PC S.T.A.L.K.E.R

"My Ideal Holiday" by Bodster. Thousands of square miles of overgrown, unkempt, woodland; cities and villages turned ghost towns by the lack of involvement of humanity for at least 30 years; a military presence to execute interlopers on sight; wild and chaotic, sometimes psychic, monsters and mutants; helicopter patrols primed and ready to fire at a moment’s notice; obscure random events liable to kill people at a moment’s notice often unseen to the untrained eye; a blown out nuclear reactor that is working once again.

Yep, I want to be a STALKER.

There was much hype built up around this game "Shadows of Chernobyl" for a game set in and around Chernobyl and Pripyat, mapped and modelled after the real locations and having suffered much of the events of the location but also tying in with an relatively obscure piece of fiction at the time, Roadside Picnic, which I heartily recommend to any avid science-fiction fan looking for a short story.

Plot wise, you are Mr Memory Loss (so obviously you're a fuck up somewhere along the lines, why people can't just be Captain Bland, I'll never know) who has awoken with a burned tattoo on his arm earning the nick name Marked One like it's the biggest and cleverest joke of the century, given the local population, it's understandable. After a brief "What you got no memory? Go do X, Y and Z to learn the layouts and I'll tell you what I remember" sets you up for the big events in the game and readies you in getting and gathering weapons, scavenging in buildings, avoiding radiation zones and the infamous anomalies.

Or... it would have done. But I'll rip into that later.

Your amnesiac self has to travel the "Zone" a cordoned off military are around the Chernobyl Reactor to stop people getting close and meeting death from the anomalies. These being ghostly things that can travel the landscape and cause things and people to die suddenly, bloodily, excessively or cause horrific damage for no real reason. In the book they're described as being the remnants of a picnic left over from aliens (as a metaphor) and it's just the debris from their littering doing what it usually does. You however get to avoid the nasty ones, find items affected by the reactor's blowouts and trade them for bigger and better guns and items or keep them for the bonus factors they provide (Until someone gets smart and gets enough bullet protection to HEAL each time they get shot...nice one for working that out). While trying to do various things like not pissing off the local factions of fighters and survivors, raiding groups of glory hunters, mutants and monsters spread liberally around the countryside, finding out whom you were or trying to get into the reactor to find the grand prize.

That grand prize being a single wish, but the wish granter is a prick, so it'll back-fire hilariously. If you've ever seen Wish Master films, you'll know what I'm talking about. "I wish to no longer see this world in pain and suffering" Bye, bye, eyeballs. It's that kind of wish granting little bastard.

It takes the story from Roadside Picnic and combines it with the real world events that happened in Chernobyl, the anomalies and odd items in the zone, the STALKERS and scavengers that would aid people in finding and selling items while skipping military cordons but the story and film had a lot more suspense and potential than the game does in storytelling, but wouldn't make as much fun to be a game. The overall package however of the first STALKER game takes the more interesting aspects for action and story and combines them to create this game.

You'll travel from place to place, trade your items and weapons for other items and ammo, armour and the usual survival items like med kits, radiation cure and equipment to give you lights, grenade launchers and other such fun things. You'll explore derelict buildings avoiding traps and radiation in the cities and complexes while negating the military turning up to stop you here and there because as far as they're concerned, nobody should be making wishes as it can't be controlled so there's a nice little pro-anarchy notion for your political bullshit comparisons. You'll have to explore how to shut down defences to let you get closer to the big prize and suffer the hallucinations accompanying it while skipping back and forth and fighting almost every step of the way.

The physics engine is gorgeous, if a little clunky in places. Bullets punch through as far as they would through wood, metal and concrete so seeing a guy taking cover behind wood you can machinegun his body into a ragdoll through the barrier he's hidden behind. Bounce grenades off the walls nearby to land near him to flush him out or charge in with a double barrel shotgun and unload your pseudo-penis into his face. Breaking parts of buildings can cause other parts to topple and fall upon opponents and launching barrels via explosions into people to kill them is always rewarding to observe. The anomalies play with the physics even further by occasionally launching you into the air if you wander into one, dragging you into the sky and ripping you apart or electrocuting you with high damage shocks (or heal if you're immune to shocks and electrics).

