Brutal Doom v19 (mod for Doom and Doom 2)

This is going to bloody, fast.

It's an odd thing to do but I felt that rather than review a game, I'd review a modification for a game. Modifications are an interesting subset of gaming, taking the whole game and deciding "Yes, I like this game but I feel that it needs this..." and then going and changing the game in some manner from things like adding in new sound effects, replacing the enemies with large pictures of dicks or going above and beyond to the point of effectively re-designing the WHOLE game with just the core engine being the only thing that is recognisable in the first place. (Even then... it's hard to see it at times).

This is one of the latter modifications. Brutal Doom (v19, for those wondering what's the issue).

You just made a VERY big mistake...

As a comparison, I ran this mod over Doom 2. Let's get straight that right now the things that don't change are the levels themselves and the textures used in those levels and the music of the game. Everything is changed, modified, improved or different. (Yes I'm generalising and there's going to be a few things similar like the BFG sprite is still the same so let's not get pedantic, people).

Brutal doom, is often spoken about as being the game that turns doom into the game we would LIKE to remember. Ramp up the violence, the blood, the gore and the action and this is about as chaotic and gorefesty (yes it's now a word) as one could possibly imagine a game to be without having someone stood beside you and opening an artery over your face every few seconds.

Before chaos...

...after chaos

Let's start with the weapons. ALL the weapons barring the BFG are different. Your fists for a start can punch, rip, fatality and slaughter enemies if you have the right power up or sneak up on them for a stealth kill. Your pistol is now an assault rifle where you can aim down the iron-sights for headshots and pick off body parts, your shotgun can do the same. The double barrel shotgun is stronger and can fire off individual barrels. The minigun is now more like a minigun and can be set spinning for a faster rate of fire (with more judder from the recoil), rockets are kept in 6-pack drums and need reloading but they're faster and hit harder. The plasma gun can be reloaded and used to spray flames around while the BFG just paints the town red... still.

A wealth of fatailities just for you.

They also give you back health and you're untouchable while doing them.

The enemies, whoo! there's a list and a half. You can blow off limbs and they'll keep coming, you can watch them attack each other with multiple animations, some will assault you with others, some will animated differently, almost ALL of them will animated a fatality if they kill you in hand-to-hand combat (See the cacodemon for half-filling meal while it chomps your torso off and leaves the legs behind, or the Baron of Hell RIPPING YOU IN HALF down the middle of your chest). Some will crawl screaming along the ground or just stop there and try to attack.

The enemies aren't the only ones capable of being killed creatively.

Even here, large floating tomato monsters need feeding.

On top of this, you can take the rockets off the Revenants and the cannons off the Mancubus and use their weapons against themselves, kill the enemy with explosives or use a chainsaw on the corpse and you'll be able to steal and use it for yourself. The SpiderMastermind now has an explosive ammo chaingun and a LOT more health while the Cyberdemon now sports multi directional firing spread (no more easy sidesteps) and can stomp you if you get too close for comfort. He also doesn't appreciate being told to go "fuck yourself"... Seriously, don't do it.

10 seconds in and it's going to get far more bloody.

For many, the fun will be found in spraying body parts all over the place and the exploration in the melee fatalities if you have the berserker pack. Or just seeing how over the top one can go with this level of chaos and explosions. Coupled with the notion that everything can be ripped apart, players will end up experimenting to try and find various ways of acquiring all the deaths. Hit it with shotgun and you blow the upper half away, plasma rifle will leave a burnt electrified corpse, machineguns will make them dance a little while rockets just chunkify everything around themselves.

Before paintjob...

...after paintjob.

There are some downfalls though, with the high level of explosive giblets and everything having far more blood than is physically and logically possible, the game can suffer from having too much on screen and quickly identifying what is dead, dying and still a threat can be a hard task. The new approach to the game also will catch many players out with the faster AI and alternative attacks, enemies previously locked to sectors may start wandering to places the players will not expect and more quickly too. New scope is now feasible for ambushes in various places and players toes will be kept upon.

Yes you are seeing that right, and yes the revenant can STILL attack.

