It is as far from modern, quasi-realistic military shooters as can be imagined. The Doomguy does not care about hard cover, infantry tactics, or changing magazines he enters a room and is in constant motion, circle-strafing, dodging incoming fire, and shoving his shotgun directly up a demon’s nostril before he fires. I knew I was going to like this game as soon as it started, and my character started moving around the hallways of the base as if he was on rocket skates, moving at a full sprint at all times, with a standing jump like Michael Jordan in zero gravity. You should kill them, as they are demons. More details get filled in later, through flashbacks and the occasional found document, but even the protagonist thinks it’s mostly irrelevant. The plot is bare-bones you wake up on a scientific outpost on Mars that’s already been wholly conquered by demons, and alone, set out to kill them all before they kill you. I grew up playing Doom and Doom II, back when they and Marathon were the only shooters worth mentioning on the Mac, and so Doom 4 was almost instantly and comfortably familiar. The campaign is brilliant and close to perfect everything but the campaign is, at time of writing, pretty underwhelming. the chainsaw and berserk pack not being available to place in user-made maps) is going to be sold later as DLC. It’s an unbalanced package, at least out of the box, and I suspect a lot of what’s missing (i.e. Everything else is, at best, anemic you have an incomplete, unsatisfying batch of tools for the level designer, and the multiplayer suffers from unbalanced weapons and the lack of some obvious modes, such as a classic deathmatch setting. To summarize Doom, which I will be calling Doom 4 for simplicity’s sake, briefly: the single-player campaign is one of the best action experiences this year, and is an early contender for one of the best of this generation of hardware.

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