The story is played through in finding PDAs of dead people you're sent to find or follow a path towards the main goal of working out whom you are and the truth behind the wish maker, which side of the conflict to take and ultimately determine whether to be a shitbag or a saint in the very obvious moral choice system of "nice guy" vs. "scumbagbastard guy". You can entertain yourself with various side quests to kill other STALKERs in the zone, hunt wildlife (and it's VERY wild in some places) beat the arbitrary arena fights that seem to litter free-roam games these days to become king-dong of the arena. There's little here that hasn't been done before in say other games but the stylish presentation and grotty feeling really sells the environment and emersion is... where it falls down.

Originally the game was going to be full roaming, huge area with exploration akin to Morrowind, Skyrim, fallout etc. Vehicles could be commandeered and driven, anomalies would be randomly moved around when blow outs happened (you get only one, it's scripted and you have to be indoors to survive radiation death day), other STALKERS could finish quests for you or even beat the game and make their own wishes. Most of this was scrapped and now you get key "areas" and upon reaching the end of such an area, you get "would you like to move on" and it RIPS you out of the story and game's immersive properties. That said, the game is fantastic at the setup of suspense and horror when scavenging inside the bigger installations and being attacked out of seemingly nowhere by creatures that turn invisible or can rip your consciousness from your mind and throw it back with psychic blasts. Moving around the towns and the city itself is sadly limited by the usual debris that blocks all doors and windows you could get inside had it not been there while hyper-powerful and super-armed enemies are hitting you with death from above, a little one-sided but knock one down and steal the gun for a BIG boost in your fight back.

The attention to detail is lavished lovingly in this game and it shows, even when running around the reactor buildings themselves in the final fights and being teleported through anomalies left and right while combating the same people that tried to sell you down the road with bullshit, gets intense in the final moments and feels more like a fulfilling payoff than the wish making itself (yep, those are bad endings). The final product is so trimmed down from what was originally promised and moved back from the grand ideas and story we were all sold, I can imagine that through the effort put in, the decision to do so couldn't have been taken lightly and would have been a huge blow the actual designers and programmers. You can feel the dedication in the game and the fact it's a fraction of what they wanted to deliver (and videos and demos show that there WAS those things in there) would have been soul destroying to have to do.

What STALKER falls down on is variation. You'll enter a new area, kill a few people, take their guns and ammo and trade off your older guns and ammo, and repeat this with each new area. Once the bigger more powerful guns come into play, you'll stick with those and load up on ammo, of which there is plenty, and keep running and gunning to find new items and scavenge further. There are a few different monsters in the game from large mutants, to stealthy ninja monsters that turn translucent, to psychic attacking gnome/dwarf things to dogs and blink dogs which generate fake dogs. In the bosses, there are a few more ethereal creatures but not all that many altogether. Humans range from military with high power guns and usually difficult to take on, scavengers with lower guns, clan members aligned with their respective groups that will have their own weapons, some will be armed in exosuits making them walking tanks most people will fear but still die from a headshot from event the crappiest pea-shooter. If you're accurate with a rifle and scope, no human enemy will be a threat. Add in a rocket launcher for yourself and it's easy street until sheer numbers MIGHT overwhelm you. Take your time and use cover and there's little challenge here at all.

That said, it's a good game with great potential that was sadly cut short either by meddling from the executives or skipped deadlines. I have heard that various mods can be installed for people to play the game closer to how it was originally envisioned but that takes a little trust on the part of others to deliver that and not to bollocks up your game in the process. Well worth a look however just to see how an apocalyptic survival game could and should be done.

I'd wish you to stop reading but likely my hands will fall off to stop anything else I write ever to be written aga...

GameCube: Gotcha Force

Hey kids! Did you ever really enjoy Pokémon, Digimon, any dumb fucking cartoon where some young kids run around with super powerful beings obliterating and destroying the planet in the name of happy love fun times and general Japanese sub culture? Yes? Would you like to do the same for an entirely unknown brand? Maybe...?

That’s something I never got about these cartoons. Kids aged around 6-12 years old end up befriending super powerful beings that can obliterate planets. If it’s not small living flame throwers, it’s creatures that can shift and switch time and space, break planets and cities apart like nothing and generally I think it’s going to be fun as hell to see out my window and watch little Timmy from down the road incinerating half a city with a small green turnip looking thing that has a perpetually happy face on its so-called features.

