[Editor’s Note: Because Doom review copies were not provided ahead of release, we didn’t get to start playing until release yesterday. We’ve now completed the single-player portion, and the review below covers that content. Come back early next week for our thoughts on the multiplayer modes, the SnapMap editor, and of course our final score.]
At its best, Doom is everything it should be — you, your super shotgun and just barely the amount of ammunition required to kill every single demon on Mars. It feels like a Doom game as you desperately try to find health pickups to keep you going, an ever-growing menagerie of demons snapping at your heels. It's exhausting and exciting and a little bit dumb, and when you're into it you're all the way in. At its worst, Doom is a series of enclosed rooms filled with demons, all of which you must kill to advance. By the time I was halfway through the 8.5-hour-long campaign, hunting down the last Imp in a room so the door will unlock had begun to wear thin.
First impressions wise, Doom strikes all the right notes. The Union Aerospace Corporation's research facility on Mars runs red with the blood of employees who learned a new meaning for the phrase 'wrongful termination,' but that barely matters to the inexplicably mute Doomguy, who shoots anything and everything which moves. Starting with only the pistol encourages you to focus on the diabolically delightful Glory Kill system — shoot your nearest Demon enough that they become staggered and highlighted in blue or orange, and if you press F (or R3 on a PS4 controller) while standing next to them you will rend them asunder. That is to say, you'll tear off their limbs and, in more than a few cases, joyfully beat them with their own appendages.
Lifted wholesale from the still-popular Brutal Doom mod for the original Doom, developer id Software smartly uses these executions to maintain momentum as you play. An executed enemy will drop health packs — critical pickups in a game where you don't regenerate your health out of combat. As you make your way through the UAC facility, the purpose of those health packs becomes clear: They allow you to sprint headfirst into combat (Doomguy's default movement speed is a steady run) and kill as many enemies as you can. If you take too much damage, or if you're running low on ammunition, it’s easy to recover by staggering demons and performing an execution, which gets some health back and removes a threat without using as much ammo. Executions teleport Doomguy a short distance to his target and render him temporarily invincible while they’re carried out, which makes them great for two slightly left-of-centre things — getting a moment's ironic peace in the middle of a firefight, and teleporting yourself loose when you clip through the floor (which happened to me more than a few times).
The demon outbreak on the facility is a result of worst business plan of all time — to rob Hell of its energy resources — and security precautions see to it that you cannot open most doors if any demons are still alive. These are kill chambers, a relic of an era of shooter design all but gone, designed to contain you and force you into a particular playstyle. Where games with regenerating health reward players who hide and pick off enemies one at a time, Doom instead forces you to map out a path through the chamber trying to find health without ever stopping long enough to become overwhelmed.
It's a design philosophy which runs counter to the nature of the execution system. Glory Kills promote a forward momentum, encouraging you to move towards enemies to close the distance and earn your health pickups, but the kill chamber map style does the opposite. Your best strategy is to move backwards through the chamber, away from the enemies, and to do damage as you go. The AI in Doom is not particularly smart, and you can rely on it to roughly converge on your location (even when it can't see you and shouldn’t know where you are). So if you run in circles around the kill chamber, shooting behind you and dodging projectiles, you can kill the majority of the enemies within — only after you've thinned the herd of Demons can you then start running forward and killing them by circle-strafing (running around them in circles).
See full Review at IGN.