tried this
fast! and fun! and delivers on some of the promises of doom3! and oh my god the glory kills are anathema to my soul. the only constants to the game are your on-screen weapons, your hud, and endless canned glory kills. it’s one thing to have canned invuln finishers like resident evil 4, it’s another to put it in first-person perspective, have a limited number of animations, and then make it such a core element of the gameplay loop that you’ll see the same (personally unsettling) glory kill animations literal thousands of times. so fucking distasteful. i think that might single-handedly have ruined this game for me.
how did we go from the doomguy grinning maniacally when he picks up the chainsaw to him having to do a “stylish” gore porn kill every fucking time? why do i need to fucking curb stomp demons. it’s an instant immersion killer. it’s fucking asinine.
imagine if when playing mortal kombat, every special move had a fatality animation. even fucking mortal kombat has more restraint than doom. seriously?
also snapmap is utter garbage what the fuck. multiplayer is incredibly tepid.
let’s continue to edit this post, shall we
the level design is pretty fucking good. pretty impressed by that. i like the halo nods (this game feels like a faster halo/quake/rage hybrid sometimes) with using ranged attacks to soften enemies and then finishing with melee attacks. environmental design is impressive.
the music is very bleh, and the sound design is a bit over the top imo.
graphically stunning, i mean wow. this game looks amazing!
i’m very torn. i want to play some more because it’s fun but it also makes me feel kind of sick. why is the level editor worse than the doom 1 level editor. that is pretty mindboggling to me
Also picked this up over the weekend. The glory kills are initially what made me not want to buy this game - it definitely seems pornographic. Interestingly, the kill animations are much shorter than what they had at E3. Makes me wonder if they slowed it down for E3, or if they sped it up before release.
Regardless, the glory kills haven’t turned me off as much as you, although I agree they are wholly unnecessary. Let me just smack the demon with my gun and have them explode or fall over or whatever. I think the reason the animations don’t ruin the game for me is because they are so fast and I can basically just ignore them. The repetition is grating though.
Mechanically, I think they work pretty well. Like you said, it feels sort of Halo-like, and in a good way. I’ve also really enjoyed jumping off a cliff to smack a Cacodemon, then falling down to the level below. Very satisfying.
The one non-mechanical thing I like about the glory kills (god I hate that name) is that you get to see the monster models more closely. I like the amount of detail they have, and I’m glad that there’s a real reason to see some of that.
Music is okay. It’s pretty clear that the music isn’t up to the level of the original when you can walk into a classic map and hear those good, good tunes. I never fully appreciated Doom music at the time, but I certainly do now. Especially how understated they can be versus “IT’S TIME TO KILL” GUITAR NOISES “YEAHHHHH”
I’ve enjoyed exploration in this game far more than it deserves. I really appreciate the quiet time between doing murders, even though most of what I am doing is bringing up the map, making two jumps, then bringing up the map again. I’ve maxed out my level of exploration so now secret items show up when I’m near them. I still only manage to find half the secrets in any given level.
The player progression is okay! But again, it’s a nice quiet time between massacres, which I appreciate very much. It also gives me the chance to have a shotgun that also shoots grenades which…yeah, that’s good. I like completing the challenges for the final weapon upgrades as well.
The game is easier than I expected. I’m playing on Hurt me Plenty, and have only died a handful of times, usually because I was distracted. It does force the player to move around a lot and take advantage of the terrain though, which is nice. Still, for a person who stinks at FPSes, this is surprisingly easy. I might bump up the difficulty later.
Imps are the best. I could play a whole game fighting powered up versions of the Imps. The way they crawl on walls, leap between level features, dodge shots…it’s the best animation in the game by far.
It’s weird how good the level design is versus the total pointlessness of the glory kills. On the one hand you’ve got levels where every piece matters and can be utilized in various ways. On the other hand, you have a “Press F to punch in the eye of a Cacodemon for the 80th time and get 5 health” feature. It’s weird.
EDIT: The Mancubus kill animation is genuinely nauseating, I forgot that. I try my hardest to kill them without melee because it’s super fucking gross.
I love this deeply flawed game to itty bits so I’m going to reiterate myself:
I wish the finishers were charge-release moves. They talk about glory kills as a risk-reward mechanic but it’s completely not; since you go into a canned animation of indeterminate length they have to extend invincibility all over it (otherwise the player takes cheap shots on exiting).
Instead, I’d prefer the risk to come before starting the attack: hold down a button to charge up a distance, then release and crush through any stunned demons. Building up the charge stops/extremely slows your movement; of course, you can release early, maybe not getting your kill but shunting out of the way of the fireball coming at your face. The health reward is now properly earned, and we preserve the tension of the Half-Life style health (i.e., plentiful health drops on enemies, increasing as the player’s health is lower, to ease the player into playing at <50% life as often as possible).
yes, Wario was a formative influence on me
also why you love farts so much
y-you want the glory kills to be charged farts, don’t you? D:
These would be easy to aim because Doomguy has two butts one in front and one in back. #canon
I like big farts,
I cannot lie
Finished this game’s single player. Thought the ending was poor. I was genuinely interested in a resolution to this story, but it definitely felt like they were saying “u gamerz wanted doom WE MADE DOOM you fucken killed all the demons now stop complaining”
Combat was interesting right up to the end, although I found that there was minimal to zero interesting continuity between encounters. I essentially had full ammunition and mostly full health and armor between every major encounter. If I was running low on ammo I would just chainsaw the first imp or zombie I saw and be right back up to full ammo for every single weapon. It might as well have just been a series of arena challenges.
