Doom Eternal: Cure His Heart

Let's have a look at Doom Eternal. I've written a poem about it. I'm going to share it with you. Here is my poem about Doom Eternal. I call it "Doom Eternal".

Doom Eternal
-
When it works,
it's Dieter Diercks!
But when it fails,
it's Tony Sales (bassist with Tin Machine)

I could stop writing, but the night is still young. What is Doom Eternal? It's a first-person action game released in March 2020, just as the world was undergoing its first COVID lockdown. It was a big hit, partially because there was a lot of pent-up demand from fans of its predecessor, Doom (2016), and also because a lot of people were stuck indoors, and what better way to let off some steam than by stabbing demons in the head with a serrated blade.

But success is relative. Doom Eternal was multi-platform, but it was at heart a PC game, or at the very least it came into its own with mouse and keyboard control. It was released for the Xbox and PlayStation as well, and a few months later there was a surprisingly slick Nintendo Switch port, but they were all controller-only. I have no idea why developers don't allow console gamers to use mouse and keyboard. Games consoles have USB ports. Do console owners not have tables? Can't they balance a plank of wood on their laps?

To that end I ventured out into the streets of south London. I asked a selection of random passers-by if they could balance a plank of wood on their laps. They all ignored me. Doom Eternal was released on the very same day as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was the latest in Nintendo's super-cute life simulator franchise. The press laughed heartily at the contrast between the two games. Doom Eternal's gameplay involves ripping demons limb from limb and also stabbing them in the head with a serrated blade, whereas New Horizons involves planting seeds. Doom Eternal ends with the player discovering that heaven is a lie, built on the suffering of the innocent, and that his god is a false god. New Horizons does not have that, and yet despite an almost total lack of gore and blasphemy it was the more popular of the two games by a huge margin.

See, New Horizons is a console game, released exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. It's a different world. Despite the fact that COVID caused a shortage of Switches, New Horizons went on to sell almost fifty million copies, grossing over two billion dollars. It's one of the most popular games of all. It has almost certainly outsold the entire Doom franchise single-handedly. Doom Eternal apparently shifted around eight million copies over the same period, which was excellent for such a niche title, but the relative sales figures do highlight the fact that PCs and consoles live in different worlds.

It must have been tempting for the developers to soften up Doom Eternal and make it console-friendly. But if there is one thing the developers learned from the fate of Valen, the Betrayer, whose treason brought down the Night Sentinels of Argent D'Nur, it's that temptation is a path that only leads to ruin. Instead they held firm. They made Doom Eternal for us. PC gamers. You and I. We. Us.

The Doom franchise has always been aimed at us. Now, Id Software has never been prejudiced against games consoles. The original Doom (1993) was ported to all of the popular consoles of its time, and speaking as a PC person, the PlayStation port of Doom was surprisingly clever. It had a spooky tone that gave the game an identity of its own. In the thirty years or so that have passed since the release of the first game in the series, Doom has been made to run on all manner of stuff, including fridges, fitness watches, pocket calculators, even Doom itself. But at heart it's a PC game, for PC gamers. You and I. We. Us.

Doom and Doom II also run inside Doom Eternal, as an easter egg. The game uses a later version of the .WAD files that replaces the Red Cross icon with pills. It also strips out all the Nazi textures and models from the Wolfenstein levels.

If you run the .WAD file in a source port the Wolfenstein levels look very bare, as at the top here.

The PC as a games platform has waxed and waned over the years. It costs just as much to develop a PC game as it does to develop a console game, but sales are lower, because PCs are expensive pieces of equipment that target an older market. PC owners have to pay for their car, and childcare, and Nike Air Monarchs and so forth. PC developers can ameliorate the cost of development by porting their game to consoles, but this risks diluting all the things that make PC games special.

Furthermore some games are more multi-platformy than others. Undertale? That's an easy port. But fast-paced first-person shooters don't translate well to games consoles, because it's a lot harder to move and aim effectively with a hand controller than it is with a mouse and keyboard. As a result the first-person shooter has evolved into two distinct forms. Old-school, PC-style first person shooters tend to be fast-paced, skill-heavy, and also very rare nowadays, because the PC market is relatively small.

In contrast console shooters are slower, and tend to emphasise scripted action setpieces and cutscenes rather than twitch-style gameplay. They sell in the tens of millions. It's like the difference between Carcass and Def Leppard. In theory they play the same genre of music, and they both have their strengths, but one is greasier and nastier than the other. It's ironic, in a way. Historically it was PC games that were slow and console games that were fast. The first-person shooter is a peculiar inversion.

There was a time when it seemed that our kind might triumph. That we would win. But it was not to last. The light faded. I like to imagine the light finally dimmed towards the end of 2007, when Unreal Tournament 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were released within a few days of each other in November of that year. One of those games was the future, the other was Unreal Tournament 3. One of those games sold millions, and was remade a decade later into a title that sold tens of millions, while the other isn't available any more and can't be played online because the servers were shut down.

But sometimes the pendulum swings the other way. In the 1980s the PC games market was dominated by role-playing games and flight simulators. Meanwhile kids wanted to play Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. Then Doom came along, at which point the PC abruptly and unexpectedly became the hippest gaming platform around. Kids wanted 3D action, and the PC had the best 3D action game around. Even after the launch of the original PlayStation and its contemporaries the PC was the only platform that could play multiplayer games over the internet.

Consoles caught up around the middle of the 2000s and went on to dominate the market, but every so often a new PC game comes out that reminds people of why they spent £1,000 on an ugly metal box that breaks every time the drivers are updated.

For example 2004 had Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, and Doom 3, all of which were popular, critically-acclaimed, extremely influential PC titles. They were eventually ported to consoles, and although the OG Xbox version of the first and last were impressive technical feats they weren't the same. In 2007 STALKER and Crysis showcased the PC's raw graphical power, and a few years after that Minecraft began its swift march to global domination on the PC, before being ported to consoles a few years later. PC-only hits are few and far between, but they haven't completely gone away. Also, you can't bittorrent the entire Ice Road Truckers franchise with a PlayStation 4. You can download or at least view pornography on a PlayStation 4, but it feels weird. So the PC still has a niche.

Let's fast-forward to 2016. Id Software's new Doom title didn't promise much. It had a troubled development and good-but-not-great reviews. However word of mouth had it that the single-player campaign was something special. At a time when the market was getting sick of story-driven military shooters Doom 2016 was non-stop action. Sales were modest, but the Doom franchise was back.

There had been revivals of the meat-and-potatoes first person shooter before. As early as 2001 Croteam's Serious Sam was built around large-scale slaughter arenas. The incredibly long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever (2011) was at least initially intended as a return to 90s-style action, although the end result was a peculiar mish-mash of essentially every gaming trend that had appeared in the 2000s. Doom 2016 on the other hand was a polished, A-list title from a major publisher, with a slick engine and great gameplay focused entirely on running around and shooting things. There were no physics puzzles and no driving sequences. Furthermore it was made by Id Software, the very company that had invented the genre, although by 2016 most of the team that worked on its 1990s classics had left the company.

As a PC person I am fond of Doom (2016). How can I put it? Imagine that you're British, and you've resigned yourself to the fact that Britain will never win Wimbledon again. And then suddenly there is a flash of light, and Andy Murray appears, crouched over, naked, transported from the future, covered in blood, as in The Terminator. He pulls himself up to his full height and surveys the lights of London in the distance. After ripping the hearts out of some punks and stealing their clothes he goes on to win the US Open, and then Wimbledon.

And then he wins Wimbledon again, thus proving that it wasn't a fluke. All of a sudden Britain is back, and all the nations of the world want us to manage their affairs. India gives ownership of its mineral resources to Britain in exchange for protection from Belgium. The government of the United States realises that monarchy is the way to go, and the United States becomes part of the British Empire once again. We allow all of the States of the United States to retain their names, but they are now counties.

