"They are rage.

Brutal, without mercy,

But you... you will be worse.

Rip and tear, until it is done."

The development history of the DOOM reboot is a bit of a strange one.

The series hadn't seen a new entry since DOOM 3 released in 2004, a game known for being a departure for the series from pure action into a sort of action-horror. However, it was not actually a full 12 years that DOOM fans had to wait for any news. DOOM 4 was announced in 2008. It wouldn't release for another 8 years.

Like its protagonist, DOOM found itself trapped in its own hell, but a hell of development rather than a biblical one. The premise of the game was that it would be a sort of boots on the ground shooter from the perspective of a soldier fighting against an army from hell that had descended upon the Earth. Taking more from Call of Duty than from any of the inspiration the original games had, it was... a bit of a mess. There is some fantastic concept art from this era, but the developers weren't satisfied with the product. It wasn't DOOM. Not really. It had the name, but not the spirit.

So, they scrapped it.

What they built from the ashes turned out glorious.

Wake up.

You're lying down, flat. On the ceiling is a red symbol. A symbol of power. Yours.

The structure around you begins to shake. Wherever you are, it's not doing very well.

Looking down you see the rest of your body. You're on a stone tablet of some kind, chains binding your arms.

A gargling groan pierces your ears, you look to your right and see a person. Except no, that's not a person. Not anymore, at least. Lab clothes fused to its skin, skin tighly wrapped around its skeleton, and a gaping hole in it's face where eyes should be. It's shambling closer.

These chains need to come off now.

With adrenaline-fueled near superhuman strength, you wrench your right arm free, just in time to grab the monster by the head as it reaches you. You grip its skull, thumb digging into that bizarre facial cavity. After a moment to get a better look at it, you slam it down on the edge of the slab. splattering its cranium against the cold stone.

Freeing your left arm the same way you freed the right, you land on your feet and pick up a pistol.

Welcome to DOOM.

Immediately, just in 30 seconds or so, you know what DOOM is. No nonsense, absurdly brutal, and badass. Corny, sure, but taking itself seriously and allowing you to fully embrace all of it. Buckets and buckets of blood and gore. It's no secret that the original games took heavy inspiration from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, and the reboot continues this in full force.

Going into the next room, you see a suit of green armor encased in stone. You touch it, and are suddenly met with screaming flashes of demonic imagery covering up the time you spend putting it on. To your right, a screen, telling you where you are. If you're familiar with the Doom series, you basically already know the information.

You are in a facility on Mars, run by the Union Aerospace Corporation, or UAC. The UAC did a little too much fucking around, and now they are finding out. What they are finding out is that a horde of demons has been unleashed and is killing everyone on the base.

Looks like you're on clean-up duty.

You're suddenly met with a voice transmission, from one of the only survivors of the disaster: Dr. Samuel Hayden. Immediately, something feels really off about his whole deal. He is way too fucking calm about this whole thing.

"Welcome," he announces. "I'm Dr. Samuel Hayden. I'm the head of this facility."

Ah, he's a higher up! No wonder he doesn't seem to give a shit about his workers.

"I think we can work together, and resolve this problem in a way that benefits us both."

As he finishes this sentence, Doomguy grabs the screen and just throws it to the side in an act of disgruntled defiance. Two sentences into meeting this guy he already doesn't like him.

The couple of zombies you popped in the head introduced you to shooting, but as you move forward you are introduced to DOOM's primary mechanic, and easily the coolest thing it introduced to the FPS scene: the glory kill.

Execution type mechanics aren't new by any metric, but DOOM incorporates them in a way that feels incredibly innovative and is unbelievably satisfying.

After damaging an enemy enough, they will enter a STAGGER state, where they stop moving and begin to glow blue. Once you're in range, they glow orange, and by pressing the melee button you will execute a GLORY KILL, a supremely awesome and brutal takedown of the demon. Even further, there are not just different glory kills that randomize but different glory kills that play based on what angle you approach from and even what body part you're looking at. Glory kill an imp from the front, you punch its head off. From behind, you rip off its jaw. From above, you drop down and give it a powerful curb stomp.

This system isn't just for show, although it could be and I would still do it. Glory kills have a very specific gameplay function. Sometimes, upon killing a demon, it'll drop a health pickup. Glory kills GUARANTEE health drops, and provide even more than a regular kill might. Therefore, when at low health, the best strategy is not to run away, but to charge at the nearest enemy with full force and rip it apart with your bare hands.

