Gameplay (9/10)

Highlights

The combat is by far the best part of the game. The mechanics, the animations; all perfect.

The boss fights are difficult and engaging, and they force you to really think about how you’re gonna beat them (which we don’t always see in FPS titles). The boss fights felt closer to a platformer than an FPS boss fight, because they’re structured in such a way where you find yourself avoiding or dodging attacks for most of the fight, and then in the small windows of vulnerability between their swipes, you strike back. I thoroughly enjoyed these boss fights, and found that their resemblance to platformer bosses worked out really well.

Each mission encourages you to explore the map, looking for secrets, more enemies to bump up your “combat score” and even just for some ammo, health or armor if you find yourself running low. This adds another dimension of depth to the game which it wouldn’t otherwise have, transforming a mindless “punch-em-up” into a game that sometimes requires you to use your head and think about where the secrets could be. This forces the player to distinguish between where the main story wants you to go and where the secrets could be hidden. It also adds replay value to the game, rewarding the players who spend the most time repeating and looking around each level, rather than simply playing each level once only.

The guns are all unique and fun to use. The sometimes scarce availability of ammo forces you to use every weapon at your disposal, and discourages you from picking a favorite weapon and using it exclusively, which I think makes the game stay fresh longer and keeps it from feeling stale and repetitive.

Each weapon feels different from the last, and has its own additional modifications that can sometimes completely change how the player chooses to use them. For example, the plasma rifle gets a charged stun shot as an upgrade, so instead of using it like a normal gun, the player may choose to use this upgrade to stun a strong enemy and then swap to a shotgun and get up nice and close to deal massive damage with no punishment from the enemy. This adds another level of depth to the gameplay, which again keeps the game from feeling too mindless. A very nice addition, I must say.

“Glory killing” are perhaps some of the most satisfying animations I have ever seen in any game. “Glory kills” occur when an enemy is low on health and the player gets close, hitting the enemy with a melee attack to execute a finishing blow. I’ll touch on the goriness of these later on, so all I’ll say for now is that the “glory killing” feature is one of, if not, the best part of the entire game.

Finally, I must applaud this game’s lack of glitches. Throughout my entire time playing the game, I only ran into one minor visual glitch and one major gameplay glitch, where the boss I was fighting just disappeared after I killed it without the game acknowledging I had beaten it. The only fix I could think of was to load from a checkpoint and restart the boss fight.

Footage of the boss glitch

Lowlights

I wouldn’t exactly call this a criticism, because I don’t believe this part of the game deserves to be criticised since it didn’t make the game any less fun, but I wished the game had better movement mechanics. I really feel that pairing the amazing combat mechanics with insane movement mechanics could’ve made the game so much more exciting, and would give even more freedom to the player with how they choose to tackle hoards of enemies. And we’ve recently seen the first look at this game’s sequel (DOOM Eternal)’s gameplay, which has shown us that id Software is already on it, adding grappling hooks and leap dashes. I’d also love to see these mechanics used to make parkour courses the player must traverse to reach secrets or hidden Rune Trials. So, it’s not that this part of the game was poor, but simply that it could’ve been so much better.

Additionally, I found that some of the areas where battles take place felt kind of crammed. Hopefully with the inclusion of more movement in the next game we’ll see battle terrain that accommodates this, with wide open areas so that the player doesn’t just get stuck sitting around a corner being trapped by mobs of angry demons.

The loading times are very long. I get that it’s a huge game in terms of graphics and rendering, and so it has to take its time to load, but this doesn’t change the fact that dying being followed by a long loading screen does take its toll on the flow of the game, as it disrupts the game’s excitement and the players’ adrenaline.

Also, this game is, at times, VERY draining to play. Some games I can play for days on end. This was not one of those games. Frequent breaks from the game felt essential to me, because after a long, difficult boss fight the last thing I wanted to do was be thrown back into a large hoard of killer demons. This brings me to my final gameplay lowlight, the game lacks downtime. This means the player will either have no downtime and will continue to consume the intense content, or they will create their own downtime.

For me, my downtime was taking frequent breaks from the game. Now, as a consumer this doesn’t really bother me, because I’m fine with taking breaks when needed. But from a game design point of view, I definitely see this as a game floor, because the last thing you want your game to do is encourage players to take constant breaks from it. You want them to consume your game as much as possible.