Simultaneously Egypt apologises for nationalising the Suez Canal. France admits that it is broken and wrong. Gemma Arterton becomes Queen, and an amendment to the Magna Carta compels her to wear red leather thigh-high boots at all times, as in the video for Kylie Minogue's "Padam Padam". Argentina admits it was joking about the Falklands. Germany dissolves and freely gives its territory to Poland and the Netherlands. Denmark finally sorts out the Schleswig-Holstein question.

Imagine how you would feel, if you were British, and all of those things happened. You would be overjoyed. That is why we must all vote Reform in the next general election. Only they can make those things happen.

This is how PC gamers felt about Doom (2016). The game was a breath of fresh air. There was something uncompromising about it, because the developers were on our side. It was an old-school PC-style first-person shooter, a genuinely difficult game that rewarded skill, and it was made for us. What would Id do next? What was the sequel going to be like? Could Andy Murray win Wimbledon forever?

If you're reading this, Gemma Arterton, it took Rosamund Pike another twenty years to find her groove after Die Another Day. You still have time.

Still have time. I'm old enough to remember the original, original Doom, which came out in 1993. It was technically mindblowing in a way that's impossible to recapture nowadays, and for a few years afterwards Id Software was the world leader in 3D action games. The sequel, Doom II, was more of the same, but better, and the company's next project, Quake (1996), continued their technical dominance over the competition.

But it didn't last. Id was staffed with passionate assholes who quickly got sick of having to spend fifteen hours a day in each other's company. By the end of the 1990s almost all of the people who worked on Doom had left. As I write these words most of them are still alive - morituri te salutant, Bobby Prince - and they remain in contact with each other on Twitter, but the chances of them going back into business with each other are nil. Id's technical leadership continued until roughly 2004, with Doom 3, which had a clever engine but controversial gameplay. From that point onwards the company's output slowed down.

Amongst other things Id pioneered the idea of licencing out their game engine to other companies, instead of keeping it all in-house, but after some initial success the Id Tech engine fell by the wayside. It had strong competition from Valve Software's Source, and latterly Epic's Unreal Engine, which as of this writing is more or less the default non-mobile video game engine. Universities run courses on Unreal 5, while Id Tech is only used by Id and a handful of Id's friends.

Id's next big thing after Doom 3 was Rage, which was released in 2011 to a tepid reception. I've written about it before. Technically it was very clever, and visually it has aged well, but it had an anonymous blandness to it and the story felt unfinished. A year later John Carmack left the company. He was the chief technical guru behind Doom and Quake and the Id Tech engine. From that point onwards Id became the Sugababes of software development. The same name, a similar style, but all the people were different.

And yet there was a lot of residual affection for Id's games. In 2014 MachineGames had a big hit with a surprisingly good reboot of Id's prototypical first-person-shooter Wolfenstein, which spawned a long-running franchise of its own. Circa 2022 the updated re-releases of Quake and Quake II had a strong reception on consoles. I remember hating Quake when it came out, but I grew it like it. Quake II was sort-of mid when it was new, and it remains sort-of mid.

After Rage I have the impression that most PC gaming fans wrote off Id. Without John Carmack, what was the point? Was it even Id any more? Id's next project was a reboot of Doom, but development didn't go smoothly. The original plan was for a military-style shooter set on Earth, but after a couple of years' work the team realised that the game was boring, so they decided to go back to basics and throw in demons and hellspawn and serrated blades and so forth.

One good thing that came from the cancelled Doom 4 was the glory kill. When some of the baddies were mortally wounded but not killed they became stunned, at which point the player could close in and perform a close-quarters execution. This involved ripping open their chests or stomping on their heads or crushing their skulls. The basic idea of a glory kill is old as the hills, but it's an unusual mechanic for a first-person shooter, not least because it doesn't work well in a multiplayer game. The team designed the glory kill so that it would reward the player with health and ammo, which encouraged an aggressive, in-your-face playstyle. It was a simple idea but it worked incredibly well.

Doom (2016) was released to a positive-but-not-rapturous reception. On a personal level I don't remember seeing any publicity for it at the time. I assumed it was a b-list title. The multiplayer game was an afterthought, but the single-player campaign attracted praise, and although I don't have access to official sales numbers I have the impression that it sold and kept selling. Ultimately it was nowhere near as popular as contemporary hits such as Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3, but for a niche first-person shooter aimed at elderly PC owners and heavy metal fans it was a substantial success.

I picked it up on budget in 2020 and enjoyed it. I couldn't quite put my finger on what made it so much fun. It was slick, but it didn't seem to do anything new. I realise now that the glory kill mechanic was the key. Glory kills were optional, but they encouraged the player to get stuck into the fighting instead of staying away. They encouraged a dynamic style of gameplay whereby the player had to close with the demons, deal massive damage, then dance away before the bigger demons got too close. Speedruns of the ultra-nightmare difficulty mode - where the game throws the player back to the menu screen if they die - have the same bewildering, hypnotic quality as the old Quake Done Quick videos.

There was another clever idea. Some of the baddies - shielded soldiers, most obviously - were vulnerable to certain weapons and not others, which led to a gameplay style that encouraged weapon switching. It was a little bit of extra work that made the gameplay feel more complicated. It wasn't oppressive, and the player could complete the entire game with the shotgun and super machinegun, but it added a bit of depth.

The storyline and characterisation were simple, but memorable, and there was a complicated backstory that didn't get in the way of the shooting. In advance of this blog post I replayed it, and it holds up. The platforming is still annoying, but there isn't much of it. The story doesn't slow down the action. What is the story, by the way? In the future the morally flexible United Aerospace Corporation finds a way to drain energy from hell, so they set up a refinery on Mars, just in case something goes wrong.

Inevitably the hell energy corrupts the staff of the Mars base and things go to pot. Luckily the UAC had done a bit of archaeological work beforehand. They had found a mysterious stone coffin containing the body of a man. A man who was both dead and alive, human and not human. A man possessed of a steel-barrelled sword of vengeance. Shortly after the forces of hell began pouring into our dimension the man burst out of his stone sarcophagus, on a single-minded mission to defeat the forces of hell. He is THE DOOMSLAYER, e.g. the player character. An immortal, trans-dimensional warrior who hunts down and kills demons. There's a backstory involving an order of holy warriors and giant monsters, but the player doesn't have to pay any attention to it.

It's good to be The DOOMSLAYER. He's tough, but he isn't an asshole. He's disappointed with humanity, but he's on our side. He was one of us, once. He just wants to have a nap.

The story treads a fine balance between serious and stupid. The opening narration asks the player to rip and tear "until it is done", which sounds portentous, but it's also a tongue-in-cheek reference to a notoriously awful promotional comic for the original, original Doom. The sequel has overt references to Repercussions of Evil, a poor-quality amateur short story based on the original game. The rest of the Doom mythos combines serious mythology with the occasional reference to tie-in novels and fan-fiction. It's basically a heavy metal concept album, but as a video game. Some of the skyboxes are basically gatefold heavy metal album covers.

Still, Doom Eternal. Is it any good? Dieter Diercks, or Tony Sales? Four stars out of five, goodbye.

 

Ye Gods, it's frustrating. The original game had a simple structure. It was essentially a series of combat arenas linked together with corridors. The corridors had a little bit of fighting and some exploration, but the meat of the game was a series of battles, one after the other, and then there was pudding, and then there was meat again, which sounds horrible - you can't go back to savoury - but let's imagine that The DOOMSLAYER is ravenous, on account of the fact that he has been in suspended animation since the end of the Second Age.

Doom Eternal has a similar structure. It has combat arenas, punctuated by transitional bits. I have the impression that the developers split themselves into three teams. One team worked on the combat arenas. A second team worked on the transitional, linking sections, and a third polished up the story. All three teams excelled themselves, and yet the end result is like a mixture of meat and pudding, all on the same plate. Ice cream and mashed potato and gravy, coexisting awkwardly.