There's also the sad truth in that there's various situations and circumstances that make the game exponentially more difficult while in some places outright impossible due to the layout of the level, placement of the enemies and the modifications brought in by this near Total Conversion. Incidentally it doesn't stop it from being just outright, immature, gore fest fun.

You'll end up just staring when the action lets up and seeing the beautiful horrors.

So get this mod, grab a BFG and paint the town RED.

Rage

Now for a more modern, more recent, First Person Shooter. ID software seems to fall into a trap of their own making in which each game they make looks nice, looks lovely in fact, is developed on a very impressive engine (aesthetically impressive at least) and falls down with the game in so far as plot/story and the delivery of which. Doom was a wonderful little game with atmospheric delivery, doom 2 was very similar and became and much more action orientated game with cut scenes/text plots. Quake was more of the same but in full 3D mapping and modelling. Quake 2 had the same with more detail and animations in models; Quake 3 was a fast and fluid multiplayer experience of dropping the single-player mode in favour of bots in multiplayer. Doom 3 was a wonderful experience in a technical engine but still falling flat with the delivery of storyline and plot development. Quake 4 was a more open Doom 3. I'm Not going to touch Daikatana, for now... I'll suffer that one another time.

So what's RAGE got to offer? More of the same. But at least there's an attempt at doing something with some plot beyond "Turn up and shoot stuff until everything's dead". Doesn't sound like fun but works well in Doom and Quake, in this case there's more than that available to everyone playing.

The game kicks off with you, Captain Anonymous, unrecognised regenerating hit-point wonder with an affinity for carrying lots of weapons and ammo types, making things from scrap (if you've the blueprints) and mad driver extraordinaire from buggies to quad bikes, cars and more, including able to operate guns, rockets/missiles and weapons from the future (by your perspective). The Buck Rogers of this game, waking up in the future and being attacked by assholes and then in turned saved by John Goodman. (Genuine Celebrity Voice).

With Mr Goodman's guidance, he'll help you as long as you go and slaughter locations filled with fuck-heads. John kills 2 mutants and in exchange for helping you, he wants you to (as a one man army) kill an entire tower block of ass-hats with a crusty old pistol and some of those bladed boomerangs from Mad Max 2. It's in this first area that a rather interesting element of the game comes to the fore in the form of your regeneration and health. Not only do you have the red-mist of damage descending over your screen, but in being taken down, you can force your heart to restart itself with a small mini-game of push the analogues in the right place, then hitting a button. The more you get right, the higher the health regeneration will be and the more powerful the output, meaning you can electrocute people with your own personal defibrillation kit.

After a while it'll regenerate sufficiently enough to let you do it again. Though oddly, getting blown up with a rocket sometimes bypasses this. But a shotgun round to the face won't bypass the heart restart. At the risk of becoming far more cardiologically focused, I'm going to move on to the game again.

The first act of the game is John Goodman asking you for help, getting you new weapons, medical supplies and opening up routes and access points where everything is very 'by the numbers' in the form of gaming, go to point a, do mission, go to point b, do mission, go to hub b and do missions c and d, get cards, shoot guys with bad accents in the face. It's not until the big breakthrough into the 2nd area that the game opens up a little more (not entirely free range but sufficient enough a step up from Doom games) where players can visit a lot of locations and do very little until they're supposed to be there on specific missions.

Eventually you'll become saviour of a town, move on to another town, save that one too and then go fight the big bad group that has a lot of futuristic tech and beat them at their own game. In the meantime you'll get to play an odd form of cards akin to battle cards, racing cars and upgrading cars (limited options in the form of engines, wheels, armour etc, and very limited in that there's an obvious BEST to have and you'll just use that), stab your own fingers in reflex games, play duelling banjos and do a few missions consisting of turn up to a place and kill dudes. One particular mission is to turn up to a place, grab the things someone stole and kill everyone, the mission provider doesn't even want those things back and you can sell them. So basically you turn up to slaughter a load of people on the whim of some guy who could easily have said that inside location X is a Thing that was stolen.

Great. Freedom to kill based on generic bullshit. But at least it's more of a reason than some other games provide.