The result is a combat system that is unrelentingly brutal, tearing through demons like a hurricane. You are encouraged at every turn to never stop attacking, never stop moving, never back down. It is absolutely exhilarating.

Of course, this combat would be nothing without the many fantastically punchy guns you acquire along your journey across the Mars base. The PISTOL you begin the game with is a really weak peashooter with even weaker feedback, but DOOM has never been known for its pistols.

The real star of the show is introduced soon enough: the COMBAT SHOTGUN. I'm not too big on the sound design of the shotgun in this game, but it is undeniably a brutal and punchy weapon. A new mechanic introduced to the series here is weapon mods, alternate fires for your guns that can be swapped out and used interchangably. Each one (except for the pistol) gets two, and while they tend to be really hit or miss, and I dislike the upgrade system associated, they are undeniably a really fun addition to the series. First for the combat shotgun is the laughably useless charged burst, which after a brief charge fires three shots in quick succession. It doesn't sound particularly bad, until you see the second mod: the explosive shot, a built in grenade launcher that is better than the actual grenades the game gives you by a wide margin. It is one of the best weapon mods in the game.

Your second weapon is the HEAVY ASSAULT RIFLE, which more or less takes the job in gameplay that the chaingun had in the original games, as a low damage rapid fire weapon. With the addition of the glory kill system, it gets an extra job in softening up demons into a stagger state, due to its lower damage than the other guns. Its mods are the micro missiles, which are fairly self explanatory and awesome, and a scope that does fuck all unless you fully upgrade it, and even then is completely useless in most combat. I have no idea why its in the game.

Up next, the PLASMA RIFLE, the assault rifle's beefier cousin. Packing some incredibly meaty sound design on its shots of blue plasma, it is fantastic for quickly clearing out rooms of weaker enemies, and for focusing down on larger ones. Its mods are a stun bomb and an area of effect blast that charges as the gun is fired.

The ROCKET LAUNCHER needs no introduction. You need shit blown up, you pick up this beast. Along with its destructive capability, it has the best two weapon mods of all the weapons, the remote detonation and the absolutely devastating lock on burst. It is the only weapon in the game where I actually regularly swapped between its mods rather than just sticking to one.

Now... for the moment everyone has been waiting for.

A gun so iconic, so badass, it deserves its own proper introduction.

Ladies, gentlemen, slayers, I present to you...

The SUPER SHOTGUN.

Introduced in DOOM 2, with similar weapons famously wielded by iconic badasses including Ash Williams and Max Rockatansky, this double-barrel menace has been the face of the DOOM franchise since 1994, and for good reason. It's not just your average shotgun. It's a SUPER shotgun. A gun so awesome it basically carries you through the entire game.

The super shotgun you get in this game carries on the legacy with ease. You pick it up like its an old friend, giving a good test of its break action features before setting off to use it to carve up some demons. It has no weapon mods. It does not need them. Demons hear that BOOM of those two barrels firing and they go running. It does have a final mastery upgrade, however, that allows it to fire twice, inexplicably doing the same amount of damage with one barrel at a time as it did with both at once. It is a completely broken gun at this point. You can pretty much solve any problem using it once you have this.

Your next gun is a brand new addition to the series, and along with the good old SSG it is my favorite gun in the game. Introducing the GAUSS CANNON, a glowing blue railgun that absolutely does not fuck around. It is an unbelievably satifying gun to shoot, with a huge blast of energy coming out of the front accompanied by an absolutely NASTY sound. The thing actually physically kicks you back a little bit. Its first mod is the precision bolt, a zoomed in charged shot that I never really figured out the use of. Its next mod, however...

I said that the rocket launcher had the best mods, but I meant them as a pair. This is the best singular mod. Demons start praying when they see the seige mode charge. The base fire of the gauss cannon is strong, but the shot fired after charging up with seige mode makes it look like a joke. Its so powerful that to counteract how easy it would make the game, using the mod completely stops you from moving. It is capable of instantly killing several of the higher ranking demons, and once you get the mastery that allows you to move during the charge... forget it. Nothing can stand in your way.

