So yes, I was a Doomie back in the day, and a Duker, and played those games until everyone else had moved on to the newer gens of multiplayer stuff. My kid blew $60 on Doom when it was released and has been babbling about it intermittently ever since. But I prefer the more complicated, intelligence-driven open-world games; I’ve outgrown “kill everything that blinks” FPS’s.
So Kid crashes into my office yesterday: “Dad! Doom’s $30! You gotta geddit!”
So I had $50 or so sitting in PayPal that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so okay, hell with it, I buy Doom. It DLs overnight and takes an hour to get rolling.
I play for five minutes. Nice.
I come back a few hours later… and HOLY SHIT IS THIS ONE CACKLING, GRINNING, ROARING RIPPING MOFO OF A REMAKE OF ONE OF THE GREATEST GAMES EVER!
The graphics are of course astounding and it all has the comfortable feel of a good old shoe. But the fantastic gameplay, character movement (both NPC and player) and the crazy-ass animations have me bouncing in my chair and giggling maniacally in a good room fight… and I outgrew that crap DECADES ago.
It is indeed very good. Looks great, plot does not insist on itself, weapons are very satisfying, action is frantic and fluid. If I must nitpick I’ll point out that there is a bit more jumping than I would have preferred, feels a bit like parkour, which is just silly when there is demons trying to murder you.
Agreed with everyone else – Doom 2016 got it right. Lot of fun, never got old. Silly plot could afford to be silly. How well it ran on my system was insane.
Interestingly, the last FPS I really enjoyed before that was the reboot of the Wolfenstein franchise (The New Order/The Old Blood). It’s the 90’s all over again!
DOOM 2016 has a map generator using the “Snap Map” system. I don’t think there’s an easy way to do other modding like skins/models so no Total Aliens Conversion mods.
I’m surprised the game runs so well. I’m getting solid 60fps on ultra at 1080 with a 970. Any idea how that was done when many other AAA games will not achieve anywhere near that?
I do get blackouts where I have to alt-tab in and out to restore the screen, but it is always in park mode when I come back, so no harm. Only game that does it.
A recommendation from a fellow old-school Doomer is worth a thousand net reviews. I too was a Doom and Duke addict in the 90s and in fact I still sometimes pop over to the Doom fansites and play one of the new mods over there. (Incredible that they are still being produced, it shows the lasting power of the game.)
After reading what you’d written I’m really gung-ho to play this new game. Doom 3 didn’t impress me. It wasn’t a bad game, it just didn’t have that same Doom energy to it. I’d love to play the new Doom but unfortunately it’s going to have to wait until I get a new rig, this one just doesn’t have the chops to run it at a respectable rate (perhaps not at all.) In the meantime be sure to waste a few demons for me!
I bought the game at half price this weekend thanks to a Steam sale. I prefer a slower sneaky/sniper pace, but this game is still great fun to play. I particularly like to try and find all of the “secrets” I can before moving on. I chuckle every time I pick up one of those Doom Marine plushies, and I can faintly hear the old Doom music playing as a reward.
Please clarify: are you recommended VSync “on” or “off” for better performance?
“Off” for more frames since it doesn’t lock your rate. I was mainly surprised that he was getting 60fps since I had gotten well over a hundred. But I used an AMD card and, from what I understand, the AMD cards with DX12 got a huge boost under the new Vulkan API.
