I don't like this game, I just don't. But lets start off with the game itself and what it does right!
Word of warning: this review is kinda all over the place and also will talk about basically everything in the game. So expect spoilers (of monsters and stuff, there's not really a plot, it's Doom)
Doom 64 is one of the sequels to Doom, which there are surprisingly quite a few of. If you go from the original game to Doom 3, thats still 6 games!
While Doom 64 was developed in close association with ID (mostly for the engine), the game itself was developed by Midway, and it seems pretty clear that they weren't quite sure WHAT they wanted to do for their take on Doom.
On one hand it seems like its trying to be a direct sequel or spiritual successor, it seems to take place at some point after Doom 2, it has all of the classic Doom gameplay and even uses the same engine, down to some of the extremely weird quirks.
But on the other hand, it seems like they wanted to make it some sort of horror shooter? Albeit, Doom was originally envisioned as that, they very clearly decided against that for the most part with the final release.
So lets go through everything one by one because i kind of have a lot to say about it.
Gameplay: It's Doom, but... for some reason the physics feel more slippery? They often times put items on stairs and you just kinda fall down the stairs (when i say fall i mean that you just lose all control of your character) and then float OVER the item, which is frustrating.
They also added a new weapon, "The Unmaker" which is neat in that it gets better with each secret Demon Rune that you find... but it just completely obsoletes the plasma rifle, which I don't like. The only real "obsolete" weapon in the original Doom games is the pistol.
Level Design: Just plain fucking awful. Sluggish, maze-like, Hell Knights literally around every corner, and claustraphobic. Lots of puzzles that actually make no sense, AND are slow. in order to get into one of the secret levels you need to press 4 switches in the correct order. Problem, there is nothing ANYWHERE that eludes to combo and if you press the wrong button it just completely locks you out... why????
about 90% of the switches in the game you have no idea what they do. and you can't even hear whatever happened because it usually is on the other side of the map. So you have to wander around until you find what changed.
Unlike the original games, Doom 64 actually supports spawning in enemies directly, which is great! However, they use this feature to just randomly (and silently!) spawn enemies in tight hallways that you've already cleared. Its not very fun.
They also for some reason have lots of weird traps in this game? Inescapable pits (like 1000x more than the original Doom had), Dart traps?, Homing missile traps, maybe some more i'm forgetting? At least they found some use for the Revanent's homing missiles since they had to be cut from the game, but I feel like Doom is not the place for traps like this, maybe in something like Heretic or Hexen, but not Doom.
Graphics: I don't like the artstyle of this game at all. It lacks the clarity that the original games have, and overall is just boring to look at. The monster's designs are overall kinda eh, they look less like demons that want to kill you, and instead like something that would be in literally anything aside from a fast paced FPS.
However, I do like the game's heavy emphasis on color, and I wish that the Doom community would actually support the custom map format for the original games which allows for colored lights... seriously UDMF came out in 2008 why does no one support it let me have my funny colored lights please.
Audio: Hey remember the great metal music that Doom, Doom 2, Plutonia and TNT: Evilution had? Well Doom 64 has... Silent Hill white noise... in a fast paced first person shooter? When i'm not completely tuning it out, it's distracting. On my second playthrough, when i got to the last 2 stages I just started playing the E3M8 midi from Doom on a loop. The worst part about that, is that I started enjoying the game more as soon as I was listening to real music. Its amazing how much music can affect your mood, especially when playing a game.
Aside from the music, the actual audio in the game is... muddy, distorted, and drowned in reverb. Just like the graphics, the audio in the original Doom had amazing clarity and you can tell exactly what enemies were where and when one died around the corner. Here I don't even know what half of the enemies sound like, and I have no clue when an enemy dies. As stated before in the level design section, I can barely hear when a door opens or closes, which also sucks.
Port: This probably doesn't need to be it's own category, but i'm doing it anyway. It's a Nightdive port, so it runs phenomenally, I don't think I encountered a single issue that wasn't present in the original game!