Up next we return to a classic with the CHAINGUN. It's done some working out over the last 20 years, and its got a lot more firepower than its 1993 counterpart. This is your rapidfire solution for when the plasma rifle just won't do. To compensate for this, it no longer fires instantly, now requiring a short windup to get going. There's a mod that allows you to wind the barrel independently of firing it, allowing you to stop firing while keeping it spinning, but you can forget about that entirely when you see the other mod: the mobile turret. This mod splits the barrel of the gun into three, which can then transform into a turret configuration that allows them all to fire simultaneously, turning the gun into an absolute bullet hose. The transformation animation is better than most porn.

Finally, the master of destruction, the original super weapon, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the BIG FUCKING GUN 9000, professionally known as the BFG. No longer using cell ammo like in the original games, it now has its own ammo type that can only hold three charges. You can't fire it as many times as you used to be able to, but the damage done by each shot makes the original almost look like a joke. This is a room clearing weapon. If well timed and well executed, it can end an encounter in seconds. Its a gun so badass that there's an entire level leading up to you getting it. Once you do, it puts you in a room full of zombies and explosive barrels. You could kill them normally, sure... but you're holding the largest gun ever constructed for human use. Might as well give it a test fire.

There is one weapon I have neglected to mention, and that is the chainsaw. Seeing as it is quite a unique weapon among this roster, it gets a special role in your arsenal. Provided you have enough fuel, the chainsaw will instantly kill ANY non-boss demon you use it against, and when you do this you'll be rewarded with a shower of ammo drops. Classic doom had resource management as a very important part of its challenge, expecting you to run out every so often. DOOM 2016 is more focused on how you kill the demons, not if you'll be able to, so being able to easily get more ammo is a must. Of course, you'll still need to pick up fuel canisters. This fuel system also provides a small and unique bit of strategy for the chainsaw. Killing a large enemy, like a baron, will take it out of the fight quickly, but it will use up all your fuel, making it easier for you to run out of ammo in the future. Conversely, killing a small enemy like an imp will only cost you one fuel pip and give you the same amount of ammo, but at the same time you've used your instant kill move on a weak enemy. This interesting dillema doesn't actually come up often. You usually find fuel pretty quickly, and it actually takes a lot to completely run out of ammo in the later stages of the game. In any case, it is a very cool weapon, and has some absolutely gnarly animations.

The weapons would be nothing without the demons, and the cast of demons is equally fantastic, taking the iconic roster from DOOM 2 and revamping them with modern tech and new designs. There are a few notable abscences, including the arch-vile, the pain elemental (good riddance), the arachnotron, and the chaingunner, as well as a couple of new additions. The summoner functions basically in place of the arch-vile, only significantly weaker and summoning new demons rather than resurrecting dead ones. The hell razer is an even further corrupted zombie soldier, with a crystal fused to its arm that allows it to fire lasers at you from a distance, basically acting as a sniper unit, although with shaky aim. The cyber-mancubus is a UAC enhanced Mancubus, harder to kill and firing globs of acid that stay on the ground instead of fireballs. Finally, as previously mentioned, the possessed. Shambling zombies that are basically walking piñatas of ammo and health waiting to be smashed open. Small new additions for the demons, but considering that these enemies haven't been in a video game for about 10 years, less is more here.

While I won't go into full detail on the demons, I do want to shout out my absolute favorite: the revenant, pictured above alongside a mancubus. In gameplay these guys are way less of a threat than they were in DOOM 2, but what makes these new ones so special to me is just how perfect their visual design is. The artists behind this game somehow managed to turn the goofiest demon of them all and make it into a vicious gory monster, while still retaining that original charm. They even managed to make it goofier along the way. They turned its chestplate into a fucking jetpack. There's also has a truly horrific backstory in its codex entries, which explain how the UAC created revenants from humans that they mutated with hell energy... while still alive. Deliciously creepy. I adore them.

Not all of DOOM's gameplay works for me. The action is fantastic, no doubt, the guns feel great and the demons are excellently designed, but there are a lot of little things that I'm just not a fan of. A lot of the game feels more bloated than it needs to be. The main offender is the upgrade systems. You have three sort of upgrade things to improve your demon slaying ability: weapon upgrades, suit upgrades, and runes. Weapon upgrades are decent, and of course the mod system is fantastic, but the final mastery upgrades require challenges to be done in order to acquire them. Kill 30 demons with this mod, whatever. I dislike this. It ends up turning a decent bit of the game not into just feeling the moment to moment combat but trying to make sure you get in all these super specific weapon things. I find it uninteresting and not a worthwhile addition. The suit upgrades are completely redundant, pretty much all of them are things that you feel like you should just have by default. They make repeat playthroughs especially annoying, although so many are completely useless that it doesnt take too long to get back the important ones. Finally, runes. Conceptually, they're interesting. You are allowed from 1 to 3 runes equipped (limit increasing as you collect more), and they each have unique properties that will give you certain advantages in combat based on your playstyle. They're fun! Some of the runes are super overpowered, but I enjoy this little bit of design, even if I still find it to be a bit bloaty. What I don't like is the way you have to get them.