That’s what Gotcha Force is themed on. Small, young, kids (paedo’s, fuck off, now) that live in Nowhere Suburbia (because all kids live the in best places with great families and easily affordable rents and mortgages... no wait, they own the whole place) where one day a star falls, the new kid to the town that is instantly relatable for the outcast new kids at schools, finds a tiny robot “toy” that talks to him. No bigger than his hand and a conveniently marketable size should some company pick up the merchandise.

Turns out his next door neighbour got one, as did some girl down the road, and conveniently, only a few kids at school. Oh yeah, and these robots are great at kicking seven shades of shit out of each other in over sized arenas. So day 1, going to your friend’s house and it goes like this.

“Hey, I found this alien talking robot!”

“WOW! So did I!”

“Let’s make the fight to see who is stronger!”

“Yes! Let’s!”

Notice any bullshit here because it REEKS to me.  Here’s how it should have gone.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH” and the kid runs off down the street to be horrifically scarred for life while everyone laughs at his pissed and/or shat pants.

But enough of my social commentary, there’s a game here.

That’s the pretext to the game, you’re a new kid, find toys that fight and go up against your opponents. As you fight them you realise there’s a “Death force” (strong names for a kid game I know) that puts up more than just 1 on 1 fights, so you have multiple opponents that are weak but there’s backups.

You start each round/fight with your main char (at first, but hold on) and your opponent in a 3D arena that’s been scaled up because you’re scaled down. So there’s arenas like a marketplace, kids bedrooms, gardens with picnic tables and such. You move around the 3D arena while always looking at your opponent, until you switch targets to other enemies. But you’re always locked to an opponent and seeing them through things. So the stealth element in multiplayer does exist but you can still hide behind cover... sometimes. Combat depends upon the “bot” you’re using. The one you start with is a rather powerful system with melee combos, long range attacks and beam attacks. Combos can be changed up and range can dictate which combo/move you use. Fully aerial combos are different to ground ones that are different to launchers and such. For the more developed bots, there’s a LOT of potential and exploitative measures to be used in combat.

The choice and selection of bots is staggering. From your bipedal combat (Not ripping off transformers at all) bots to tank bots, walker bots, girl bots, soldier bots, nurse bots, flying bots with wings, walking cannon bots, aerial bombardment flying airship bots, ninjas, cowboys, samurais, actual transforming bots, bombs, NUKES there’s a LOAD of different bots. Some bots fly with jet power for a while, others can jump, double and up to quadruple jump. Others have wings to keep airborne, others are dragons. Some can fuse together for even more chaos and death. Every single bot has its own attack(s) some can charge shots for other attacks, melee specials or beam attacks, homing missiles to bullets, growth/shrink attacks there is a HUGE variation.

Though the eyebot has one shot and 10hp.

As you progress through the levels, you gain power points that can limit your maximum team. Each bot has a cost and the more powerful tend to be more expensive though some of the cheaper bots have very lethal potential. For example the walking laser cannon of one hit death is about 1500 points but it takes a while to charge that laser. While the main hero is 500 points and upgradable (and only he is...) to 800 points in a plot device. Your group can have as many bots as you want but you can only put out the first bots until that limit is hit. So you can start with a ninja at 150 points and have an orbital platform with laser cannons and reflective bullets at 1000 points next, but only if you have a power score of 1150, else it’s ninja and nothing else after.

Once a bot has lost all health, you lose the bot for that round and your next bot comes out, lose all the bots and you’ve lost. Losing either means a re-fight or you take a plot course to a different storyline, except in the first time you play. Later replays let you win over more friends you can choose as a partner in the fights so you and an AI pal (Multiplayer is just deathmatch games and nothing to do with the main plot) take on various opponents from friends to alien enemies and so on in a growing plot that would sit perfectly at home on Saturday mornings. A few friends are enemies, you fight and win, they back off, then you win them over eventually, then you win over the more hardcore friends, then everyone takes on the last kid who becomes possessed by the reason the bots are there at all and it becomes all balls-to-the-wall fight fest with giants running across the planet.

Pretty much like most anime day time shows.

As you play through, you unlock bots by beating them, or parts of bots, which you can trade with other players adding a nice touch to the whole “catch them all” section of the series that would fit in well with any Pokémon game. Gathering more bots to use and then use again in replays though each new bot has that inherent risk of not knowing the full potential straight away and some matches are VERY one-sided if you’re not ready. Most people won’t beat Sho the first time he shows up and even with replays it’s STILL tough to get something to match him. The AI gets a bonus 33% discount on their bots. So you’re fielding a 3000 point team, they’ll have 4000+ depending upon the level.