Enemies: Most of the enemies are the same, so i'll skip those ones. Others were cut for filesize reasons.
-Zombie-men/Shotgun Guys: I literally cannot tell these two apart in this game. while in the original game the zombie men had this green and white color palette and the shotgunners had this red and black one, here i think they both wear white shirts? Like I said I can't tell the difference.
-Chaingunners: Cut
-Nightmare Imps: New stronger imps that have a bit of transparency to them, as well as a duller color palette to help them blend in a bit. Not a bad idea tbh.
-Spectres: Better graphics hardware allows them to blend in even more! Maybe a bit too much with how dark the game is.
-Pain Elementals: I do not know WHY they felt the need to buff one of the most annoying enemies in doom, but they did. They fire TWO Lost Souls instead of one, AND if a Lost Soul cannot spawn (either due to being in a wall or in another enemy), it will deal blast damage. Just one problem with that, Doom has big hitboxes, and Doom 64 has small rooms. While this fixes the issue of players essentially pacifying a Pain Elemental by just standing in front of it, it makes fighting Pain Elementals at basically anything other than long range a DEATH SENTENCE. due to the big hitboxes and small rooms Lost Souls are CONSTANTLY spawning in the wall, and you'll end up dying to it without knowing what happened. Oh and there's no different animation or sound to let you know that this Lost Soul death causes an explosion rather than just dying, have fun!
Hell Knights/Barons of Hell: for some reason, the hardcoded infighting exclusion that these big guys have in Doom 2 is removed, so they will infight. Alright I guess?
Revanent: Cut :/
Archvile: Cut
Arachnotron: They gave these guys an extra barrel for their plasma rifle. Makes them quite the threat, I like it!
Spider Mastermind: Cut
Cyberdemon: An actually really REALLY interesting and fun change! Instead of shooting rockets out of his dick, Cyberdemons now actually shot rockets out of their gun! This is a big change because instead of shooting rockets at player height, they will always be angled slightly downward, which means that you can take splash damage from a rocket without being next to a wall! This makes fighting them MUCH more interesting and scary, and I honestly enjoyed fighting them with this new threat more than...
The Mother of All Demons: This boss sucks. Boss fights were never really Doom's strong suit, and ID clearly knew this because every single boss fight had other enemies to infight or distract. This Boss has a pretty interesting fight beforehand, and then you just fight the boss. alone.
Overall, she just seems like a way for them to repurpose cut content. She has 2 attacks, Shoot 4 EXTREMELY fast homing revanent missiles (there is barely any cover in the arena and you basically need to circle strafe to avoid them, if you slow down AT ALL, you WILL get hit) and send out a bunch of flames along the ground which knock you up into the air (borrowed from the archvile), if you get hit by one of those flames you're almost guaranteed to get deleted by the missiles, due to Doom not having any air control.
And in a league of their own, Lost Souls:
These guys need a category all to themselves.
Lost Souls were already annoying, especially in conjunction with Pain Elementals, they would just charge at you and body block other monsters. However ID did grant one grace, after the Lost Soul attacks, it forgets who it was targeting, giving a window where the Lost Soul would need to turn around and find their new target.
Midway took what little help ID gave and shit all over it.
I'm going to get a bit technical so stick with me.
In Doom, all enemies have reaction time, it can be set per enemy type but they always just set it to 8. So when an enemy wakes up, it takes 8 ticks (around .23 seconds at Doom's internal 35 ticks/second) before the enemy attacks. When playing with the "Fast monsters" launch option or on Nightmare! difficulty, the reaction time value is ignored.
When a Lost Soul forgets its target, it doesn't just forget who it was attacking, it falls back asleep. meaning that it has that 8 tick window.
Midway decided that was stupid, and made it so that Lost Souls do not forget who they were attacking. This means that Lost Souls can now infight for more than 1 attack, but it means that they are IDENTICAL with their "Fast monsters" version.
They will eat ANYTHING they are hostile against alive in a scary amount of time. I watched a single Lost Soul SOLO a Mancubus (600HP) in around 15 seconds.