Fucking rune trials.

Easily the absolute worst DOOM has to offer. In order to get a rune, you interact with a glowing green stone and get transported into a small arena where you have to complete some challenge within a time limit to proceed. They are idiotic. Challenges range from extremely easy to borderline torturous, and for some the basic concept just isn't remotely fun. I despise rune trials. They help to balance out some of the more overpowered runes, but they're just not fucking fun.

Some other small yet bothersome nitpicks: falling into bottomless pits makes you reload a checkpoint. Makes platforming (which this game has, although its not too in depth) tedious at times. There are a couple of sections of the game where you're forced to just stand in a room while someone dumps exposition on you. This game tries to commit to having no real cutscenes, always keeping you in first person, but sometimes things just fucking need to be a cutscene. It's so dull on repeat playthroughs, and it's not particularly engaging on a first either. Last but most annoying to me, every time you do a glory kill the music fades out for a moment and this stinger plays, which is fun conceptually but just really takes me out of the moment. I glory kill so often, it's just a natural part of the combat, and the music flows so well through the combat that interrupting it feels like interrupting my flow too.

Wait... the music!

How could I possibly have forgotten to talk about the music?!

Written by Australian composer Mick Gordon, known for previous works on Wolfenstein, Killer Instinct, and Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots, DOOM's soundtrack blew everyone's minds and sent Gordon into the fucking stratosphere. Combining shredding metal guitars with absolutely nasty synth sound design, it is a work of absolute musical genius. Far from the blatant MIDI rip-offs of popular metal songs of the classic games' soundtracks (not to diss Bobby Prince, he's fucking great), Mick Gordon brings a soundscape that is sinister, vicious, and downright brutal.

His most iconic track from the game is BFG Division, and it is easy to tell why. The song begins with mysterious ambience, distant thumping drums and a light repeated synth beep over all sorts of different ethereal and demonic risers. Then, it begins to ramp up, before a massive guitar hit. It keeps ramping. Another hit. More and more tension, building and building, until suddenly it stops.

And then goes for the fucking throat.

It is a fucking masterclass. A single song so good that all of a sudden we're all wondering why we don't get more games that sound this cool. This song alone sold me on the game, I mean it. I stumbled across it on Youtube one day, and determined that a game with music this good was a game I needed to play.

That being said, my favorite song on the soundtrack isn't BFG Division. Nor is it Rip & Tear, or Transistor Fist, or any of the massive badass metal themes. Rather, it's completely the opposite: a more ambient, moody track, playing between big moments and during some cutscenes, called Authorization; Olivia Pierce.

If you're familiar with DOOM, you'll notice that this is a direct recreation of Sinister by Bobby Prince from the original game's soundtrack. If you're familiar with Good Music, you'll notice that it's fucking incredible. So deeply haunting and moody and creates this feeling of just an impossible threat, an enemy so big that you have no chance of truly stopping it. You could not have saved them anyway.

On the topic of Olivia Pierce, let's get back to the story.

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

This little quote was famously said by John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, and ever since it was uttered it has made DOOM fans a lot more insufferable and the world overall just a tiny fraction darker. Look, I get it. I understand what he was going for. Deep story, or even any story, is not required for a video game in the way that it is for other mediums like film. Most of the time, with games, people care about gameplay first and story last, and to that extent the porn comparison makes sense. I have never expected good writing and character development out of porn. I have, however, expected it out of video games, and many video game stories are some of my favorites ever! Carmack wasn't saying games shouldn't have stories. The original DOOM came out in 1993, at a time where the extent of video game storytelling was mostly just saving the princess. The FPS genre wouldn't get Half-Life for another 6 years. Despite all this, many DOOM fans act like he was dissing video game storytelling in its entirety, that nobody gives a shit and if you try to make a player care about characters you're dumb and lame and gay.

It pleases me to say that the writers of DOOM (2016) did not share this belief.