The driving in the game is simply a means to get from one location to another because doing it by foot will get you killed quickly when the first cars turn up and either run you over or cheese grate you out of existence quickly and regenerating will get you stomped shortly after again. Though at one point I was successful in running myself over and having to regenerate back into my own car, score 1 for Twit Of The Year. There are races against other players in the online mode or races against the AI which thankfully doesn't do the whole rubber band difficulty thing and if you're a big distance ahead, you'll STAY a big distance ahead unless you just stop still like a prick. All of which gains you tickets to buy more things so you're forced to win races if you want upgrades and forced even more to win races to progress the plot at various points too.

This is never fun. "You must do this before you can kill more dudes!" makes me wonder why there isn't a response of "....fuck off" and then smacking him over the head and stealing all the fun toys before driving off into the sunset laughing like a nutcase.

There's an odd duality in the game too, there's this fun side of the game that's rather jumpy and fun, light hearted despite being about killing things mercilessly and then there's the darker more foreboding side of having to wander through derelict cities and being attacked by the dying remnants of the world's infected/mutated individuals. Some of the settings and scenery really conveys the sense of depression and hopelessness while you're scavenging through a dead city. Given that until a few moments ago you were running around a town pissing off the Mayor and playing games of "my card kills your card", it's rather a sudden twist and the shock can come a little too suddenly, breaking you out of the atmosphere and plunging you into another one.

In fact that's this game, two halves that are one side light and peppy despite the apocalypse and the other just full of doom, gloom and depression and the switch between the two is an express elevator to hell. Almost immediate switches with little build up between and as the game goes on, becoming further and further apart from each other with the darker side of the game taking almost the forefront until you're saving the day up to the cliff-hanger that few will expect to happen.

Yes it ends on NO closure at all. Pods open, you're stood atop a light-barrier tower and ... that's it. No final boss, just a final gauntlet. I'm tired of seeing shit like this in games, where designers couldn't find a suitable ending point so they just don't use one. It's annoying. When the first few games did it, it became edgy, but when it becomes the standard it becomes fucking stupid and unfulfilling. Try cooking a meal, the best meal you'll ever taste, you get to sample the ingredients, slap it in the oven and cook it to the point you open the oven, smell the finished dish and slice it perfectly to place onto a plate and then you leave the shop after paying and not eating it. That's how these kinds of endings feel. Anticlimactic and I really shouldn't write a review just before dinner.

The game looks impressive, not great because we've gone the route of the doomed world in brown and grey, which is a great reason to NOT throw in lush green fields, flowers bursting into colour and instead pretend everything is doom and gloom and slap a few brown filters atop the lenses to make it murky and dank. Movement in the game seems to suffer the Doom experience of feeling like you're running slightly too fast but that could just be down to not having faster movement in other recent FPS games, I'm not going to criticise there on being different, it just takes a little period of adjustment.

Co-operative mode is entirely disjointed from the game, which is disappointing, it'd be nice to run through the game with a colleague/partner but instead you get a series of 'legends' about events that happened before the proper game takes place. Rather than having to bring in experience or setups from the players, the level itself determines the weapon load out, and inventory load out (and places things in different places on the quickslots... Left on D-Pad will be bandages in one level and sentry bots on another, with similar for the weapons too!). Players will have to work together to kill lots of dudes and score points and multipliers to boost themselves up onto higher echelons of video game scoring.

I'd rather have had a colleague with me in the main game, because once the levels are over, there's only the harder difficulty to try and that's it. Co-Op done, dusted, finished and completed. Thanks for playing, sod off, now drive cars at each other for hours. It's a lacklustre addition and while there is the possibility of using DLC I shouldn't have to wait for someone to add it when they feel the need to later on, just so I can get the full experience once someone gets off their fat arse and types a few keys on a keyboard.

I'm done here, now to drive off into the sunset, laughing... for some reason...

Strife

Strife is one of those games that was forced into a situation without realising it. The promise and prospect behind the game is let down mainly by the limitations of the engine in which it was made. Strife is one of the last games made commercially on the Doom engine and it pulls out all the stops to become something far more than just another first person shooter.