The player at MOST can have 400HP, but by default will have 100. That means that a single lost soul can kill a player in around 2.5 seconds.
2.5 seconds... for just ONE Lost Soul, combine that with Pain Elementals now spawning 2 each attack, and they are by far the most dangerous enemy in the game.
I think I used the BFG most against Pain Elementals and their Lost Souls, which is so ridiculously that its laughable that its even a thing.
It's understandable to burn 1 BFG shot to kill an Archvile in Doom 2, those things have a scary attack, are pretty tanky, and can resurrect other Demons. A Lost Soul on the other hand dies in a single shotgun blast in Doom 64 (they nerfed its HP a bit), but it is still by far, the most dangerous enemy in Doom 64. And there is an enemy that can spawn them. What terrible game design.
So overall, its mediocre in basically every single category except for gameplay, which is mostly untouched from the original games. I'd rather just play any other Doom game.
Whats left now is some more minor unstructured thoughts of mine:
-This game is either not difficult at all or ridiculously bullshit, with 0 inbetween. Around Map 18 (i think?) there was a massive difficulty spike, which quickly became frustrating, but then after 2 or 3 maps it went back to the same difficulty it was before! I played on "Watch Me Die!" which is essentially the equivalent of the original Doom's "Ultra-Violence", but on my second playthrough I had to enable fast monsters as well just for it to be sort of difficult. In the early stages at least I thought that i had messed up enabling fast monsters, because it didn't feel that much harder. It turns out in tiny hallways with 1 or 2 enemies, its kinda hard to tell that fast monsters is enabled.
-The hud is just a downgrade from Doom. They show your health, current weapon ammo, and armor, thats it. It sounds like such a weird thing to complain about, but coming from the older Doom games where they show you the ammo you have for ALL of your weapons as well as what weapons you have, it is annoying. The extra info that Doom shows helped a lot in a fight, where you knew before you swapped to a weapon that you had enough ammo to actually use it, instead of wasting time swapping to a weapon only to have to swap back, with Doom's honestly pretty slow weapon swap speed.
Word of warning: this review is kinda all over the place and also will talk about basically everything in the game. So expect spoilers (of monsters and stuff, there's not really a plot, it's Doom)
Doom 64 is one of the sequels to Doom, which there are surprisingly quite a few of. If you go from the original game to Doom 3, thats still 6 games!
While Doom 64 was developed in close association with ID (mostly for the engine), the game itself was developed by Midway, and it seems pretty clear that they weren't quite sure WHAT they wanted to do for their take on Doom.
On one hand it seems like its trying to be a direct sequel or spiritual successor, it seems to take place at some point after Doom 2, it has all of the classic Doom gameplay and even uses the same engine, down to some of the extremely weird quirks.
But on the other hand, it seems like they wanted to make it some sort of horror shooter? Albeit, Doom was originally envisioned as that, they very clearly decided against that for the most part with the final release.
So lets go through everything one by one because i kind of have a lot to say about it.
Gameplay: It's Doom, but... for some reason the physics feel more slippery? They often times put items on stairs and you just kinda fall down the stairs (when i say fall i mean that you just lose all control of your character) and then float OVER the item, which is frustrating.
They also added a new weapon, "The Unmaker" which is neat in that it gets better with each secret Demon Rune that you find... but it just completely obsoletes the plasma rifle, which I don't like. The only real "obsolete" weapon in the original Doom games is the pistol.
Level Design: Just plain fucking awful. Sluggish, maze-like, Hell Knights literally around every corner, and claustraphobic. Lots of puzzles that actually make no sense, AND are slow. in order to get into one of the secret levels you need to press 4 switches in the correct order. Problem, there is nothing ANYWHERE that eludes to combo and if you press the wrong button it just completely locks you out... why????
about 90% of the switches in the game you have no idea what they do. and you can't even hear whatever happened because it usually is on the other side of the map. So you have to wander around until you find what changed.
Unlike the original games, Doom 64 actually supports spawning in enemies directly, which is great! However, they use this feature to just randomly (and silently!) spawn enemies in tight hallways that you've already cleared. Its not very fun.
