Doom (Xbox One) Review

Do you like violence, big guns, heavy metal, bloodshed, and have a particular distaste for demons and the legions of Hell? Then Bethesda and Id Software have just the game for you!

I was about six years old, give or take a year, when I first saw Doom. My brother and our neighbor friends were babysitting me, and one of them pulled it up on their laptop. I wasn’t really allowed to see that level of violence in video games at the time of course, so to me watching the (then realistic-looking) guts spill out of a possessed soldier blew my mind… so much so that I had nightmares for a week afterward and was too scared of getting grounded to tell my parents why.

So here I am now, twelve years later, and ready to tackle anything Hell throws at me…or so I thought. Doom has several difficulty choices, all named the same as the originals from the first games: I’m Too Young to Die, Hey Not Too Rough, Hurt Me Plenty, Ultra-violence, and Nightmare!

At the start of your first playthrough, you are only able to crank the difficulty up to Ultra-Violence, but myself being the coward I am, I only stuck to ‘Hurt Me Plenty’, which is still very difficult.

The story of Doom is about as important and prevalent as you might think it would be; which is to say it isn’t. I only picked up bits and pieces as the campaign went on, but from what I was able to pick up, the UAC was harvesting ‘Argent Energy’ an unlimited energy source from… Hell (what could possibly go wrong?!).

Dr. Olivia Pierce (the game’s main antagonist) however, had different ideas and was merely using the Argent Energy as a cover-up while she looked on to bigger goals. Goals like the opening of a portal which would directly link our world to the world of devils (and heavy metal).

This is where you come in. Doomguy (yes that’s right, they still haven’t given him a name, and let’s leave it that way Mr. “The Rock” Johnson) is a Space Marine who utilizes a menagerie of hot-lead slinging weapons that includes a machine gun that shoots miniature missiles, a boomstick which rivals that of Ash Williams (demons must have a certain hatred for shotguns), an ‘arc gun’ that can rip apart the Barons of Hell in just a few hits, a mean chainsaw, and the big mama – the BFG. You’ll need to take advantage and learn these weapons inside and out to become an efficient killing machine against the hordes of the devil.

Speaking of which, the game is full of all of the original baddies you remember, though with a bit more of a modern make-over. The Barons, the Imps, the possessed soldiers, the Mancubi, the Pinkies, they’re all here and looking more terrifying and angry than ever.

So now that we know the campaign is in order (and near perfect, in my humble opinion), what about the multiplayer? While it isn’t the most original, or the best PvP system I’ve seen in a game of that matter; it’s incredibly fun and a good pass-time.

For some reason people compare the combat in Doom to Halo. This is even though there are no shields, no regenerating health, and a barely functional radar (all of which add to the experience), all of which are big parts of Halo, so I don’t really get the likeness there.

Most of the modes are pretty standard though, but my favorite (and one of the more unique), is the Freeze Tag game mode. During a Freeze Tag match, when one of the players on your team “dies”, they are frozen in a block of ice, and you must stand beside it to thaw them out. It’s interesting to see multiple people die in one area, and the last person alive on the team can somehow turn a 4v1 back into a fair fight with just a few lucky seconds.

Characters in multiplayer are completely customizeable, including armor color, even though it isn’t shown in any game mode in PvP. There are also several different unlockable sets, none of which change your offensive or defensive stats any, as they are purely cosmetic.

Finally, and this is one of the more unique things about Doom, I’ll speak a bit about SnapMap. It was undoubtedly the most talked about thing in the game prior to its release, so I kind of have to.

Essentially, SnapMap is a very detailed level creator, where you can not only choose what goes where, but even the properties assigned to the item. I didn’t play around with the level editor that much myself, as I am far from savvy with that sort of thing, but I did enjoy seeing all of the interesting creative (and not so creative) ideas from the other fans of the game and it’s predecessors.