase and hell.

Lastly, the music of Doom 2016 is amazing to listen to and it’s by design as some parts of the current song play when you do things like getting Glory Kills (Melee when an enemy is flashing blue or orange and you do a kill animation) or chainsaw kills you hear a cinematically timed version of the current song. Inclosing Doom 2016 is a good game for its time and it helped create its sequel game so it’s safe to say this game succeeded in remaking the old school Doom gameplay in a more modern style though It may still bug out with soft-lock where even after killing all the demons you still hear combat music and the doors areas still locked. Admittedly this rarely ever happens but in my two playthroughs total I had this bug happen at least once before finishing the game thankfully the checkpoint system is good enough to make this bug a minor problem at most. This has been Imperfect Game and thanks for reading.