The premise is simple, Earth fucked itself up, life got shit and then a meteor hits to really slam a great fat throbbing fuck-you into humanities throat and blow it's alien invasion load down its throat for years to come. You are someone growing up in the aftermath of all this with humans living under a pseudo cyborg-cum-religious order that are steadily offering stability and enslavement in the same sentence. Humans are steadily being oppressed and the ruling factions are locked in an inner conflict of "entities" that are trying to outdo each other and defeat each other to rule over everything by themselves. Naturally, you'll have to take down each of these "entities" and in doing so you gain access to more and more pieces of a weapon that does huge damage but drains your health when you fire it.

The story unfolds with you joining the resistance, getting roped into other plots and plans and trying to determine who to believe and follow while being mindful of back-stabbed by other key players in the grand plot. Eventually leading armies to conquer other opponents and taking control of the resistance, before duking it out with the big nasties of the game, and some of the larger and more powerful opponents, that Strife has to offer. Various towns and locations initially will be friendly and accept trade though with enough hunting around inside other locations, you can acquire enough weaponry and ammo without the need to go the whole barter route.

The game can glitch up big time and if you set yourself on a course, backtracking upon yourself (i.e. realising two characters are about to fuck things up, you'll have to side with one, but if you go midway through that storyline and then opt to kill the other, you'll end up stuck with nothing to do and no progression), may cause issues the game hadn't been programmed to anticipate. A huge mood killer in a game with only one save slot and auto saving will cause everything to fall apart if you decide you don't like which new direction the game is going.

As a new arrival you're given a dagger/blade fist and that's it while someone is about to kill you for being you. What's not apparent straight off is that this game can't be played like doom. You can't run around killing everyone as you'll trigger alarms. Which stops the game from letting you trade and function, the first person you meet is going to kill you if you don't kill them, which is the wrong tone with which to start this game as playing on that line will just have unlimited enemies spawning in until you're brown bread. Likewise, some missions are designed to be traps and if you save along those missions and go the wrong route about it, you'll never be able to progress even if you escape the death-trap.

IF you can look past these bugs, you'll find there's a rich environment, carefully and in many cases, wonderfully designed areas that really do the most with the doom engine, a full inventory of items to help the player along and a fair selection of weapons with which to get the job done. In some cases you're planting rocks to blow up force fields, fighting giant mechs, infiltrating various dungeons for prisoners to save, fighting mechs... and fighting clouds of eyeballs that launch lightning... Ok so the variation isn't great and some of the opponents you'll fight are hugely overpowered compared to the things you as a player can do.

Engine wise, it's more in common with Hexen in that it utilises a hub system and quite an expansive one at that. There are a few quick movements and teleports but otherwise you'll find yourself running through a large part of levels with newer opponents and enemies in your quest to get to the bottom of the invasion, stop the plans and force back the alien invasion. You'll find yourself running from one area to another, through missions based around that area, then through a channel-level to get to another hub with more quests to do there. Thankfully the HQ moves depending on the point of the storyline you're in so there's less running about to do, though this breaks down when realising that there's teleports put in to move you around and leaves you wondering why they didn't just use them from the start.

Sadly, the levels do become less plot driven and less interactive as the game progresses, compared to the first few levels where you'll meet and encounter people, trade items with them or threaten them for answers, do various missions and submissions before the game soon becomes, "Hi, go to point B, kill dickface C, come back" upon which you get "umm... now go to point D as it's really important, then kill G go to H kill P eat J and take a dump on Y" and you're just running through landscapes killing everything. Especially jarring when you consider that earlier levels had a large focus on stealth, not alerting people to your presence and making silent kills rather than alerting the guards. In fact in some levels you're even given the opportunity to dress up and re-stealth the mission from there on; though some levels also have a compulsory alarm sector you have to walk over. You could run through and kill everything with a gun, but you could try harder to not have to.

But then that defeats the point, it's too difficult in places to try the stealth route that ends up with you going murder-death-kill spree on everything.

It's as if the game can't make up its mind as to what it wants to be and then just decides to say bollocks and become a generic shooter. Which is a shame as the potential here was fantastic. The first half of the game, up until the death of the Programmer, is very plot driven. The levels are very well designed and you get the sense and possibly the feel of actually doing something towards helping to overthrow a controlling faction. The push towards attacking the enemy base is done with the support of other rebels, making it rather surprising the first time you see it, given the previous games hadn't had things like this in Doom, Doom2 etc (but had in Marathon), to see AI supporting you was quite the shock. Though they're shit at actually getting to the boss and help in no way at all.

