Demons invaded Earth and ruined Doom HUD. Some alternative titles:

A devilishly minimalistic style vs death by Candy Crush glitter.

An immersive vs casual game.

A dark journey vs demon piñata.

Impressions

Autumn 2019 I played Doom 2016 for the first time, and immediately fell in love. Everything was exactly in place: from the pace and mechanics, through graphics and the atmosphere, to UI and style. Gameplay just felt right — dynamic as hell, encouraging rolling up your sleeves, and getting into visceral contact with the enemy. We had all the best from Doom 1&2 (no talk, all action) plus much more. It is a masterpiece on so many levels. In the last decade, the closest showing the rage of hell was the Painkiller series (which, IHMO, has the best concept of hell in all games). Samuel Hayden’s ambiguity is second only to G-Man from the Half-Life series, and in the same way, I got small shivers each time he talks.

When I opened pre-ordered Doom Eternal, on the release date, my feelings were… mixed (was I ripped off and should I burst in tears?). I mean, the game is clearly polished, and there are quite a few things that make its combat dynamics nicer. Yet, I feel like it turned into a superhero button-smasher.

I can go in-depth on many aspects that made different. For example, the big emphasis on platforming (it turns out that demons turned earth into a gym, with gymnastic bars and climbing walls everywhere). Everything was made more ‘epic’: your flying castles (a safe place to go breaks the atmosphere of danger), bombastic talks on (early on a specter Thor and Purifier-Selendis), and the overall background story looks more like a creative writing exercise (or was it generated by GPT-2? then actually I hold my reservations). Also, as a person who played Doom (in 1993, when I was 7 years old) find it blasphemy to show the third-view perspective. This person should be… you.

But all of it is bleak when you compare that to XPs, 1UPs, and Candy Crush-esque colors. So, I will focus on showing screenshots, side by side, with the focus on UI differences. It won’t be fair

A few more of my biases

To be clear, while I do like the challenge, I care even more about immersion. I am totally into atmospheric “walk simulators” like Amnesia or SOMA. I couldn’t play most “free to play” games if they instead paid to play them. With a few exceptions (e.g. The Dark Knight, Dr. Strange), I don’t like superhero movies. I did like Diablo 2, but after seeing graphics (and cinematics) of Diablo 3 I never ever got tempted to play this.

In-game screenshots side-by-side

Since at its core, most of the mechanics are the same, we can literally compare equivalent features. The most striking is the difference between the so-called HUDs (Heads Up Display — indicators of health, armor, ammunition, etc):