The combat is fantastic. It's absolutely superb. Full marks. If the developers had stopped there I would love Doom Eternal. The combat combines the hard-and-heavy up-close fighting of Doom (2016) with the more fluid, acrobatic jumping and shooting of Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament. Do you remember how you could turn the gravity down in Unreal Tournament? It's like that. I would have been perfectly happy if the game had been just a series of combat arenas one after the other. A single, enormous, unending battle punctuated by the occasional loading pause. It would be like biting into an electrical cable. Numbing, and then transcendent.

The combat is tricky at first. The game throws a lot of new mechanics at the player. Some of them were controversial when the game came out. The game encourages the player to use specific weapons against specific baddies, but this is presented in a hamfisted way, as if it was mandatory. If the game merely pointed out that some baddies had destructible weapons, it wouldn't be so bad, but the game implies that the player will have to keep switching from one weapon to the next, targeting weak points until they go dizzy. In reality it's optional. Even on the hardest difficulty level it's just an optional bonus way of doing some extra damage, or knobbling a monster quicker than usual.

It left a bad taste in my mouth. At the beginning of the game I remember wondering if the gameplay was going to be a big memory test, whereby I would have to keep switching between two dozen different combinations of weapon and weapons mods. The rock-paper-scissors aspect also has the effect of making certain weapons redundant. I never bothered with the heavy cannon's micro missiles, for example, because the sniper scope was far more useful. The scope disables the weapons of three different baddies and also has added headshot damage against the smaller demons, whereas the micro missiles have no special use.

Ditto the shotgun's full-auto mod, which was far less versatile than the sticky bombs. Also ditto the plasma gun's microwave beam, which appears to have no special use at all in the base game. To make things worse the rock-paper-scissors aspect feels half-baked. The game emphasises it at the beginning, but gives up on it later on. The weapons that appear later in the game can't specifically target weak spots, and the more powerful baddies don't have any. By the time the player is confronted with Dread Knights and Tyrants the rock-paper-scissors aspect is a distant memory.

Furthermore the one gun mechanic I found myself using the most - the super shotgun's meathook - is introduced almost in passing. It is by far the most memorable of all the new ideas in Doom Eternal. It transforms the arenas into kinetic aerial ballet, but the game treats it as just one of many extra weapon modifications. I was expecting it to be used in the platform sections, for example, but no. Someone should have noticed during playtesting that the meathook was awesome, and encouraged the designers to exploit it more, but they didn't.

Mid-way through the game I settled on the super shotgun for virtually everything. A combination of flaming meathook, jump, aim down slightly, point-blank shotgun blast, blood punch, grenade, followed by jumping away carried me through most of the later levels. It's like Bionic Commando, but on speed.

The other new mechanic is a Predator-style shoulder-mounted projectile launcher. The concept sounds great, but in practice it feels tacked-on. It has three functions. It can fire a grenade, plus a frost grenade that freezes the baddies, plus a flame belch that sets the demons on fire. Each has a use, but the more I played the game the less I liked the projectile launcher. The plasma gun in Doom 2016 had a useful secondary mode that fired stun bombs. The new plasma gun replaces that with a microwave beam that I never used.

I put it to you, developers of Doom, that it would have been simpler to just keep the stun bomb, and omit the frost grenade entirely. Then the player wouldn't have to remember to use the G key now and again. 

The grenade itself overlaps with the shotgun's sticky bomb, so why not be bold and get rid of that, too? It isn't used for any puzzles. In practice it just increases the player's damage output by a small amount every twenty seconds or so. As for the flame belch, why not give the shotgun a weapons mod that fires incendiary shells? By implementing these three changes the projectile launcher could be removed, and thus I have saved the player from having to remember the G, R, and CTRL keys, you can thank me later. There's a fine line between a gameplay mechanic that makes the game more entertaining, and a mechanic that just gives the player more keys to press. The projectile launcher is firmly in the latter category.

The other big new thing is an expanded emphasis on glory kills. In the first game the maps had plenty of ammo, and the extra health and armour from a glory kill was a bonus. Doom Eternal largely strips the maps of ammo bonuses and gives the player a much smaller ammo load. The game expects the player to keep The DOOMSLAYER in business by farming the demons. Thus the aforementioned flame belch, which makes the demons drop armour, but has basically no other use at all.

On the one hand the flame belch feels like a missed opportunity. Who doesn't like the idea of fighting demons with a flamethrower? Albeit that it raises the question of whether demons from hell would be vulnerable to fire. Some of them are already on fire. Some of then are literally made of fire. Wouldn't a flamethrower heal them? Hmm, Id Software? Wouldn't a flamethrower heal them? Why is Arkansas pronounced like that? Why don't you answer me, Id Software? Why?

Why don't you answer. Because you've mostly been laid off and you'd rather not talk about Doom right now. I understand. I apologise. You did a good job. You deserved better.

The DOOMSLAYER has a chainsaw. It spontaneously refills with petrol. Let's assume that the petrol tank is too small to cure humanity's energy crisis. In Doom 2016 it was mostly useful as a get-out-of-jail-free card that could kill the larger demons in one hit. In contrast Doom Eternal's chainsaw is mostly used to farm the lesser demons for ammo. It doesn't work against the tougher demons, so there's a new one-hit-kill weapon, the crucible, which is a giant sword. The crucible is disappointing. The developers didn't program thrusts and parries. There's no swordplay. It's just click-to-swipe, and although the weapon makes sense from a storyline point of view, I have the impression the developers didn't know what to do with it.

A plain glory kill restocks health, so the player has to work out what they need most, and either flamethrow the demons for armour, or chainsaw them for ammo, or hit them enough to stagger them for health, and also flamethrow them as a bonus, with the complication that the flamethrower and chainsaw take time to recharge. In addition the player has the aforementioned grenades, that also take time to recharge, plus a dash ability that recharges. The weapons have secondary fire modes that take time to recharge as well.

All of this extra stuff - this button-pressing and waiting for things to recharge - often feels like busywork. I found myself wondering what it actually added to the gameplay. In practice I gave up on trying to remember which thing had recharged and just periodically tapped the grenade key, the flamethrower key, or the chainsaw key, and I did manage to finish the game, once on hurt me plenty difficulty and a second time on ultraviolence. The game is apparently optimised for the nightmare difficulty level. Could I finish the game in nightmare mode? Perhaps, but it would be a slog.

I mean, I've been playing first-person shooters for nigh-on thirty years, and I really enjoyed Unreal: Tournament, which is faster-paced and more difficult than Doom Eternal, but I'm not as young as I was. On ultraviolence most of my deaths came about when I was trying to do something clever, or when I was trying to win a weapons mastery bonus. If I had knuckled down and actually used the BFG and crucible instead of perpetually keeping them in reserve I would have made much faster progress.

I have a theory. Doom 2016 didn't have any mission packs or season passes. I have the impression that the publishers didn't expect it to sell enough to justify any extra content. As a consequence the developers ended up with a tonne of ideas that all went into Doom Eternal, without a chance to playtest them all. If there had been DLC for the original Doom, the developers might have had time to work out which new mechanics were fun, and which were just busywork, but alas that didn't happen. Instead they shoved all of it into Doom Eternal. All of it. Everything. All at once.

What about the baddies? The array of demons is much the same as it was in Doom 2016. Perhaps the developers didn't have time to do a lot of new animation. There's an upgraded Mancubus, an upgraded Baron of Hell, Doom II-style Pain Elementals and Arch-Viles, and some weaker Cyberdemons, called Tyrants, who are surprisingly boring to fight. There's a new demon called the Doom Hunter, who is introduced with great fanfare but feels like a reject from Quake II. Plus a gladiator, who might have been a fun challenge, but he only appears once, in a boss encounter. Doom 2016 had some memorable boss encounters, but Doom Eternal is surprisingly low-key in that respect. One boss fight involves shooting some eyeballs and then punching a brain, which was so trivial I remember wondering if it was a boss encounter or a puzzle.

