I rented it from RedBox yesterday and I'll have to share my thoughts with the disclaimer that I'm very picky in regards to the Doom franchise and that I'm aware that I'll be in the vast minority with my opinion here.
To clarify, I played a few hours total to the 4th level on Ultra-Violence with all glory kill highlights, indicators etc. turned off besides the basic HUD.
Some positive thoughts first:
-Technically speaking, the graphics are really easy on the eyes and the fact that it holds 60 FPS at that level of chaos is quite amazing.
-Glory Kills as a mechanic aren't nearly as awful or disruptive as they appear in videos and trailers in their proper context of this type of gameplay.
-Mars skyboxes look very nice.
-The basic Machine Gun is really satisfying in sound and hit feedback and definitely a nice step up from the shittiest-of-all-time Doom 3 machine gun.
-Lighting is quite nice and atmospheric at points.
-Level design is a step in the right direction away from FPS games of the last decade.
-Self-awareness in this particular game's context works well.
-Ambient sound design is really cool.
Ultimately however, I was quite anxious to stop playing after I had felt that I 'put enough time in' to make the judgment call that the game indeed wasn't for me. Some thoughts on that:
-I find this overall direction only marginally, at best, better than Doom 3's. The focus on faster run & gun gameplay is welcomed, but overall, this still isn't the Doom I've been waiting for by a long shot. I feel like Doom 3 and DOOM both went one extreme of the
original Doom experience and neglected the other side of the coin respectively.
-Art direction is one of my biggest gripes and it just fails for me on every front. I was hoping for a continuation of the route Doom had taken with PSX Doom and Doom 64. A ramped-up insane, grotesque HR Giger-ish atmosphere and look taken into current gen graphics would've been fascinating. What I saw didn't look much different from Doom 3 environmentally and enemy redesigns are entirely too cartoony with a strong leaning towards Gears of War's style. Even Doom's original lab/space station designs were unique and had a particular atmosphere to them. It seems like a shame that we had to trod down the utterly boring art design path Doom 3 took again regarding the interiors. Weapon designs also look like extremely generic 'nowadays videogame Sci-Fi' stuff to me.
-Lower level enemy types look extremely similar and dull if you're not up-close for the glory kill. They really had no distinguishing look to them other than their speed of movement to tell them apart. I found this especially tedious when enemies would spawn half a mile away in a giant Mars outdoor arena where everything is tinted brown/red on top of it. This 'samey' look was a huge problem for me in Doom 3 already and I'm not sure why this was continued here.
-My absolute deal breaker complaint would be the incessant reliance on arena/enemy wave style gameplay. This the antithesis of what I enjoy about Doom's original design. Outside of the randomly placed 'we need to fill space here' low level possessed engineer guys, there is absolutely no fixed enemy placement. Even by level 4 the game had devolved into an extremely predictable exploration corridor > arena > exploration corridor > arena rut. This is uncomfortably close to mindless Serious Sam encounter design and a baffling design choice to me overall. Doom could get chaotic, yes, but it was controlled chaos whereas this game feels like randomized, thoughtless chaos to me. I don't find this intense or visceral, I find it boring.
-While the level design is definitely a nice step away from modern FPS convention, I didn't enjoy the very strict exploration area/arena segmentation of the maps. Obviously the original games had many of these level design/arena faults I'm mentioning going on as well in some capacity, but they were extremely clever about shuffling them around and hiding them behind a thin veil that at least provided the illusion of more choice.
-The jumping mechanics feel very stiff and a bit odd for a game so heavily reliant on it. Not a big complaint or anything but jumping definitely felt a bit weird to me and the ledge grab randomly wouldn't work in odd spots.
-I do not now or will ever understand the Mick Gordon appeal. Especially as a long time Metal fan, it sounds like extremely generic Bro-Metal to me. His music is to Metal what Michael Bay is to Action films. The Ambient sound design in between arenas I really did like however.
-Shotgun felt and sounded really wimpy. A step up from Doom 3, but it's more like version 1.5 of the Doom 3 shotty rather than an actual, good revamping.
-The sound mix is really over-compressed and mushed together sounding. It reminds me of the loudness wars in music production that have been going on. Every aspect has to be so loud and in-your-face that the total mix needs to be so compressed that everything ends up sounding mushy and weak again ironically. I played on Sennheiser headphones and couldn't really tell where enemies were coming from which could also be because the enemy types don't really have very distinct sounds. The originals would 'alert' you to each enemy type with a specific sound that you learned over time. Hear a a baron scream? Ready this and that weapon.
Again, I realize most people won't care about many of these aspects but they are very important to me in a Doom game and overall I'd actually rate this below Doom 3. If I had to put a score on it, I'd give it a 6.5/10. It is what I expected it to be, a decent shooter with plenty of good intentions that just doesn't feel like a Doom game at all to me. Frankly, it reminds me more of the plentiful Doom knockoffs of the late 90s/early 2000s.
If you can be as into it as most people are on here, more power to you. A fun game is a fun game. I'd cut it much more slack if it wasn't supposed to be a 12 year in the making Doom sequel is the bottom line. I think the extremely positive reactions to this game also serve to point out how truly robbed-bare and burnt out the FPS genre is when a game with, in my opinion, so many issues compared to its big brother that came out over two decades ago can be called the best FPS in a decade.
Hopefully it sells well and lights a fire under id's, or others developers', asses to keep improving this first step of getting closer to the brilliance of the originals.
EDIT: Would also like to add that the SP campaign is most certainly an improvement over the miserable MP Beta for any potential players. I did not do MP in the retail/rental version however.