The first time you fight dragons... could be entertaining with most of their moves being one hit kills if you’re not high enough on HP for that bot. So you might take a ninja in with low health and your first opponent for the fight is a space station that hits you straight off with a cannon that kills you outright. Especially with instant beam attacks. But the flipside is you’ll find a bot that can slaughter whole armies without batting an eyelid and for not many points. Solar Samurai as a quick charge, cut through beam attack that does huge damage. Metal Hero has a sword attack with a charge time, but is invincible to most stun locks and tanks damage, killing everything with the beam sword attack especially if he lands on them, including the final boss if timed right. At 380 points and can jump 4 times and transforms whenever he needs at no charge or ammo cost.

The truly skilful can take down space stations using just a ninja at 150points thanks to its high mobility. So there’s quite the imbalance from one bot to another.

The storyline though is absolutely cringe worthy with the voices and overly young aimed audience, combat can be a butcher if you don’t realise the huge threats when they arrive but you’ll re-think it for the next fight and 4 player death matches are difficult on split screen. Interestingly there’s the co-op mode where players take on armies of enemies in easy, medium, or hard mode and take their largest possible group with them to fight off armies of well over 8000 points, some of the fights can be huge and epic or you can drop a nuke on someone for 400 points (just make sure the nuke isn’t the last bot... twat)

The game tends to take about 17 hours to play through and can be a chore in the middle sessions when invasion after invasion means you’ve to fight every single level against similar waves of enemies while annoying ones turn up and you have to switch out your group for a more capable one to deal with the threat. Some would argue this is called “tactics” but the implantation of the switching is a joke.

Getting too many bots will bug the game out too but like Pokémon, you want them all. Just to royally fuck with your head, there’s different “skins” for the bots from glass, to black, to silver and gold, each with different stats and levelling up differently to give boosts. There’s a lot of replay value but not enough to warrant wanting to get them all and with the limited scope of combat falling down to having flawless combatants rather than being forced to use specific bots. A few things could certainly have been improved like being able to unlock from opponents, giving a stealth element to fights that is completely removed if someone has a full beam attack that hits THROUGH objects and lets them whittle down damage until a cheap victory is won.

Acquiring the bigger and more powerful bots can be a long and arduous task particularly for ones that take 4 or more parts to build, as can hunting down the named bots that the key characters use for the bonus stat boosts they gain and in some cases, it’s not worth the damn effort. Especially when comparing a ninja to the named ninja, both still get wiped out by some of the more casual attacks from other bots, so why waste the time.

This is a game that’s good, but not great. Great would be with better variation in battles, an online mode for team plays of 2 vs. 2 be it AI or Humans, online trading with people to get more bots and such.  

But certainly, no annoying kid voices and synth robotic growls during the cut scenes.

RANT: Old school shooters vs New Age Shooters

With the recent review and recap upon DooM, I’ve decided I’m going to look a little more in-depth at the differences between the new age shooters and the “old school” shooters labelled by supposed ‘hipster wankers’ that like to differentiate themselves from the supposed ‘norm’ of society and then with wonderful comedic tragedy (tragic for them, comic for the rest of the world) become the very thing they’re trying to avoid.

And no, wearing glasses doesn’t make you a hipster if you don’t need them; it just makes you a twat.

HEALTH – Pickups vs. Regeneration

Bit of a mixed bag here. Old school shooters generally have a value for the health of the playable character as a set value of 100 where the player is hurt or wounded; the health drops and STAYS there. The only way to get the health back is to either collect health packs that can be found littered around the levels of the game or in some cases at the end of the level. Health might be gradually regained in smaller units of 1, 5, 15, 25 etc, or could be full re-heals back to 100 or boosted to 200 etc. Having low health that doesn’t regenerate is wonderful for creating unintentionally tense moments where someone has very low health; the next thing could hit the player and kill them. So they have to push on with low health and strive to avoid enemies and death. It can however leave players trapped just to die if they’re faced with a situation where they have to be injured to continue.

