Counting it out I think it’s got quite a few flaws –
Music often great but not consistently loud/dynamic enough
Demon design straddling a line between scary, detailed, and characterful and ending up only busy
Levels too long and too full of dead space caused by reiterating for secrets, an unfortunate collision of making secrets more meaningful and the much greater density of a modern 3D level next to a classic Doom level
Sharper rendering reduces ability to be interpreted as goofy
But still, giving me a brand new shooter base, and delivering gorgeously intense and smooth 20 to 200-second fights can overcome all of that. Flawed but masterful.
Oh my gosh this so much. I got the PC version on sale and was ready to play the game with my stupid fancy gamer headphones and wow was it underwhelming compared to my memories of the PS4 version
I did one level of it. I was disappointed to find they weren’t arenas or just little compelling chunks of levels but actual speedruns of the entire real levels, which are too long for that kind of sustained thing. What I loved about it was the fact that it was like “here are all the fully-upgraded weapons you’d have by this point, and all the runes, choose whatever loadout you want.” I just want to play the singleplayer normally in exactly the same way. All the score chain boost medal whatevers nonplussed me utterly.
Only watched 3 minutes and this is exactly what a modern DOOM game should be like. The enemies look more like the enemies of the original games, the environment looks more varied than NuDOOM’s, new movement options look awesome… Hell, this is great. NuDOOM II: More Blades!!!
Very happy that the art direction is cartoonier and more characterful. And the hints that level direction is being rethought; it wasn’t terrible but the pacing was really screwy as you could spend hours crawling empty levels for secrets.
With that incredible combat core this should be an easy homerun for them.
I really quite liked the level design in the first nu-Doom even if it didn’t always justify being so setpiece-driven; this looks to have gotten away from that and much closer to the original games, which I’m ambivalent about, but it certainly looks great and looks like it feels great
I can clarify and say, the combat staging and multi-layered nature of the levels was excellent, but the application of classic secret-hunting to levels this large was poorly-considered and scales to take something like 10x the time for every doubling of level size. Arcade mode fixed most of those issues by forcing you to ignore secrets!
Setpiece arenas were mostly fine and subtle enough that it didn’t feel constrained, but there were a few duff ones like the nuclear reactor climb that were a bit too restrictive.
One thing that came to mind watching how the plasma rifle works in that video is that this series is as much a successor to Halo as it is to Doom. Like Halo, the aesthetics are intended above all for rapid readability in motion, allowing complex arenas full of enemies and obstacles that come across as exciting and engaging (rather than messy and overwhelming).
I think they’re just playing up the speedy blastemtobits vibe with ace playing + tailored layouts for these clips. But who knows, momentum and ammo made quick work of most enemies before. I expect some good resistance.
Invasions seem neat but not fully worth the work to me unless something changes in the death system; if the game assumes you’re F5-F9-ing all over the place this is kind of silly.
I think this is a hint that the game might be moderately open-world in construction, actually. Certainly we should assume any expensive single-player game from now until the end of time is open-world until proved otherwise.