The arena challenges were good though! Every fight felt like an interesting use of space that hadn’t been done before in the game. Well, every fight except boss fights which were pretty bland (other than the double hell mech things with worms in them, that was pretty cool).
I was happy that, even near the end, the mixtures of enemies were pretty varied, and Imps still remained semi-viable threats, especially in large numbers. Mancubi as bullet sponges weren’t very interesting though, as I was usually able to avoid all damage by staying out of range and just blowing them up with patience. I think their best application was with a Baron of Hell or a group of Hell Knights that would force you to use lots of space to avoid damage; the area around a Mancubus was essentially dead space and had to be accounted for while fighting the larger threat.
My interest in exploration abruptly ground to a halt 2/3 of the way through when I had 25 weapon upgrade points and nothing I cared to do with them. I had also upgraded the suit to where I wanted it to be (full ammo and health upgrades) and didn’t care to get more. The reward for getting those tiny dolls was not enough for me to go out of my way looking for them, and finding secrets was mostly about looking at the automap and going “oh, that part is gray.” It didn’t help that some maps had one-way sections, and it wasn’t clear which was the secret route and which was the expected route.
Most used and favorite guns:
Combat Shotgun - mostly used grenades to blow up low level enemies. That was the first weapon I upgraded to max and saw use all the way to the end of the game. It was a hell of a lot of fun to use.
Gauss Rifle Thingy - Great for killing larger enemies as long as I had ammo, and I loved charging it up and blasting in semi-sniper mode.
Rocket Launcher - The tracking rockets were good for killing Mr. Flying Skeleton Missile Boys. Their splash damage wasn’t appreciable though. Still, good fun.
Least used guns:
Super Shotgun - what a fuckin shame
Plasma Rifle - boring, would rather use Gauss Laser Explodey Thingus
Chaingun - boring, would rather use assault rifle tiny rockets
BFG - only on bosses
Most used boring gun:
Assault rifle - very practical, especially with mini rockets, but not very interesting.
Multiplayer is tepid but serviceable. Snap map is a fucking drag and takes forever to load, but I suspect more interested parties would do interesting things with it. The tutorials for Snap Map are down the last time I checked. I guess they were hosted online and aren’t there anymore??
Now that I’m finished with the game, I’m left with an unscratchable itch for more Very Good AAA Games That Don’t Have a Ton of Bullshit In Them. I guess that’s a compliment?? I enjoyed my time with the game and would definitely have bought a single player DLC campaign (that I suspect will never be made.)
EDIT: I played on Hurt Me Plenty and I still feel like the difficulty was a tad low, but I didn’t want to change halfway through. I’d like to say I died about 25 times, which sounds like a lot, but those were only on a handful of encounters, most of them bosses. The boss deaths were really just a matter of memorizing the patterns, not doing anything interesting. Best single encounter was near the end when you pull up in a train and half to fight in this very interesting space that included 3 distinct tiers, an electrified pit, and a section sandwiched between an balcony above and the train on the other side. I died a few times there and it felt very satisfying to finally clear it.
The ending reminds me a lot of Half-Life 2, with a similar theme being propounded.
I think maybe the worst thing that Half-Life brought into the world, expanded upon by Bioshock, is the “all FPS games have a lying or otherwise misleading character leading the player on by the nose and then betraying them at the end.” I thought about this a lot while playing Doom.
snapmap is less bad than i made it out to be
glory kills are still incredibly asinine and sort of a dealbreaker for some people
multiplayer is just mediocre. it’s not bad
i like the level design.
music sucks, sound design is great
i think i’m done thinking about this game forever now
But I mean, Doom is good because obviously the doctor guy is just an asshole using you, but Doomguy doesn’t care because he’s a rage machine who just wants to kill demons. And this lets him kill demons. Like I don’t think there’s any misleading going on, really.
I think the need to put a character like Doctor Sammy Roboto in (who does actively mislead you when he puts the tether on you by surprise, then uses it at the end to restrain you) is still informed by that “every AAA FPS is about lack of player choice” that seems to still be a thing. Coulda just been the DOOM guy waking up and killin’ some demons, ORRR it could have had an interesting resolution. I’d prefer either of those.
this viewpoint may just be becayse of the lack of AAA FPSes i play though.they all seem to have some sort of character like this. and i really thought Portal would have put an end to that by being the best example and also a parody.
Gotta set up that sequel homey
Part of my love for HL2 is the ways in which it leaves open a truly awesome opportunity to resolve Gordon’s lack of agency through an integrated whole of story and mechanics, and the fact that Valve is what Valve is these days makes me incredibly grateful that they are seemingly never going to make HL/Ep3.
yeah you’re right, flippin sequels
frig
can we get a triple AAA version of hexen
no because hexen sux
But that mace… 
look i really want to love hexen and the opening area is fantastic but it’s a good doom clone mixed with a really, really bad myst clone