Every single thing about this game takes what was near universally applauded about DOOM2016 and throws it in the trash. The visceral combat, the gut wrenchingly hardcore soundtrack to match, anti-modern storytelling, and excellent pacing. And they destroyed the online mode for good measure.
I found this game to be obnoxiously overdesigned. On one hand the combat in this game certainly feels different than DOOM2016, so I can't knock this game for just being more of the same. But I can't honestly say any of the new things they force upon you are really any fun. 2016 isn't improved by making you low on ammo the entire game. It's not improved by having popups telling you what enemy to expect and how to beat them optimally in very dry, mechanical terms.
There's an achievement in 2016 for using the chainsaw 50 times. This was one of the last achievements I got. And it's sitting at about an 18% achieval rate on steam. It's like they saw people weren't using the chainsaw as much as they wanted and now you're forced to use it multiple times per encounter. No longer a novel power move but a constant thing you're forced to do. And it's just one of the many abilities they want you to cycle through. They slowed your running speed down to compensate for a new dash move. You have an awkward flamethrower that makes enemies shed armor pickups for some reason but doesn't really damage them. Grenades to 1-shot Cacodemons...Because every demon now has a very specific way to shred them and it's a waste of your much more limited ammo to ignore that specific weakness. Make sure you save your energy blaster for the enemy who specifically dies to the energy blaster almost instantly! Your punch now no longer does damage, unless you charge up the ultra punch through glory kills, then it kills things in an AOE whether you want it to or not, too bad if you wanted to use the enemies around it for ammo or shield replenishment. No longer a game about going sicko mode and mauling demons to a pulp, but a game about cycling through shallow abilities. And to top it all off the Ui is horrible about being clear what's even off cooldown or charged up. Way too minimalistic for how many gamey systems are being juggled. Also it felt random whether your gun auto-swaps to one with ammo when you run out with your currently equipped gun. Sometimes you'll sit there like an idiot trying to fire something with no ammo, sometimes frame 1 of your machine gun running out it'll swap to the BFG and blow up the single low-tier enemy you just wanted to tap for some hp drops.
I could totally see some people preferring this system though. Assuming they found DOOM2016 shallow. There's a lot more nuance to the combat here. Normally I'm all about that nuance, but I think they not only went too far, but they put it in a franchise it doesn't belong. So many times I went "Wow this set piece would be AWESOME in the previous game..." Like the final boss is absolutely sick. Too bad I gotta spend most of it roaming around looking for level 1 zombies to chainsaw so I can actually have ammo to fight. Then I shoot the boss for 15 seconds and have to go hunt down another trash mob for ammo again. The game's just way too restrictive in its design and all the mechanics are so isolated almost none of it came naturally into a seamless rotation, partially because of the minimalist Ui I mentioned. It's so restrictive the design of the game itself requires them to spawn an endless amount of trash mobs for it to even function properly. Almost forgot but there's a lot of weird upgrade paths and trees in this game and none of them felt like they did anything whatsoever.
If it was just the combat that I didn't really click with I probably wouldn't rate it THIS low. Actually exciting encounters on par with 2016 are few and far between but it wasn't absolutely miserable otherwise. It was an ok challenge that was satisfying enough to overcome. Not what I like about DOOM in general but it's something. But you know how early 2000's low budget platformers often had mediocre combat systems thrown in to pad out the game? This game has the opposite. It's got some shallow, nothing platforming that takes up a weird amount of the game. If you told me 30% of the sequel to DOOM2016 was some Nicktoons Unite tier platforming I wouldn't believe you. But here we are...Constant platforming in a game with almost no platforming movement options, meaning the design can't get more interesting than making you dash into a dash refill so you can dash again.
They overcomplicated the combat and filled the rest of the game with baby's first platformer. And Doom Guy doesn't even fist bump the hidden action figures anymore. Smh.