Ignoring the dullness of the storyline towards the end, the game is rather expansive and harder to gauge on the account of hubs changing and levels adjusting as you progress through the game. Of the 31 maps, some of those are hub levels, some are just missions stemming from the hubs, and a few are changed for other maps depending upon the plot, such as the programmers lair being a point of destruction and battle, then becoming a HQ for the rebellion and looking like it's been torn apart through warzones while the old HQ is left very empty even going as far as to remove all the parts of the level that resembled storage crates and boxes. It's a very unique aspect and the surprising attention to detail is impressive to realise. IF it's realised at all.

That said, the game does take the doom engine into a much larger field than just grab guns and ammo. There's a whole host of items you can collect from suits and hazmat, health packs and targeters, gold for trading, quest items and so on. Some of which are really useful while others are just there because someone thought "let's put that in" and someone sadly, agreed. It does make for a rather redundant system in places but it also allows more choice on the player's part rather than just running over an item and automatically picking it up AND using it. Given that in some levels, hazmat suits are used to avoid poisonous areas found IN that level, stealth suits however can be used later in the game assuming you're not up against enemies that can negate the effects. (Read: Most of them by that point)

There are problems with the game, it can be very hard to work out where to go in a level and the waypoint guidance only informs you with written instructions which can be misunderstood or misleading. However it does make you explore things more thoroughly and when you check the map you'll start to identify where somewhere has not been seen or explored properly, at very few times will it be a case of "hit all switches" to progress but when it does, it reeks of the old Doom style of gaming that Strife has tried hard to distance itself from, then falls back to it with enough force to kill any engrossing sensations you might have had.

Having said that, it is rather surprising to hear a full audio accompaniment for the entire game with everyone's speech, which can get a little annoying when your built in ear-piece squawks off your mission like a parrot needing its head shoved up its arse, though given the scope of the game and effort put into the production, there's evidence of a LOT of work involved in taking something like the Doom engine and putting up and beyond expectations, while still a flawed piece of work, those with a keen eye on Doom and its engine's limits, will respect the work gone into this.

Otherwise it's an RPG that can be rather unforgiving and have a case of some of the most nasty traps of all time where players will need to start over by making a wrong choice at a wrong time, even as far as quite late into the game.

Doom

The doors are locked, you’re down to 12 health points, demons are approaching from the rear, the lights have failed, your shotgun is down to its last round and there’s an army to slaughter ahead of you. Make your choice wisely or meet your DooM.

Yes, Doom. A very key and prominent component in the machine of pushing to the forefront the First Person Shooter genre of gaming, while Doom itself is very similar to Doom2, I’ll be focusing on the first game for this particular review as the two have some very large differences that almost make them completely different games from each other. I’ll explain that a little better during this review.

Doom. Bow down and worship it for the Grand Father figure that it is, Wolfenstein 3D could be the Great Granddaddy but Doom is the more widely recognised forerunner on this genre. While other systems might recognise Encounter, Marathon, Dungeons of Doom (no relation), Doom has been the more successful and iconic game for many reasons. (Don’t talk to me about Doom 3... that’s for another day).

Doom, has a very simple premise and get go for a game. You’re a marine. The end.

I joke.

You’re stationed on a moon base while covering for secret lab stuff involving teleportation. They open the teleport, it works, great celebrating. That would make for a royally shitty game but then it all starts going wrong with the teleporters from the moon to mars. Things start to come back through the teleports and a whole lot of skullfuckery happens. The marines go in and you’re sat on your arse while they get ripped, slashed, chewed, munching and generally hurt to death in the way a trained army usually does and you’re left all on your lonesome.

50 rounds in the pistol and that’s it. Go save the day, Hero. To which you’ll do this by running through 3 (or 4 if you have Ultimate Doom which wasn’t the last doom, that’s Final Doom and even then it’s Doom 2 but enough of that complex mindscrew) episodes of 9 levels (8 and a bonus) filled with corridors, darkness, keys, switches, traps, monsters, monsters, monsters and monsters, with some monsters for bonus and then a monster or two.