One baddie who does stand out, however, is the Marauder. He's introduced as a boss, and then he reappears as a regular heavy later in the game. He was and remains controversial. He's a bit like the shield soldiers, with the difference that the player can't force him to drop his shield with gunfire. Instead the player has to wait for the Marauder to charge, at which point he is briefly vulnerable. If the player shoots his shield too early he spawns a golden dog who tries to flank the player.

There are two problems. Firstly the game encourages the player to use weapon-switching to kill him, but every time I tried it he just raised his shield. I couldn't tell if my timing was terrible, or there was a bug, or if he was just naturally resistant to the ballista. Secondly, for all the hype surrounding him, including a dedicated cutscene, fighting him is surprisingly dull. The player just has to back off, wait for him to charge, shoot him, shoot him again, then back off. In fact the super shotgun plus meathook almost makes him trivial. The first shotgun blast staggers him, then the meathook brings the player into range for a point-blank shotgun hit, and after three or four repeats of this process the Marauder is no more. It can get tricky when the Marauder is part of a larger wave of baddies, but even then his high mobility means that he tends to leave the regular baddies behind.

That's enough about the combat. The game has some Master Levels, which are essentially regular maps but with different enemy spawns. My hunch is that the altered demon spawns were originally intended for the higher difficult levels, but the developers didn't have time, so they ended up using them as bonus maps instead. Here's a video of me playing one of the easier Master Levels, in Ultraviolence difficulty, with "classic" weapons (e.g. new weapons are scattered throughout the map, which is why I only use the shotgun and heavy cannon). Notice how the balance of fighting, jump, and farming the baddies is such that the battle attains a kind of hyponotic equilibrium. Of note the video is set to 18+ so you might need to pop off to YouTube to see it.

So, the combat is fantastic. Full marks. For the combat.

As mentioned up the page I like to imagine that the developers split themselves into three teams. They all did a good job. The combat is fantastic. The third team worked on the storyline. They also did a good job, but the game doesn't present the story very well. There's a big emphasis on hitting the TAB key to read text boxes, which may or may not be a deliberate throwback to the 1990s. There's a lot of backstory, but it slows the gameplay down, and conversely none of it is really worth the read.

Early in the game there's a short sequence where The DOOMSLAYER meets Valen, The Betrayer. There's a whole cutscene, although in practice he just gives the player a big battery. I remember thinking "who is that man", and "should I care about that man", and "will he re-appear", and "should I exercise restraint when using explosives", to which the answers are (a) that's explained in a text box (b) not really (c) no, he doesn't (d) no.

One level involves retrieving The DOOMSLAYER's special sword, but it's a shaggy dog story - it breaks, so he has to forge a new one - and as mentioned earlier it doesn't play much role in the gameplay. Yes, technically he uses it to kill a particularly significant demon, but it's just a McGuffin.

The story is told with text boxes, and the plot is mostly go-here, collect-this, then-go-there, which was true of Doom 2016, but I suspect the developers had higher hopes. It picks up towards the end. When it finally gets going, the story of how The DOOMSLAYER came to be, and the story of how the gods of his universe turned out to be just as evil as the demons, comma, was actually quite affecting. The heavenly expanse of Urdak has an air of tragic grandeur, and it's a shame the story doesn't get into the groove until the second-to-last level.

Which brings us to the third element. The in-between sections. Doom 2016 was basically a series of combat arenas linked with some corridors and a little bit of platforming. Doom Eternal amps this up by removing the corridors and turning the platforming sequences into full-on platform hell. The mixture of double-jumping and dashing reminded me of Ori and the Blind Forest, as indeed did the difficulty level. Has there ever been a game that looked so cute, but was so maddeningly hard, as Ori and the Blind Forest? On the surface it's beautiful, but underneath it's evil. Just like communism or any political system devised by misanthropic, middle-class hipsters with beards. I don't want to be reminded of Ori and the Blind Forest. I loved that game, and also hated it. I don't want to feel anything. I just want to be numb.

Do you remember Mirror's Edge? I wrote about it a few years ago. First-person platforming is very hard to pull off, because the player can't see their feet. Mirror's Edge was built from the ground up as a first-person platform game and it mostly worked. The engine made the player feel like an actual physical body, with hands and feet, clambering onto things and bashing into walls, whereas most first-person games until that point made the player feel like a remote camera hovering in a vacuum.

I don't know if the developers of Doom Eternal ever played Mirror's Edge, although the game was very influential so I have to assume they were aware of it. Whatever the case, the in-between-sections of Doom Eternal feel a lot like Mirror's Edge, but harder, because they're less grounded in reality and there's lava. In isolation Doom Eternal's platforming sections are well-executed, but they don't mix with the rest of the game.

They don't mix well at all. I bought Doom Eternal when it came out on budget in 2022, but I didn't warm to it, and after five hours I gave up and went to Greenland instead. Part of the problem is that the early levels aren't much fun. They feel like glorified tutorials. But most of the problem is that - as with the rock-paper-scissors element - the game throws platforming at the player right from the start. The second level has a sequence (pictured above) where the player must drop down from a height, then dash through a gap, then double-jump-and-dash up the other side onto a wall, then jump from the wall and double-dash to a second wall. The same map has sequence where the player has to jump between collapsing platforms onto a swing-bar, then into a mid-air power-up that refills the player's dash ability, all above a sea of lava. I remember seeing this and thinking "what went wrong".

Later in the game I remember one particular jump that involved leaping from a wall, onto a jump pad,  then pulling a 180 and dashing and jumping so as to avoid a huge piece of spinning debris. The problem with the platforming sections is that they're off-puttingly difficult until the player gets the knack, at which point they become a boring triviality. I'm reminded of The Last Guardian on the PlayStation 4, which has a similar problem. Once you know what to do, there isn't any challenge. Furthermore the combat and platforming are completely separate. Doom 2016's exploration sequences had a bit of action and a bit of exploration, but Doom Eternal separates the two flavours entirely. When there is platforming, there are no monsters, and vice-versa.

To be fair, if the player falls into oblivion they're returned to the start of the platforming section with a little bit of health taken off, but I still hated the platforming sections, and then I was bored with them. I never enjoyed them. They brought the game to a standstill when they appeared. The developers would probably argue that they exist to hone the player's mobility, but in the combat arenas I never had to drop down from a wall, then dash, then jump up, then dash, then grab a wall etc. In fact most of my mobility came from the super shotgun's meathook, which is never used in the platforming sections.

Also, do you know what else honed my mobility? The combat arenas. I didn't need a separate set of tutorials to learn how to navigate the combat arenas. The combat arenas themselves taught me that.

The platforming would have been inoffensive if it was optional. The game has bonus elements in each of the levels. Generally one or two extra combat encounters, plus a separate, optional mini-arena that rewards the player with part of the key to a special weapon. If the platforming had been a kind of bonus "show us your skills" element, I wouldn't have minded. But it's mandatory. There are no short-cuts. The player has to knuckle down and learn how to jump and shoot a switch then dash and wall-grab then double-dash and double-jump and so forth.

So, on the whole, Doom Eternal has great combat, and the rock-paper-scissors element is much less annoying than it could have been. Only one of the new enemies requires a completely different gameplay style, and he only appears a few times. However after every arena the game grinds to a halt, because there's some unavoidable, unskippable platforming. The platforming is unenjoyable the first time and boring thereafter. The story doesn't get going until the very end.

The game has considerably more replayability than Doom 2016, with a bunch of Master Levels that add new monster spawns, plus some optional cheat codes that allow the player to indulge their power fantasies. One cheat code even dubs applause over the gameplay, with the occasional incongruous "yeah" during quiet moments and a dog bark. But I can't bring myself to max out all the secrets because the pacing is bitty and the levels are slightly too long to play casually.