Oh yeah remember how 2016 made a statement against pretentious, invasive, unnecessary stories in video games by making Doom Guy impatiently brute force his way through most of it without listening whatsoever? I got very little of that here. This time it felt like they actually wanted you to pay attention. Not a single word really connected to anything to me, aggressively uninteresting stuff. At least there's no scene where they lock you in a room for an exposition dump, major mistep of 2016 there. But otherwise it's yet another area that feels like they went "This thing everyone loved about the previous game? Bet it would be better if we did the exact opposite!"
Bringing up the soundtrack is risking bloating this review to three times its size given how poorly managed it was and how badly they treated Mick Gordon. Long story short they gave him obscenely unrealistic deadlines to write music with extremely ambitious demands...A literal year before any gameplay or even levels were designed. Forcing hardcore crunch and rejecting the work anyway. Refusing to pay him for anything rejected. Only to end up using 100% of the work they rejected in the final product anyway. Straight up scammed him for double the amount of work in his contract. And that's far from the end of that story. In the end the soundtrack came out ok. But this game as a whole feels like such an unfocused mishmash, not sure if it's the music itself being weaker or the game as a whole being a letdown...But in the end the music doesn't feel like the heart of the game like before. (Absolutely wild read btw if you want to read a long story about how comically incompetent the higher ups were, Mick Gordon released a statement they offered a 6 figure sum to keep him quiet about)
And to top it all off the online multiplayer is the most blatantly unbalanced garbage I've ever seen. And I've never been one to cry balance issues in online games, this is a nasty outlier on that though. One mode and it straight up sucks.
And that's to say nothing of the creative director who talks about crunch in game development like it's a super cool lifestyle. Would love to hear what his staff has to say about that.
H*eckin mid game and horrendously inflated egos of the higher ups after the success of 2016. You make a review on steam criticizing the game and the devs will respond going LoNg TiMe FaNs WiLl ReCoGnIzE wHaT wE'rE gOiNg FoR even if the person has comments turned off because they don't want bethesda and id fanboys barking at them for not loving the game. Bet they didn't expect a dev comment basically saying "you just didn't get it, hope you try it again".
I found this game to be obnoxiously overdesigned. On one hand the combat in this game certainly feels different than DOOM2016, so I can't knock this game for just being more of the same. But I can't honestly say any of the new things they force upon you are really any fun. 2016 isn't improved by making you low on ammo the entire game. It's not improved by having popups telling you what enemy to expect and how to beat them optimally in very dry, mechanical terms.
There's an achievement in 2016 for using the chainsaw 50 times. This was one of the last achievements I got. And it's sitting at about an 18% achieval rate on steam. It's like they saw people weren't using the chainsaw as much as they wanted and now you're forced to use it multiple times per encounter. No longer a novel power move but a constant thing you're forced to do. And it's just one of the many abilities they want you to cycle through. They slowed your running speed down to compensate for a new dash move. You have an awkward flamethrower that makes enemies shed armor pickups for some reason but doesn't really damage them. Grenades to 1-shot Cacodemons...Because every demon now has a very specific way to shred them and it's a waste of your much more limited ammo to ignore that specific weakness. Make sure you save your energy blaster for the enemy who specifically dies to the energy blaster almost instantly! Your punch now no longer does damage, unless you charge up the ultra punch through glory kills, then it kills things in an AOE whether you want it to or not, too bad if you wanted to use the enemies around it for ammo or shield replenishment. No longer a game about going sicko mode and mauling demons to a pulp, but a game about cycling through shallow abilities. And to top it all off the Ui is horrible about being clear what's even off cooldown or charged up. Way too minimalistic for how many gamey systems are being juggled. Also it felt random whether your gun auto-swaps to one with ammo when you run out with your currently equipped gun. Sometimes you'll sit there like an idiot trying to fire something with no ammo, sometimes frame 1 of your machine gun running out it'll swap to the BFG and blow up the single low-tier enemy you just wanted to tap for some hp drops.
