This is an interesting sort of concession to modern, health-recharging shooters and Doom's old-school roots, and it's good for the combat's pacing. Glory kills also render you invulnerable while you're performing them, giving a few brief, blessed seconds to catch your breath before turning your attention to the next monster just asking for it. Glory kills always drop at least some health, which keeps Doom moving and avoids the meticulous save-crawling from the original games, which often forced you to backtrack to find medkits before continuing on. These moments are, shall we say, anatomically elaborate, but usually they're fast, and they serve a mechanical purpose beyond the perfectly reasonable goal of making you feel like a murder god. Getting enemies to a certain damage threshold makes them flash blue, a flash that will turn orange when you're close enough to perform one of the game's so-called "Glory Kills" - a fancy name for extremely gory melee executions. It's all kinetic shooting with very graphic kills. That story is mostly a distraction from a lot of shooting. Some competent voice acting aside, the story is a trifle, an occasionally intrusive scaffolding to hang monsters and guns from without being questioned too much - though I did enjoy the codex entries that unlock as the game progresses, which flesh out the world and bestiary quite a bit. That was the thought running through my head during another multi-minute dialogue sequence that I couldn't skip, that didn't particularly improve anything about the game. Doom, of all games, carries with it an implicit suspension of disbelief that most titles would kill for.
Doom's story simultaneously tries for something more while cutting as much forced narrative from the game as possible, and the disconnect there can be a little jarring. That suggests a level of sophistication to Doom's storytelling that isn't present, though. I suppose that would be a spoiler, save that Doom is aggressively self-referential, with passing narrative elements that feel mostly determined to reassure you that you're playing Doom and catch you in a-ha moments where id has slightly subverted or twisted your understanding of the series. I'm generally loathe to discuss story spoilers, so I'll skip anything but the most basic establishment that Doom takes place on Mars on a United Aerospace Corporation installation playing with supernatural forces in an attempt to solve our solar system's ongoing energy crisis. It's a remarkably effective start, and it's off to the races from there. You begin the game in chains and within seconds, you're beating things to death and blasting away. It's aimed at a different branch of the Doom faithful, or at least a different school of thought, and in that regard, it's very successful at distilling the raw gameplay elements of the source material - until, in the end, Doom stumbles over some archaic problems it can't seem to grow out of.ĭoom starts immediately and violently. Doom - in development for the better part of a decade now - is a grotesquely beautiful game that feels in many ways like a direct response to the complaints directed at Doom 3. That perspective being something very fast, very loud, very violent, and very graphic. With that in mind, this new Doom feels like a new translation of the original text, something approaching the gospel from a different perspective. New technology was built specifically to hide all those obvious monster closets from the original games, to make you have to run scared in the dark in a way that maybe id had always intended but never quite came across. It was a translation of what the developers thought Doom was. Id's previous attempt at modernizing the most influential shooter of all time was 2004's Doom 3, a great game that nonetheless proved divisive. There was only moving very fast, and shooting demons. Doom released at the tail end of an era of pixelated abstraction in games, a time when your brain had to do a lot more heavy lifting to fill in the gaps between those big squares of color to see a bright pink demon explode into a intestine-strewn mess, where those bright red blobs were blood, where, as the now-infamous Edge review lamented, there was no talking to the monsters. It's been demonstrated before that taking the original 1993 release of Doom and repurposing it for a modern audience is hard.
Doom (2016) is an attempt at translation.