They also for some reason have lots of weird traps in this game? Inescapable pits (like 1000x more than the original Doom had), Dart traps?, Homing missile traps, maybe some more i'm forgetting? At least they found some use for the Revanent's homing missiles since they had to be cut from the game, but I feel like Doom is not the place for traps like this, maybe in something like Heretic or Hexen, but not Doom.
Graphics: I don't like the artstyle of this game at all. It lacks the clarity that the original games have, and overall is just boring to look at. The monster's designs are overall kinda eh, they look less like demons that want to kill you, and instead like something that would be in literally anything aside from a fast paced FPS.
However, I do like the game's heavy emphasis on color, and I wish that the Doom community would actually support the custom map format for the original games which allows for colored lights... seriously UDMF came out in 2008 why does no one support it let me have my funny colored lights please.
Audio: Hey remember the great metal music that Doom, Doom 2, Plutonia and TNT: Evilution had? Well Doom 64 has... Silent Hill white noise... in a fast paced first person shooter? When i'm not completely tuning it out, it's distracting. On my second playthrough, when i got to the last 2 stages I just started playing the E3M8 midi from Doom on a loop. The worst part about that, is that I started enjoying the game more as soon as I was listening to real music. Its amazing how much music can affect your mood, especially when playing a game.
Aside from the music, the actual audio in the game is... muddy, distorted, and drowned in reverb. Just like the graphics, the audio in the original Doom had amazing clarity and you can tell exactly what enemies were where and when one died around the corner. Here I don't even know what half of the enemies sound like, and I have no clue when an enemy dies. As stated before in the level design section, I can barely hear when a door opens or closes, which also sucks.
Port: This probably doesn't need to be it's own category, but i'm doing it anyway. It's a Nightdive port, so it runs phenomenally, I don't think I encountered a single issue that wasn't present in the original game!
Enemies: Most of the enemies are the same, so i'll skip those ones. Others were cut for filesize reasons.
-Zombie-men/Shotgun Guys: I literally cannot tell these two apart in this game. while in the original game the zombie men had this green and white color palette and the shotgunners had this red and black one, here i think they both wear white shirts? Like I said I can't tell the difference.
-Chaingunners: Cut
-Nightmare Imps: New stronger imps that have a bit of transparency to them, as well as a duller color palette to help them blend in a bit. Not a bad idea tbh.
-Spectres: Better graphics hardware allows them to blend in even more! Maybe a bit too much with how dark the game is.
-Pain Elementals: I do not know WHY they felt the need to buff one of the most annoying enemies in doom, but they did. They fire TWO Lost Souls instead of one, AND if a Lost Soul cannot spawn (either due to being in a wall or in another enemy), it will deal blast damage. Just one problem with that, Doom has big hitboxes, and Doom 64 has small rooms. While this fixes the issue of players essentially pacifying a Pain Elemental by just standing in front of it, it makes fighting Pain Elementals at basically anything other than long range a DEATH SENTENCE. due to the big hitboxes and small rooms Lost Souls are CONSTANTLY spawning in the wall, and you'll end up dying to it without knowing what happened. Oh and there's no different animation or sound to let you know that this Lost Soul death causes an explosion rather than just dying, have fun!
Hell Knights/Barons of Hell: for some reason, the hardcoded infighting exclusion that these big guys have in Doom 2 is removed, so they will infight. Alright I guess?
Revanent: Cut :/
Archvile: Cut
Arachnotron: They gave these guys an extra barrel for their plasma rifle. Makes them quite the threat, I like it!
Spider Mastermind: Cut
Cyberdemon: An actually really REALLY interesting and fun change! Instead of shooting rockets out of his dick, Cyberdemons now actually shot rockets out of their gun! This is a big change because instead of shooting rockets at player height, they will always be angled slightly downward, which means that you can take splash damage from a rocket without being next to a wall! This makes fighting them MUCH more interesting and scary, and I honestly enjoyed fighting them with this new threat more than...
