After playing through and having an absolute blast with the original Doom back in September, I became a lot more excited to catch up on playing more of the boomer shooters that came after it during the 1990s, with its direct sequel being first up for me. Even with the amount of time that it took for me to test out different official and unofficial ports of Doom before settling on the DOS version, I still beat the game within a week, but it took me over two months to beat Doom II, and that's because this game is way, way less fun than its predecessor. Although it looks and feels like that 1993 landmark title, Doom II makes enough wrong decisions for me to consider it a direct downgrade from the original game, as it felt like a chore to get through very early on and only got worse from there.

Putting the fantastic gameplay, charming 2.5D visuals, and blood-pumping music aside, one of the main elements of Doom that makes it such a consistent and engaging experience is its carefully constructed levels and enemy placements, and I'm of the opinion that the design philosophy of Doom II completely misunderstands this. Rather than putting just enough enemies to make encounters tense while also giving you enough space to maneuver around them and strategize your approach, Doom II instead opts for filling every single room with as many enemies as humanly possible and pretending that this counts as "challenge" (a design choice that you'd be very familiar with if you've played one of those awful Super Mario Maker levels that do the exact same thing), and this choice alone turns Doom II into a repetitive, annoying shadow of the game that preceded it. The levels either consist of confusing mazes, cryptic puzzles, unnecessary gimmicks, awful platforming in a game that doesn't even have a jump button, or a combination of the four, and while I pretty much never got lost in the original Doom due to how the different paths in each level were designed to loop back to a central room or overlap with each other, these levels literally have arrows pointing to where I should go, and that's rarely ever a good sign. A lot of the game's new enemies were straight-up unfun to fight, with their high damage, frequent spawns, and finicky ways of actually fighting them making me groan whenever I came across one, especially if it was an Arch-vile or a Pain Elemental. Even the music in Doom II was lamer this time around, as the metal and ambient tracks were swapped out for boring loops that I got sick of very quickly.

Visually, Doom II has the exact same look and feel of the first game, and while I still find the blend of 2D sprites and 3D environments endearing, it doesn't work as well here as it did before. Since the original Doom starts out in Mars before you rip and tear your way through Hell, it made sense for the environments to go from mechanical and futuristic to fleshy and pulsating, but because the theme for Doom II is that the armies of Hell have invaded Earth, the game just ended up looking like a mishmash of entirely reused assets with nothing all that visually distinct when compared to the first game. The only new addition to Doom II that I genuinely liked was that of the iconic super shotgun, as it was immensely satisfying to use with every shot and ended up being my weapon of choice for almost my entire playthrough. Despite this, Doom II was a very disappointing and tedious boomer shooter that fundamentally misses the mark on what made Doom fun in the first place, and while I am still looking forward to playing Doom 64, I'm going to be a bit more cautious after being burned by this game.