Performance-wise Doom Eternal looks a lot like a predecessor, which is to say that it's a very attractive game. I would use the word chunky to describe the scenery. With my bog-standard Intel i3 / Geforce GTX 1650 combination it hit a steady 60fps at 1080 resolution. The game doesn't require ray-tracing or anything fancy. It has some occasionally quite epic scenery, but it never slows down. There is some odd pop-in, whereby objects at the edge of the screen appear from thin air when the player turns around - presumably they were being loaded from disc - but it was unnoticeable during the action gameplay. EDIT: Since writing that paragraph I bought a second-hand Geforce GTX 1080, which is ancient - it was released in 2016 - but still pretty slick today at 1080. It easily runs Doom Eternal at max settings at 60fps albeit that it can't do raytracing

What about the music? Doom 2016 had a fantastic electronic metal soundtrack by Mick Gordon, who produced oodles of music for the game and then edited it all down for the accompanying soundtrack LP, which was released on double and quadruple vinyl. Gordon outdid himself. A joke going around at the time was that Doom was a fantastic industrial metal album with a pretty good free game.

Sadly Doom Eternal isn't in the same league. There's one absolutely superb action theme, "The Only Thing They Fear is You", and the ending credits music is brooding and atmospheric. Unfortunately the rest of the soundtrack is a kind of aural wallpaper. It works well in context, but I don't remember any of it.

But therein lies a tale. Shortly after Doom Eternal's soundtrack was released there were complaints on the internet that the mastering was poor, and that some songs appeared to be stitched together from parts of other songs. Furthermore the soundtrack was only available digitally, and at over four hours it felt as if the producers had simply thrown together every scrap of music from the game, whether it was meant to be enjoyed in isolation or not.

Mick Gordon pointed out online that he had only tangentially been involved in the final mixing, at which point one of Id's executives seemed to take personal offence, posting a lengthy message on Reddit to complain that Gordon had missed deadlines, and that most of his music was atmospheric noodling rather than hard action themes, and that Gordon should not have badmouthed the end product.

Gordon responded with a lengthy essay on Medium.com. He pointed out that the soundtrack album was sold as Mick Gordon's Doom Eternal, and that the had every right to criticise something that had his name on it. Secondly he revealed that Id had given him a deadline of two weeks to produce a suite of music for each of the game's levels, with no time to bounce ideas off the team, in part because he had to compose the music blind, because the levels and indeed general shape of the game hadn't been designed yet. Ultimately he was contracted to produce just over two hours of music, but ended up submitting double that, because Id continually rejected his contributions.

Towards the end of the process he was given an extra fortnight to create the soundtrack album, only to find that Id had already asked one of their audio designers to assemble it from Gordon's outtakes. The soundtrack album was therefore a mixture of a dozen tracks that Gordon had managed to master for release, plus an hour or so of Gordon's unmixed musical score, plus two hours of outtakes that Id technically hadn't paid for.

As a consequence relations between Gordon and Id broke down, and Doom Eternal's mission packs were scored by other composers. It seems unlikely Gordon will ever return to the series. The Doom Eternal soundtrack itself never had a wide release. It was only ever available as a bonus for people who pre-ordered the game, although the individual tracks are widely available on Youtube. As a happy postscript Mick Gordon is apparently going to headline RADAR 2027, a Sheffield-based music festival, where he will perform his music for the Doom games with a full band and orchestra. Let's all cross our fingers and hope that Id Software doesn't set their lawyers on him, or something.

Still, in summary, Doom Eternal is basically one step forward and two steps back from Doom 2016. The combat is more fluid, more jumpy, harder but just as fair. It has a steep learning curve and the early maps aren't much fun, but once the player amasses an arsenal and learns how to get stuck in it's one one the best first-person shooters I've ever played, on a par with the original Unreal: Tournament. The expanded storyline is at least mostly transparent, although it doesn't really get going until the end, but the game as a whole is tainted by the platform sequences, which kill the pacing and simply aren't fun to play. The end result is a real curate's egg of a game.

What happened next? The game was a big hit. Enough to justify a pair of expansion packs, The Ancient Gods 1 and 2, released in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The first is apparently more of the same, but harder. The second apparently dials things down a little bit, but has a convoluted plot. I have no special desire to play either DLC.

A third game in the revival series followed in 2025. Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel that tells the story of how The DOOMSLAYER came to be. It tones down the jumpy, weapon-swappy gameplay of Doom Eternal in favour of straightforward blasting. The DOOMSLAYER now has a multi-purpose shield. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have sold very well. The publishers haven't released official numbers, but it was released essentially for free on the Xbox, as part of that platform's Game Pass subscription service, and it had one-third Doom Eternal's Steam player count at launch.

My hunch is that fans of Doom 2016 who were alienated by Doom Eternal stayed away. A launch price of $70 / £70 / €80 didn't help. And the game requires a graphics card that supports raytracing, so even if I wanted to buy it, I wouldn't be able to run it. I would need to spend an extra £200 on a suitable second-hand GPU.

To date The Dark Ages has had one expansion pack, Revelations, which was released in July 2026, just a couple of months ago. Unfortunately this coincided with a massive wave of lay-offs at Microsoft's gaming studios, including Id Software. It remains to be seen how this will affect the Doom series.

Nonetheless Id has a long history of shedding talent, but bouncing back. It lost Tom Hall during the development of Doom, John Romero and Sandy Petersen during the development of Quake, Adrian Carmack around the time of Doom 3, John Carmack post-Rage, and admittedly whilst this happened the company went from being the world leader in 3D action games to being an irrelevant has-been, but the point still stands, whatever it was. Id will probably rise again, and so will Doom, unless it doesn't, the end.

Doom (2016)

Many years have passed since I last thought of The Cardigans. Do you remember The Cardigans? They were a Swedish indie guitar band from the mid 1990s. As was the fashion back then the band consisted of a bunch of anonymous men who played the instruments and a lady singer, Nina Persson, who looked like a Japanese cartoon girl and sang as if she was on tranquilisers. Here in the UK they were initially marketed as a Swedish lounge band, but eventually they found their niche as a lightweight, low-key contemporary pop act with an iconoclastic bent - they had a peculiar yen for easy listening Black Sabbath covers, and their musical weltanschauung wasn't far removed from Stereolab or The Sugarcubes, but with a more commercial sound.

I will never know, 'cause you will never show / come on and love me now, come on and love me now

For a while they were spoken of in the same breath as The Wannadies, who also came from Sweden, but whereas The Wannadies had trouble capitalising on the success of "You and Me Song" The Cardigans had a second act; their 1998 post-Britpop album Gran Turismo sold more than three million copies and "Erase/Rewind" made the top ten in 1999. Along with Catatonia they were one of the few female-fronted bands from the Britpop period that retained their popularity afterwards, although ultimately The Cardigans' career as a chart act fizzled out before the turn of the millennium. No-one hated them and they periodically reform, and Persson herself was fab. Nowadays she is grown up and married and living in New York. I think I can speak for most British men of a certain age when I say that I wish her well.

The Cardigans had one final top ten hit in 1999, a cover of Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" with Tom Jones, before taking a haitus. Their comeback single, "For What it's Worth", was terrific, but for whatever reason the band never recaptured its commercial appeal and essentially retired in 2005.

Do you remember lounge pop? It was one of those stillborn musical genres from the 1990s that people talked about but no-one liked. No-one misses it. Lounge pop was steeped in irony, which was huge in the 1990s, and today we're going to have a look at Doom, a terrific and very successful reboot of Id Software's venerable Doom franchise. It has recently come down in price so I decided to check it out. It's really good!

Doom was originally released in 2016. At the time no-one expected great things of it. The original Doom was ages old and Id Software's previous attempt to reboot the series, the ponderous underlit jump-scare-heavy Doom 3 (2004), sold lots of copies but didn't age well. Publishers Bethseda Softworks seemed to have no faith in the game and refused to give out review copies, usually a bad sign. Prior to release Doom was also criticised for its uninspired box art, which made the game look like a Call of Duty spin-off rather than the return of a giant from the past.

In which I play some of Doom (2016). Ultra-violence difficulty, on the PC.