At the end of each chapter is a Boss setup where you’ll need to kill the key monster(s) to progress and claim to have beaten the game. But what monsters have we got? Some of the infamous in video gaming history ranging from zombies with pistols and shotguns to imps that throw fireballs, flaming spectral skulls that just ram you repeatedly, huge bloated tomato gasbags that belch plasma at you, large bipedal shaved demonic mouths on legs. Barons of Hell that serve as the first boss(es) and later as a significant obstacle in later chapters, the infamous Cyber demon with its obnoxiously huge health and infinite supply of rockets it’ll pump down your throat faster than a teenager watching the scrambled porn channel before the teaser time is up. A huge spider/brain monstrosity with a Gatling gun on robotic legs as the final boss, all await the player during the course of the game.

And some of the demons are invisible.

Yes it’s all coming from Hell. So the religious right should stop reading or keep reading and then play to kill the demons they will come for them at the day of judgement. To defend yourself you’ve an array of weapons and power ups. Health boosters, radiation suits (some of those areas are flooded with nuked liquid), invisibility, armour, light amplification goggles, berserker packs (for punching things REALLY hard in the face for splatification), for one. Shotguns, chainguns, rocket launchers, plasma guns and the all powerful Big Fraggin’ Gun 9000 series, the staple for Big Gun standards and thankfully, not a weapon your opponents have.

Now this is a game that didn’t use mouse aiming, the guns automatically aim up or down as long as you see the opponent but left/right aiming is done by you. Mods... can change that and I’ll talk in a moment on that one. Most of the game can be defeated by simply standing in a room and firing until everything is dead without moving on the easier levels (with double ammo by the way). It’s not until the first boss and absolutely by the Cyber demon that you will have to learn the key movement principle that almost every FPS has ever had since Doom, strafing. Once you learn how to sidestep, you can get through most of the game entirely unscathed as enemies are 100% accurate save for the zombies, or if you’re invisible. You will eventually know that when you see something shoot at you, it WILL hit unless you move or are partially in cover.

Having said this, I’m making the game sound like a roaring rampage of destruction and vengeance. It is not. Doom is the more atmospheric of the games between itself and Doom 2. On the higher difficulties there is definitely more enemies and the fights get more frantic with tactical use of explosives to help thin out numbers. But you’ll wandering dark corridors, avoiding crushing ceilings, hunting down the noises of demons wandering the levels while they seek you. At times the game feels almost claustrophobic with the dark closeness of the levels while being attacked at close range and short range.

The limitations of the engine do keep snapping the player back at times from the possible emersion of the game. Some levels are very well designed and certainly give the illusion of complex military bases, science labs and warehouses. But the engine has this little restriction of every wall being flat and straight up/down. Each section of any map has a floor and roof and nothing between it. Yet while modern shooters make for more complicated levels with 3D mapping and polygons, Doom‘s style leaves the players experiencing an almost comic like horror experience, some areas are dark and moody but the monsters are cartoony in their own regard.

On its own, Doom is a very solid, very polished and well designed game that while lacking some of the features synonymous with today’s modern games (and in many cases NOT, thankfully...damn cut scenes...), remains as a standard for games being made today of the First Person Shooter genre.

But we’re just scratching the surface. The online scene has made doom one of the most modded games of all time and the creativity behind it has been incredible to behold. From mods that change the appearance of the game i.e. having all of a cartoon series as characters in the game rather than the monsters, to new monsters being made, to new weapons and levels being designed. The online competitions have hosted servers for FAR more players than the usual game allowed, speed increased/decreased, gravity for jumping (not featured in the main game) crouching, melee combos and gory deaths and fatalities. New music, remixed music, single level madness, whole 32 map packs, co-operative bullet hells, 2D platformers, VoIP mods, MP3 Players, remote access viewers, total conversions to other games and engines and I’m barely even touching the surface at this list.

A lot of the doom mods are very quick and easy to install and can add a great longevity to a game that has been around for a long time already and given the violent nature of the game, there’s plenty there to keep fans coming back for a LOT more.