3 years ago, when I played Doom 2016 for the first time, I didn’t get very far. I played for a couple of hours before unceremoniously dropping it. I promised myself that I’d go back to it in a couple of days, but never did. Although it started brilliantly, with the smashing of the terminal and the pumping of a shotgun, something about it just wasn’t clicking with me.
In the meantime, I’ve played a lot of classic FPS games. I played Doom and Quake for my podcast, which inspired me to check out the rest of the main doom games (including Plutonia Experiment) and titles like DUSK. With Doom Eternal on the near horizon, I decided it was time to strap myself in and actually finish Doom 2016, once and for all.
It’s been a strange experience. Because while I like the shape and idea of a lot of what the game is trying to accomplish, the end result is one of tedium and repetition. Its heart is in the right place, and there’s nothing intrinsically offensive about any of its features, but there’s very little about it that compelled me to continue playing. If we peel back the game’s many gruesome layers we’re left with a fundamentally unsatisfying experience.
The level design of first person shooters has shifted and squelched into many odd shapes over the years. We’ve gone from endless maze-like sprawls, to linear corridors and back again. Doom 2016’s levels are linear, but are defined more by open and clearly articulated spaces attached to one another rather than a narrow railroad with no left or right turns. There are plenty of nooks and crannies filled with goodies, but you’re largely moving from one large area to the next in a particular order.
This is nothing out of the ordinary in terms of level design. We have seen stuff like this as early as Half Life. What I do find strange about it is primarily in how the game treats monster placement. That is, It basically doesn’t exist.
The number of monsters passively inhabiting each level is quite low and they all tend to be of the bullet fodder variety. There are no monster closets with enemies waiting to burst out at you when you pick up some armour, either. Instead, there are designated combat areas that you either trigger manually, or will naturally begin when you enter them. They tend to be multi-floored arenas with ammo and health pickups scattered about, allowing you to easily change your elevation as you move around in circles, slaughtering the demons.
It makes the general experience of moving through the level a very stilted one. You kill demons for a bit, then wander around and explore, picking up ammo and finding secrets. You move through a corridor or two, killing a few zombies along the way, until the map opens up onto another obvious combat arena. You’re not making steady progress through the level, killing demons as you go - you’re going from one demon slaying convention to the next, sipping at your drink with a small umbrella in it with your shoes off in between.
The fundamental problem here is a complete lack of tension. When the level is littered with enemies, every step you take around every single corner is potentially opening you up to a devastating surprise attack. You never know quite what to expect as you gradually hew your way through a level. You don’t know what ammo, health or armour supplies are going to be available, and the way you approach combat situations can vary wildly based on all three. When every item has the potential to trigger a trap, you are constantly on guard, always ready to scramble to escape, survive and take your revenge.
In Doom 2016, you always have full health, armour and ammo at the beginning of each encounter, as long as you properly scavenge the area post fight. You never get surprised from a monster closet and have to react in an awkward position. And when the combat finally starts, you’re always ready for it in every sense, because they are so clearly telegraphed once you’ve figured out the level design. The terms of engagement are exactly the same every time, even if the combination of monsters you fight are different.
One the surface the level design doesn’t look like 50 combat arenas with corridors in between. It appears a lot more sophisticated than that, with platforming sections and secrets scattered throughout. But in terms of how you engage with this game’s level design in a mechanical sense, that’s unfortunately exactly what it can be reduced to.
Its difficult to come up with a clear analogue for what Doom 2016’s moment to moment gameplay is like. It's got elements of the circle strafing you engage in when you trigger a trap in the classic Doom games, but is a far more complicated affair. The game is blessed with zero hit-scanners, making positioning absolutely vital like in Quake or Dusk. Most fascinating of all is its emphasis on getting into melee range for glory and chainsaw kills, something I’d previously seen more in Bioshock than anything else.
The combat has a very particular rhythm to it as more and more powerful demons start to spawn in. The open arenas make using cover mostly futile, incentivising rapid movement by far as the best way to avoid damage. When your health is getting low, or whenever you need to take a breath, you go for a glory kill on a weakened enemy - you get some health back and are invincible for a few moments. If you start to run out of ammo, a chainsaw kill will make an enemy demon erupt in bullets and missiles.