I remember that the game emerged without much fanfare. It was launched the same month as Uncharted 4 and Overwatch, which overshadowed it; by the end of the year everybody was talking about Battlefield 1 and the remastered re-release of Grand Theft Auto V. In the UK Doom topped the sales charts for a couple of weeks and went on to be the fifteenth best-selling game of the year, a far cry from the original Doom, which was massive in its day.

Reviews were good but not ecstatic, most reviewers praising the single-player campaign and pooh-poohing the uninteresting multiplayer, with special nods to the excellent soundtrack and clever built-in prefab level designer. Nonetheless there seems to be a general consensus nowadays that Doom was something special and deserved more; the single-player campaign is great fun, and the game works equally well as a reboot of the original, a clever homage, and an excellent jumpy-shooty action game in its own right. In my opinion Doom 2016 is the best pure action shooter in years, a refreshing change from scripted, quicktime-event-based, franchise-extending interactive movies.

Doom is rendered in rich solid slabs of colour.

Doom is available for the PC, XBox One, and Playstation 4. I played it on my PC, which is modest. It has an Intel i5-2500K plugged into an ASRock H67M-GE motherboard, with an Nvidia GTX 750 graphics card that I bought more recently. This setup runs Doom just fine at 1920x1080 although curiously it slows to a crawl at one point - an arctic-themed level - and only that point.

The original Doom was available on 3.5" and 5.25" floppy discs and latterly CD-ROM. It took up about 14mb of hard drive space. In contrast the new Doom is a 55gb download that expands to 70gb or so. The game is available on DVD, but it's a bit of swizz because the DVD only has the setup program. It still has to download the vast majority of the game.

I'm old enough to remember the original Doom. Back in 1993 it was a giant leap for 3D action games, an epoch-making step-change that's impossible to appreciate nowadays. It was revolutionary in so many ways. It was one of the first 3D games that was pure action from start to finish, without any role-playing or simulation elements. It was one of the first PC games with a fast-moving texture-mapped 3D engine. It revolutionised multiplayer gaming; it revolutionised the modding community; some amateur map designers got jobs in the games industry on the back of their Doom maps; it made the PC hip; it made 3D gaming hip; it made Id Software very briefly the most important games design team in the world, with John Romero the most important games developer in the world and, if you were a young games fan, the most important man in the world, nb other people helped him write Doom. 1993 was a long time ago and much has changed since then.

Reimagining Doom today must have been difficult, because the original predates most of the conventions of modern first-person shooters. The designers compensated for the rudimentary monster AI by flooding the levels with baddies, or alternatively by making the monsters very, very tough, in the hope that the player would make a mistake in the time it took to grind them down. In contrast Doom 2016 makes the monsters smarter but thins down their numbers and concentrates them in enclosed arenas.

In fact the game is essentially a set of arena fights punctuated by bursts of exploration. As with Doom 3 (2004) the scenery is hyperdetailed, although unlike that game there's far more variety. The interiors are packed with illuminated computer terminals and futuristic industrial detritus, as if the designers had used Blu-Rays of the first two Alien films for reference. The mixture of red-blue neon-tinted lighting and giant industrial fans casting volumetric shadows into clouds of steam give the game a distinctly 1980s aesthetic, while other levels seem to draw inspiration from System Shock 2 (a hydroponics plant) and the clean architecture of the Halo titles, although Doom's levels are generally smeared in blood and gore.

Later in the game the player is sucked into hell, which has the colour scheme and piled skeletons of a Frank Frazetta painting mixed with the floating rocks of Roger Dean.

Doom gets better the harder it is. After installing the game I started my first playthrough on Ultra-Violence, the original game's one true difficulty level. The easier difficulties are boring; the harder difficulty levels (Nightmare and Ultra-Nightmare) are frustrating unless you know roughly where everything is. The original game had a novelty difficulty level that made dead monsters come back to life after a short period of time, whereas Doom's novelty difficulty level, Ultra-Nightmare, adds perma-death, whereby if you die your save game is erased! You have to start from the beginning again. The professional gaming community took three days to beat Doom on Ultra-Nightmare. It took me roughly that time to finish the first level, restarting over and over until I got it right, and I have no plans to go any further.

In which I play the first level on Ultra-Nightmare difficulty, almost dying several times. The first level.

The problem is that the skills I honed on the original Doom are irrelvant in 2016. But I have distant memories of Unreal: Tournament, and after memorising the following four rules...

(a) always keep moving
(b) ignore impossible shots
(c) score hits, but keep moving
(d) always be executing the next action

...Ultra-Nightmare got easier. Not easy. The game's difficulty curve is a kind of flattened U-shape, hard easy hard again. When Doom was new there was an infamous video going around the internet in which a professional games journalist tried to show off the first half-hour of gameplay without having the slightest clue how to move and aim at the same time:

The internet laughed and laughed. I laughed too, but on my first playthrough I died in the first room, at which point I stopped laughing and instead sobbed in rage and frustration as I felt the cold wind of irrelevance and old age sweep over me. An explosive barrel killed me. The barrels explode harder than the barrels in the original. Furthermore the cannon fodder imps are a lot more dangerous than their 1993 equivalents. The original game's artificial intelligence was simplistic. The baddies were just mobile turrets that couldn't aim ahead of their targets, and you were much faster than them, so unless you were overwhelmed with monsters or taken by surprise it was easy to master the game. Doom 2016 instead has the kind of bot-based AI that became common in the early 2000s whereby the baddies clamber over the scenery, take cover, rush you and retreat as appropriate.

Is that a mistake? I think it is.

In Doom 3 the display screens were often interactive - in Doom 2016 they're either simple on/off buttons or they're just for show. Judging by the various personnel lists througout the game, Doom 2016 takes place in a future where the white race has largely exterminated all others (or alternatively the UAC's human resources department is staffed with... genetic connoisseurs).

At times the illusion of intelligence breaks down. As with the original Half-Life, Doom appears to divide each room into a series of waypoints that the monsters try to reach, and over time you can anticipate where the baddies will leap. Furthermore the monster waves are learnable, and the battles usually follow a formula, although less slavishly than Doom 3. At least on Ultra-Violence the game seems to get easier as it goes on - in later levels you fight bigger monsters, but they're bigger targets and you have stronger weapons. Doom has a small arsenal of mostly useful guns that each have two upgrade paths, beyond which you can also upgrade your suit, although you need to find secrets and successfully kill off waves of monsters in order to earn upgrade points. You can also upgrade your points by carrying out special challenges - killing multiple baddies with a single shot, for example - and you're allowed to go back and replay levels in order to explore them more thoroughly.

The game also has runes, which act as permanent power-ups. Your suit can run three at a time, and you earn then by playing challenges in a miniature arena. In one rune challenge you have to blow up zombies with explosive barrels, while in another you have to kill monsters with a rocket launcher, with the caveat that you have no extra health and the rocket explosions hurt you as well. Certain combinations of runes and weapons actually unbalance the game. One rune gives you infinite ammo if your armour is above a certain value; a second rune makes the baddies drop armour when you kill them, which essentially means that you have both infinite armour and infinite ammo if you equip both runes. A third rune makes the baddies occasionally drop BFG ammo, which means that the boss encounters become much easier. If you equip all three of those runes the arenas turn into a chore where you stand in cover hosing everything down with an upgraded chaingun, or blasting everything with an upgraded gauss cannon.

Ah, but if you just play the game it's excellent fun. I am years out of practice playing first person shooters and I imagine that a more seasoned player would prefer the game's Nightmare mode. Some of the boss fights become a bit tedious - you repeat a pattern of moves until the boss dies, or you die - but the arenas are entertaining and diverse. The early-mid game has an unfortunate emphasis on platform jumping, which I have always hated in first person shooters, but it's not so bad given that the physics are forgiving and the clambering-onto-ledges mechanism works well. I never once felt that I missed a jump because the game had screwed me over.