The Mother of All Demons: This boss sucks. Boss fights were never really Doom's strong suit, and ID clearly knew this because every single boss fight had other enemies to infight or distract. This Boss has a pretty interesting fight beforehand, and then you just fight the boss. alone.
Overall, she just seems like a way for them to repurpose cut content. She has 2 attacks, Shoot 4 EXTREMELY fast homing revanent missiles (there is barely any cover in the arena and you basically need to circle strafe to avoid them, if you slow down AT ALL, you WILL get hit) and send out a bunch of flames along the ground which knock you up into the air (borrowed from the archvile), if you get hit by one of those flames you're almost guaranteed to get deleted by the missiles, due to Doom not having any air control.
And in a league of their own, Lost Souls:
These guys need a category all to themselves.
Lost Souls were already annoying, especially in conjunction with Pain Elementals, they would just charge at you and body block other monsters. However ID did grant one grace, after the Lost Soul attacks, it forgets who it was targeting, giving a window where the Lost Soul would need to turn around and find their new target.
Midway took what little help ID gave and shit all over it.
I'm going to get a bit technical so stick with me.
In Doom, all enemies have reaction time, it can be set per enemy type but they always just set it to 8. So when an enemy wakes up, it takes 8 ticks (around .23 seconds at Doom's internal 35 ticks/second) before the enemy attacks. When playing with the "Fast monsters" launch option or on Nightmare! difficulty, the reaction time value is ignored.
When a Lost Soul forgets its target, it doesn't just forget who it was attacking, it falls back asleep. meaning that it has that 8 tick window.
Midway decided that was stupid, and made it so that Lost Souls do not forget who they were attacking. This means that Lost Souls can now infight for more than 1 attack, but it means that they are IDENTICAL with their "Fast monsters" version.
They will eat ANYTHING they are hostile against alive in a scary amount of time. I watched a single Lost Soul SOLO a Mancubus (600HP) in around 15 seconds.
The player at MOST can have 400HP, but by default will have 100. That means that a single lost soul can kill a player in around 2.5 seconds.
2.5 seconds... for just ONE Lost Soul, combine that with Pain Elementals now spawning 2 each attack, and they are by far the most dangerous enemy in the game.
I think I used the BFG most against Pain Elementals and their Lost Souls, which is so ridiculously that its laughable that its even a thing.
It's understandable to burn 1 BFG shot to kill an Archvile in Doom 2, those things have a scary attack, are pretty tanky, and can resurrect other Demons. A Lost Soul on the other hand dies in a single shotgun blast in Doom 64 (they nerfed its HP a bit), but it is still by far, the most dangerous enemy in Doom 64. And there is an enemy that can spawn them. What terrible game design.
So overall, its mediocre in basically every single category except for gameplay, which is mostly untouched from the original games. I'd rather just play any other Doom game.
Whats left now is some more minor unstructured thoughts of mine:
-This game is either not difficult at all or ridiculously bullshit, with 0 inbetween. Around Map 18 (i think?) there was a massive difficulty spike, which quickly became frustrating, but then after 2 or 3 maps it went back to the same difficulty it was before! I played on "Watch Me Die!" which is essentially the equivalent of the original Doom's "Ultra-Violence", but on my second playthrough I had to enable fast monsters as well just for it to be sort of difficult. In the early stages at least I thought that i had messed up enabling fast monsters, because it didn't feel that much harder. It turns out in tiny hallways with 1 or 2 enemies, its kinda hard to tell that fast monsters is enabled.
-The hud is just a downgrade from Doom. They show your health, current weapon ammo, and armor, thats it. It sounds like such a weird thing to complain about, but coming from the older Doom games where they show you the ammo you have for ALL of your weapons as well as what weapons you have, it is annoying. The extra info that Doom shows helped a lot in a fight, where you knew before you swapped to a weapon that you had enough ammo to actually use it, instead of wasting time swapping to a weapon only to have to swap back, with Doom's honestly pretty slow weapon swap speed.