I could totally see some people preferring this system though. Assuming they found DOOM2016 shallow. There's a lot more nuance to the combat here. Normally I'm all about that nuance, but I think they not only went too far, but they put it in a franchise it doesn't belong. So many times I went "Wow this set piece would be AWESOME in the previous game..." Like the final boss is absolutely sick. Too bad I gotta spend most of it roaming around looking for level 1 zombies to chainsaw so I can actually have ammo to fight. Then I shoot the boss for 15 seconds and have to go hunt down another trash mob for ammo again. The game's just way too restrictive in its design and all the mechanics are so isolated almost none of it came naturally into a seamless rotation, partially because of the minimalist Ui I mentioned. It's so restrictive the design of the game itself requires them to spawn an endless amount of trash mobs for it to even function properly. Almost forgot but there's a lot of weird upgrade paths and trees in this game and none of them felt like they did anything whatsoever.
If it was just the combat that I didn't really click with I probably wouldn't rate it THIS low. Actually exciting encounters on par with 2016 are few and far between but it wasn't absolutely miserable otherwise. It was an ok challenge that was satisfying enough to overcome. Not what I like about DOOM in general but it's something. But you know how early 2000's low budget platformers often had mediocre combat systems thrown in to pad out the game? This game has the opposite. It's got some shallow, nothing platforming that takes up a weird amount of the game. If you told me 30% of the sequel to DOOM2016 was some Nicktoons Unite tier platforming I wouldn't believe you. But here we are...Constant platforming in a game with almost no platforming movement options, meaning the design can't get more interesting than making you dash into a dash refill so you can dash again.
They overcomplicated the combat and filled the rest of the game with baby's first platformer. And Doom Guy doesn't even fist bump the hidden action figures anymore. Smh.
Oh yeah remember how 2016 made a statement against pretentious, invasive, unnecessary stories in video games by making Doom Guy impatiently brute force his way through most of it without listening whatsoever? I got very little of that here. This time it felt like they actually wanted you to pay attention. Not a single word really connected to anything to me, aggressively uninteresting stuff. At least there's no scene where they lock you in a room for an exposition dump, major mistep of 2016 there. But otherwise it's yet another area that feels like they went "This thing everyone loved about the previous game? Bet it would be better if we did the exact opposite!"
Bringing up the soundtrack is risking bloating this review to three times its size given how poorly managed it was and how badly they treated Mick Gordon. Long story short they gave him obscenely unrealistic deadlines to write music with extremely ambitious demands...A literal year before any gameplay or even levels were designed. Forcing hardcore crunch and rejecting the work anyway. Refusing to pay him for anything rejected. Only to end up using 100% of the work they rejected in the final product anyway. Straight up scammed him for double the amount of work in his contract. And that's far from the end of that story. In the end the soundtrack came out ok. But this game as a whole feels like such an unfocused mishmash, not sure if it's the music itself being weaker or the game as a whole being a letdown...But in the end the music doesn't feel like the heart of the game like before. (Absolutely wild read btw if you want to read a long story about how comically incompetent the higher ups were, Mick Gordon released a statement they offered a 6 figure sum to keep him quiet about)
And to top it all off the online multiplayer is the most blatantly unbalanced garbage I've ever seen. And I've never been one to cry balance issues in online games, this is a nasty outlier on that though. One mode and it straight up sucks.
And that's to say nothing of the creative director who talks about crunch in game development like it's a super cool lifestyle. Would love to hear what his staff has to say about that.
H*eckin mid game and horrendously inflated egos of the higher ups after the success of 2016. You make a review on steam criticizing the game and the devs will respond going LoNg TiMe FaNs WiLl ReCoGnIzE wHaT wE'rE gOiNg FoR even if the person has comments turned off because they don't want bethesda and id fanboys barking at them for not loving the game. Bet they didn't expect a dev comment basically saying "you just didn't get it, hope you try it again".