DOOM's story understands that much of its playerbase is not here for story at all, so it doesn't get too ambitious with the main plot, which is a decision I respect. Aside from some previously mentioned clunky exposition segments, it does what it sets out to do really well. Much of the deeper lore is available to read within codexes, but the story is easy to understand without them. The UAC opened a portal to hell. You have to close it.

There are only four characters in DOOM, but already that's 4x the amount in the original, and each one is written very well. First you meet is Dr. Samuel Hayden, a towering cyborg, head of the UAC Mars facility and previous CEO of the company. He helps you throughout the game, but it's clear that he's motivated more by profit than by saving lives. He seems to know more than he lets on. Second is VEGA, the AI controlling the facility who acts as a tutorial voice and is the only completely friendly and genuinely helpful person you meet. Third is the main antagonist, Dr. Olivia Pierce, a scientist who grew mad with power as the UAC studied Hell and became corrupted by it, until eventually she turned to do its bidding. She is the one who lets the demonic forces loose and kills everyone, and you spend most of the game trying to kill her before she can do any more damage. She looks a bit like Tilda Swinton. Finally, of course, the hero. The Doom Marine. His friends call him Doomguy. The demons, however, have their own name for him. Before the events of the game he spent years, possibly even centuries in Hell, doing nothing but kill demons. He is the scourge of their kind. The one name they all fear. He is...

The Doom Slayer.

God, that's so ridiculously metal.

To give a little backstory on what actually leads up to the game: The UAC (Union Aerospace Corporation) sets up a research facility on Mars, and while they're there discover a mysterious new source of renewable energy that they name "argent energy." They use this energy to solve a global energy crisis back on Earth, but what they don't tell anyone is that the true source of the energy is a portal to Hell itself. Olivia Pierce, a leading scientist, becomes corrupted by Hell's influence, and starts a cult within the UAC that ends up leading her to release an argent wave that either kills or possesses half the facility, who along with a surge of demons then kill the remaining survivors. She believes that Hell represents the next stage in human evolution, and that they will pave the way for a new world for humanity. There's one flaw in her plan, however. On an expidition into Hell, Samuel Hayden discovered something. A suit of armor, and a sarcophagus with a seemingly human man inside. Demonic scripture spoke of him as an unstoppable force, one that if not contained could destroy all that Hell had built. The demons could not kill him, they could only incapacitate him (by dropping an entire fucking temple on him) and hope that he would never awaken.

But he did.

The story is fairly predictable from this point onwards, but it works in its favor. Its a simple, yet effective sci-fi action horror story. I really like it. Over the course of it you begin to uncover that the UAC's dealings with Hell were even darker than at first glance. Not only were they harvesting Hell's energy, but they were trying to weaponize the demons. Olivia Pierce or not, the UAC was doomed from the start. There is a surprising level of anti-capitalism throughout the story, which of course I really like. The most important thing to me about DOOM's story, though, is how the Slayer is characterized. The common internet perception of him is this hulking rage fueled killing machine who feels nothing but pure anger and hate. "Doomguy doesn't have PTSD because he IS the traumatic event!" The rage fueled killing machine part isn't wrong. But even the original Doomguy was shown to have some soft spots. He had a pet rabbit. He was sent to Mars in the first place as punishment for attacking a supervisor who told him to shoot at innocent civilians. The Slayer carries this on. He isn't fueled purely by rage. The man cares about people. He's not doing this just because he hates the demons, he does it because the demons are hurting people, and because the demons have hurt people he cares about and he doesn't want that for anyone else. He is fueled by compassion. His compassion just ends up getting translated into brutal rage towards the oppressor. There's a moment at the start of the game, at the end of the tutorial and right before the title card, where he's in an elevator as Hayden explains that everything that the UAC had been doing here was in humanity's best interest. As he says this, the Slayer looks down at the corpse of a worker slouched at the bottom of the elevator, and clenches his fist in white-knuckled anger, that Hayden would dare talk about the "betterment of mankind" when this is the cost of their work. Before Hayden can finish talking, he slams his fist into the interface transmitting the message.

Cue the music. Roll title card.

DOOM is by no means a perfect game, but it means a lot to me. I woudln't be where I am today had I never played it, and I mean it. There is so much that I was exposed to directly because of this game that I would have missed otherwise. My favorite band, some of my favorite movies, and plenty of other games that I adore. The Doom Slayer remains one of my favorite fictional characters ever. It is such a fantastic game. Fun story, fun characters, headbanging music, and gloriously violent combat.

Rip and tear.