Incidentally the game's physics engine is rubbish. When you knock over chairs and other scenery items they start bouncing hyperactively against the floor. It's as if the developers had a distant memory of the physics-based gameplay of Half-Life 2 and the Portal series and decided that Doom wasn't going to have any of that, thank you very much. Doom doesn't have physics puzzles. Instead it has exploding heads. In Half-Life 2 you had to stack bricks onto a see-saw so that you could jump onto a ledge; in Doom 2016 you twist off the monster's heads and crush their skulls and rip off their legs and beat them to death with their own limbs and cut them into pieces with a chainsaw and punch them so hard their heads go SPLAT. It's exactly like being trapped in a Brazilian prison but there's also a slaughterhouse and a butcher's shop and there are floating, flaming skulls and actual demons as well, but otherwise it's the same.

Did I mention that you're no longer a human being? Doom 2016 is a hard reboot of the Doom series, taking placed at an unspecified point in the future where you are THE DOOMSLAYER, a supernatural warrior who has STALKED AEONS OF TIME in order to SLAY THE DEMONIC FORCES OF HELL, and I'm using capital letters because at certain points in the game the Doomslayer's backstory is DELIVERED BY A HEAVY METAL VOICEOVER. It should be cheesy but it's awesome.

It becomes apparent early in the game that THE DOOMSLAYER is literally us. He's an amalgam of the heroes of Doom and Doom 3 and all of the people who have ever played Doom. It's touching. He never speaks, and only interacts with the world by punching and kicking it, but he does so with gusto and is by far the most likeable character in the game.

The game has a complex backstory told with PDA entries and voiceovers. It's standard Warhammer 40,000 with some of the names changed, about a bunch of bastards doing unpleasant things in an awful future where everything is shit. With the exception of helpful computer ally VEGA every single non-player character in the game is a bastard, or a weakling, or a corpse; in the course of the game you kill everything you meet, except for the big boss enemy, who survives to set up the sequel.

I hope there will be a sequel. Doom is a breath of fresh air and well worth £9.99 for the single-player campaign. Unless you're using a walkthrough the levels are complicated enough to explore twice. I admit that I haven't bothered with the multiplayer - I would lose, badly - and I haven't tried out the SnapMap level editor. Unlike the original Doom, there's no way for amateurs to create entirely original levels; it appears that that texturing, pathing, lightsourcing, hyperdetailing etc is impractical for home users. It's a shame. I realise that the gaming industry operates on a scale unimaginable in 1993, and is now fully professional, but without punky homebrew level designers where will the next generation of talent come from?

Doom 2016 has secret recreations of selected original Doom levels - you can explore parts of them during the game, or go back later and explore the whole map. They use Doom 2016's monsters, which changes the difficulty slightly (the one exception is the Cyberdemon, who looks like the Doom 2016 Cyberdemon but has the rocket-spamming AI of the original). For some reason the texturing has some mistakes and the lighting is very flat.

Also, did I mention the soundtrack? It has a fantastic industrial metal soundtrack mostly done by a chap called Mick Gordon. The original Doom had a set of memorable but cheesy MIDI imitations of contemporary metal; Gordon's music has some clever references to the original tracks but otherwise sounds likes a heavier, bassier version of Terrible Thing to Taste-era Ministry, or a slicker version of Sonic Mayhem's Quake II themes, except that this time it's context-sensitive. The guitars buzz like chainsaws and the drums have so much compression that they punch holes in the fabric of time. It switches into high gear when the action heats up and overall it lifts the game up a couple of notches.

Doom teaches us that disabled people and women - especially disabled women - are weak and can't be trusted.

This being 2017 I have to cover the political aspects of the game. The original Doom was released in 1993, just after the first Gulf War. It was an extended metaphor for the United States' contemporary self-image. In the game a lone survivor of demonic possession single-handedly destroyed the forces of Satan, just as the United States had single-handedly destroyed Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq while the rest of the world was either seduced by those evil ideologies or was simply too weak to resist. The game didn't have an obvious take on feminism or issues affecting the trans or queer communities. Doom 2016 is in contrast a clever satire that simultaneously embraces and skewers the subconscious fears of the alt-right. The game's chief villain is a lady scientist called Olivia Pierce, who is not only a woman but also disabled - she has scoliosis - and thus has to wear a robotic suit. Throughout the game physical weakness and deformity are conflated with perversion and weakness; the other main character, corporate boss Samuel Hayden, also wears a robotic suit (in fact, his whole body is robotic) because he was stricken with cancer.

Pierce resembles Tilda Swinton, e.g. she is codified as a short-haired intellectual lesbian, and is modelled as a hunched crone who can barely walk. She attempts to cut a deal with the forces of hell, but her simple, treacherous womanly mind is overwhelmed by the masculine power of Satan - a man - and at the end of the game she is turned against her will into a giant spider.

Spiders are traditionally portrayed in Western culture as feminine creatures. Along with housecats they embody many of the negative stereotypes Western society has about women. They are vile, suspicious, weak creatures that lurk in the darkness, capturing innocent flies in a treacherous web; unlike tigers or honey badgers there is nothing courageous about them, they are passive menaces akin to quicksand or venus fly traps. They embrace their prey in a deadly web and live only to consume. At the end of the game THE DOOMSLAYER defeats the giant spider by ramming his most powerful weapon into her mouth and pulling the trigger, blowing her brains out. The symbolism could not be more obvious.

Of course, this is 2017 and not 1993. The portrayal of Olivia Pierce - the equation of unnatural sexuality and physical deformity with evil, requiring that Pierce be repeatedly violated both mentally and physically before being exterminated, because she's too soiled to save - is so extreme that it must be satire. It's the kind of thing The Taliban would find embarassing. I'm not even going to touch the game's racial dimension, but suffice it to say that DOOM is an anagram of OOM'D = OOM PAUL = Paul Kruger, and I think you can tell where this is going. On the other hand the game's treatment of transexual issues is highly progressive, so in summary Doom gets 3/10.

Memories of Doom
A quarter of a century later it's impossible to recapture the impact Doom had in 1993. Imagine if the first ever talking film had been The Godfather, but in 1927. Imagine if audiences in 1927 had been hit with speech and colour and a great film at the same time. Doom took the basic gameplay of Id Software's earlier Wolfenstein but vastly improved the graphics and environments. I remember playing the game for the first time in early 1994, just walking around the first room, admiring the lighting and the way that the player's gun bobbed up and down. I admit that I was on powerful tranquilising medication at the time, but even so Doom wiped the floor with the crude polygonal virtual reality demonstrations that had been fashionable just a couple of years earlier. It made contemporary FMV-heavy CD-ROM games look like bloated piles of cack.

Until Doom came along 3D games had either been sprite-based fantasy adventures along the lines of Dungeon Master or The Bard's Tale, where the environment was a series of still pictures, or they were ponderous simulation games in which the player slowly explored a set of untextured square rooms as in e.g. Castle Master or Cybercon III. One of the few exceptions was Ultima Underworld, which had a fully texture-mapped environment rendered in proper 3D, but it was a boring old role-playing game and furthermore it was slow and visually monotonous. Doom on the other hand was a fast-paced visual feast. It had a simple but effective 3D engine that supported variable light levels and complex architecture, and a clever audio system that let you track baddies by listening to the sounds they made. Beyond the technology Doom stood out because it was refreshingly uncomplicated. Unlike Ultima Underworld it didn't have an inventory or any role-playing elements, or cryptic interface icons that were so beloved of games designers back then.

The game's ending credits sequence is a thing of beauty.

During its development phase Doom had an elaborate backstory with multiple characters, but this was continually pared down because the designers realised that no-one cared. The end result was a technically state-of-the-art game that was easy to pick up and fun to play. It was also a welcome change from the wave of graphically attractive but hollow FMV CD-ROM titles that were all the rage in the early 1990s. They died; Doom survived. In Doom the player was a space marine sent to investigate a research base on Phobos, one of the potato-shaped moons of Mars. The enormous United Aerospace Corporation had developed teleportation, but unfortunately their machines had gone wrong and opened a portal to hell. Monsters came through, killing everybody. The player's goal was to kill them back. Not to rescue anybody or carry out any quests, just kill, which was fine by me and millions of people who also played Doom. It was the early 1990s. "Just kill" was good enough.