So you shoot some rockets at a group of enemies, killing a couple but getting one low enough to glory kill. You swing in, tear it to pieces, get some health back and start strafing away, dodging fire while trying to return it. If your health gets low again, you perform another glory kill. Ammo gets low, chainsaw kill. Rinse and repeat until every last demon is a simmering corpse.
And to Doom 2016’s credit, the essential combat is a lot of fun. Each weapon has multiple different firing modes, and they all have a reason to be used. The middle third of this game is frantic fun, when you’ve unlocked most of the weapons and are switching gun mods and flying all over the place like a madman. The glory kills are the punctuation on a punchy and devastating slaughter. And the weapons are just a blast to use - the turret chaingun literally rips enemies to shreds and the super shotgun very nearly lives up to the original.
But as you enter the last third of the campaign the shining gleam of novelty starts to wear off, and you start to memorise the process. What was once a chaotic mess becomes a tightly choreographed dance routine. When you know the steps and the rhythms of combat the game stops being challenging or exciting, and instead becomes predictable and repetitive. You’re never truly overwhelmed or outgunned at any point past the initial learning bump.
Enemy threat levels blend together, with the exception of the summoner. I’m not having to deal with a combination of Archi Viles, melee attacking Fiends, sniper Chain-gunners or Cow-Girl Rocketeers. It all blurs together, an endless barrage of bullets and glory kills to keep the action going. I can’t think of a single distinct combat encounter I had in Doom 2016, because at their core they’re all the same.
Is the combat bad? No, of course not. For a shooter that takes place in 50 identical looking arenas, it remains remarkably fresh for a very long time. But there’s only so much the game could do with its bland set of monsters in similar places. It's not simply a matter of challenge, more one of variety. If the game had put you through a whole set of different circumstances then it would have continued to dazzle. It's always the same song and dance though, and once you’ve mastered it there are no more surprises.
I want to quickly touch on the aesthetics of this game before I finish, but only briefly. I think Doom 2016 sounds great. The music, the gun effects, the sounds of monsters exploding into messy heaps of flesh - it's all wonderful! What needs some work are the visuals.
From a technical standpoint, there's nothing wrong with how this game looks. But from a gameplay point there is. Doom 2016 lacks visual clarity.
It is essential in a game like this that you can rapidly identify your enemies at a glance. They need to be distinct from both one another and the environment. Halo 1 is a wonderful example of a colourful shooter with fantastic visual clarity. All the enemies look, sound and act different, allowing you to prioritise targets within milliseconds of you laying eyes on them. They stand out from the backgrounds they stand on, clearly silhouetted.
Doom is far more messy. The red of Mars and hell, the dustiness, the fog, the somewhat slimy amorphous look of the enemies makes them annoying to tell apart at a single glance. I can tell a Cacodemon from a Mancubus, sure, but at a distance a Hell Razer looks exactly the same as a Possessed Soldier.
It's not game breaking, but it is an incredibly annoying tendency of a lot of modern shooters. Bells and whistles are all well and good, but I’ll take the old school clarity of something like COD 1 over the lens flared, motion blurred, dirt ridden nonsense of COD 16 any day.
So, Doom 2016. I’m not too high on it. I think it has solid and enjoyable combat, but that it has fundamental big picture issues that hurt its ability to transcend into anything greater. I don’t really understand its insanely positive critical reception. Perhaps it was the sheer relief that a studio hadn’t nuked Doom’s legacy by turning it into a corridor shooter. Maybe it was just the only recent arena shooter to come out in many years. Or maybe it is in fact brilliant and I’ve completely missed the mark.
From what I’ve seen of Eternal, they’ve put a lot of effort into improving the core combat, which is a delight to see. It looks almost Sekiro-like with the action/reaction loops of more dangerous monsters and varied ways to deal with them. Nailing the timings of dashes and grapple hooks and flame throwers seems to be a level of complication and challenge (and variety!) far beyond Doom 2016s.
I’m still unsure if the broader level design issue has been ‘fixed’. There’s some cool Prince of Persia-esque platforming, but nothing I’ve seen suggests a massive deviation away from the repeated arena style shootings. And maybe that’s ok, maybe that’s what the fans want from this game, something intrinsic to the genre. But to me shooters are best when the levels, and your available health and ammo determine completely different kinds of fights, not simply making you do the same one eternally.
Doom 2016 an ok game. I hope Doom Eternal is a great one.