Furthermore there was the community aspect. Doom's novel multiplayer deathmatch begat countless LAN parties, and when players realised they could replace the original maps with their own levels, and share them on the internet - because the maps were small and compressed well - an online community emerged which survives to this day. Doom popularised the first-person-shooter genre, brought local and eventually online multiplayer into the mainstream, briefly made the PC the must-having gaming platform, and gave the modding community a massive boost, and it was just one game. About the only thing it failed to do was establish the homebrew shareware model as a viable mainstream publishing avenue. From Doom II onwards Id's publishers sold the team's games exclusively as boxed commercial products.

The other thing was the "rule of cool". Doom was an over-the-top mixture of ideas drawn from other games and from films such as Aliens and Bad Taste. It had the typical demons and imps from fantasy titles, plus a futuristic plasma rifle from the likes of Shadowrun - surprisingly, given the release date, it didn't have any cyberpunk elements - but it also gave the player a real-life chainsaw and a pump-action shotgun. Men love the idea of fighting demons with a chainsaw and/or a shotgun, and Doom's development team understood this perfectly. The team were mostly in their twenties, but they still understood the mindset of teenagers. The modern Doom has something of this. It reminds me of Mad Max: Fury Road, which was a rock-hard action film directed by a 70-year-old man who wanted to make a series of car crashes into an awesome kinetic sculpture. Doom 2016 is a thrill ride but it's self-conscious as well.

Beyond its innovations Doom was fun to play and aged well. When the single-player campaign got boring there was a huge library of user-generated levels, and when single-player fighting became tedious there was the uncomplicated multiplayer. On a technical level it was quickly surpassed by Duke Nukem 3D and other Build Engine games, and then Id Software's own Quake and Quake II, and then the likes of Unreal and Half-Life, but people continued to play Doom because it was simple and fast-paced. It has a following today, indeed Doom 2016 was inspired partially by Brutal Doom, a gore-enhanced remake of the original game running on a custom-made engine.

The original Doom is essentially the grand old man of PC action games. It's debatable whether Doom is single-handedly responsible for the PC's survival as a gaming platform - there were plenty of games for the PC prior to Doom, and competitors such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were already on their last legs in 1993 - but nonetheless Doom revolutionised PC gaming and established the PC as the coolest gaming platform around. The pre-Doom PC gaming scene majored in flight simulators, point-and-click adventures and role-playing games; Doom essentially killed off the first two genres and forced the third to change its ways. It was released at a point in time when the PC had a technological edge over games console, and within a couple of years there was an explosion of PC-based first-person shooting games, such as Star Wars: Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D. All of a sudden the idea of spending more than a thousand pounds on a new 486DX2/66 didn't seem so bad.

Looking back, 1994 and 1995 were great years for PC gaming. Command and Conquer, Mechwarrior 2, TIE Fighter, the FMV-heavy, not-very-good, but-CDROM-drive-selling Wing Commander IV, plus System Shock, Civilization 2, Diablo, etc, all justified the relatively huge expense of owning a PC purely for gaming. The PC's other killer app was the internet, and within a short space of time the combination of great games and pornography meant that PC sales experienced double-digit growth until the turn of the millennium. The internet also allowed fans of Doom to share user-made levels and play against each other in multiplayer games, although by the time the internet became ubiquitous the audience had moved on to other games. Nonetheless Doomworld.com still hosts user levels from the 1990s and people still release new maps today.

Id released an official Doom sequel in 1994. Doom II felt disappointingly unadventurous at the time but in retrospect it was a perfectly-judged expansion of the original. The new maps were solid without being flashy. At first the decision to add just one new weapon felt miserly, but the new double-barrelled shotgun was genuinely useful. Competing first-person shooters tended to load the player down with an arsenal of novelty weapons that the player never used, but the double-barrelled shotgun was powerful enough to clear most of the levels by itself, and also limited enough that the player couldn't use it all the time, and furthermore it made a great bassy booming noise. The new monsters fleshed out the game's mid-range, and although some of them were uninspired clones of other monsters the Revenant and Arch-Vile were particularly clever.

The Revenant always reminded me of one of the robotic prototypes from Robocop II. Unlike most of the other monsters he's man-made.

It's notable that of all of the baddies in the original Doom games the Revenant has had the least changes over the years. He appears in Doom 2016 more or less unchanged from Doom 3, although now he has a rocket pack. The other monsters were incapable of deflection shooting, but the Revenant could fire homing missiles, and at close range it had a mean punch. The blood-stained, skeletal design was more horrific and less cartoonish than the other monsters. The Revenant was a harbinger of first-person monsters to come.

Doom II was a big success, but Id then seemed to lose interest in the franchise. The original game was given some extra levels and re-released as Ultimate Doom, in which form it's still available today. Id also released mission packs for Doom II composed of home-made levels for which Id had bought the rights (The Master Levels and Final Doom, respectively), but although the maps were entertaining both titles were generally seen as barrel-scraping exercises, especially given that Final Doom was released in the same month as Quake, which was Id Software's Next Big Thing.

Quake was a first-person shooter built around a new 3D engine. It was graphically monotonous and had a so-so single-player campaign but was nonetheless a peek into the future in a way that Final Doom was not. With the right hardware Quake was hectic, and as a multiplayer game it quickly overshadowed Doom. The relationship between the two franchises mutated over time. The original Quake borrowed heavily from the works of H P Lovecraft, although the end result was basically Doom with slightly different monsters. Quake 2 (1997) was developed as a completely separate title, with the Quake name added at the last moment; it was essentially Doom with quasi-robot monsters in space. Quake 2 was a big success and also sold well on the strength of its support for then-new 3D graphics cards.

Id subsequently concentrated on the Quake franchise. Quake III Arena was released in late 1999, but it was multiplayer only and I remember ignoring it at the time. After the multiplayer success of the Quake games conventional wisdom had it that the future of action games was multiplayer only, a theory quickly dashed by the success of Half-Life. By 1999 Id no longer had a dominant position as the leading developer of first-person shooters, and I remember thinking that Quake III Arena was a tacit admission that Id had decided to forgo total spectrum dominance in favour of a niche market. Quake III had strong competition from Unreal: Tournament and Counter-Strike, and although it was very popular it never had the field entirely to itself.

A third Doom game, Doom 3, was released in 2004 but found itself overshadowed by the likes of Half-Life 2 and Far Cry, at which point Id seemed to give up on the series again. In fact Id seemed to disappear. The company wrote the engine for Quake 4 (2005) but otherwise left the game to an outside development team; where once Id's titles had been major events I recall that Quake 4 just came and went. There was a gap of six years before their next title, Rage (2011), which I admit I haven't played; it sold modestly and was mostly written-off as a clone of Borderlands and Fallout, and bear in mind that 2011 was also the year of Portal 2, Batman: Arkham City, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, and lots of other games with 3 or 5 in the title that sold millions and outgrossed Hollywood.

Nonetheless Id was busy on a new Doom game. The team spent several years in the late 2000s and early 2010s developing a version of Doom 4 that was eventually scrapped because it was boring and felt like a copy of Call of Duty. Judging by the trailers it would have been set on Earth, and would probably have involved squad-based combat and lots of dialogue. Whereas Doom 3 and the original Doom 4 took the franchise in new directions, Doom 2016 is firmly in the mould of the original games, with elements of Quake 2 (the colour scheme, most obviously, but also the iconic quad damage power-up) and and Quake III Arena (the arena fights). It's as if Id finally realised that they got it right first time; all they needed to do was give the original game a polish and add exploding heads.

Is Doom (2016) any good? Yes, it is.