Regenerating health has the player usually recover all of their health in a short amount of time of either hiding, standing still or just not being shot up and injured. There’s rarely an indication of the value of the health save for either a bar in the case of Halo, or the screen becoming more and more red and covered in blood/jam opaque annoyances. In some situations it can be preferential and is noted to be prevalent in more modern games where wars are fought rather than taking a bullet, seeing a medic then getting shipped home for months. But we’re not talking realism here. It can be useful if there’s a timed mission and getting shot up too badly causes you to lose pace, but the same can be said for non-regen health.  With regen health there’s no suspense unless you’re fighting something that instantly kills you, but then why not have that instead anyway with non-regen health. If it hits you hard enough anyway... it wouldn’t make a damn difference.  It does have an advantage in online gaming where players can’t camp out the health pickups for easy kills, you just have to hide for moment, get health back and go back in for the other to kill you properly. It also stops players from turning health pickups into a King of the Hill situation and removing the focus of the game.

Weapons: Multiple vs. limited

In what has been a slowly moving trend to forcing people to select only a few guns, shooters tending to be players could pick up and use any number of weapons. Doom2 had 9, Duke Nukem 3D had 9 entirely different ones (and a switch from shrink to microwave and later versions with alt ammos), Blood had 12 before considering alt fires and the lists go on up to even Serious Sam using roughly 11 from a knife up to a depleted uranium cannonball launcher. The old school style of shooter technically has multiple guns with usually different ammo types for each gun, sometimes they’re shared between a few guns. When done badly, only a few guns are used and the weaker guns are fallen back upon when ammo runs out of the bigger and more fun ones. When done well, each weapon has a use and a purpose and the game encourages (but not forces) the player to do use the weapons. In online gaming, unless there is a serious balance between all guns, there will be a key gun that will win virtually all games. In doom it was the rocket launcher and double shotgun, duke3d was the pistol and its perfect accuracy (balanced as everyone started with it), Serious Sam used no auto aiming at all and cannonballs were powerful but could be dodged with sufficient distance.

Modern shooters and in particular games like Halo, the more supposedly realistic shooters and class based shooters tend to go for a setup that is either 1-2 main guns, a pistol and some other ordinance such as grenades or an item that helps out teammates. Either the player will be given the option to switch out guns at specific points such as a sniping section, or they’ll be permitted to select their own weapons (probably after earning them) and being able to use the guns of their choice and upgrading them in various guises if the game permits. It allows everyone to start with the key weapons and nobody to take a huge advantage over anyone else. More often than not, the best gun in a game online will be one almost everyone can access straight away. Limited guns are certainly useful for balance but you’re never going to get something on par with the BFG9000, even the Spartan Laser was just a rail gun and quake 2 onwards was doing them FAR better.

Cut scene control

Old school shooters tended to have very little in the way of cut scenes, if anything at all. Wolfenstein had your main char running to escape for a few seconds after the first boss was killed. There were none what so ever in doom or doom 2, all you had were splash screens of text telling you things. Blood had FMVs after boss fights and Duke Nukem 3D had the same. Everything in game had to be done by the player or triggered by the player to instigate something they player had to control. Quake might have had the occasional boss monster blowing up for you to see and Quake 2 had animations you could miss by turning around at the wrong time. Serious Sam had scenes where key items were picked up and the only real interruption was the arrival of the final boss. If you weren’t looking in the right direction when the other bosses arrived, or indeed, when something scripted happened, tough shit. You missed out and you’re a prick. Not watching when the Cyber demon walked around the corner and slammed a rocket into your unobservant ass? Too bad!

Modern shooters seem to rely more upon cut scenes to tell stories than for the setting to be purely action. Sometimes it’s done well and adds to the game if the scene is at the start/end of levels or you’re given an audio feed/sample to tell you of on-goings around the place and it adds to the atmosphere without breaking from the game play. But a game that has you forced into a foxhole, demands you go to specific places and stops your control while something happens JUST so you can see it, is not a game, it’s an interactive animation and is utter bollocks. I don’t care if the missile outside hit a building and blew up the most amazing physics based demolition I’ve ever seen, I want to stare at the fucking wall and that’s MY CHOICE TO. Alternatively it’s when the game shifts play method into something you’ve never seen before, never will again and you end up playing as someone you’ve not played as before or will again and the entire emersion of the game is killed there and then (Modern Warfare 3....I’m watching you and I’m not happy...).

A.I. Involvement:

Old School shooters rarely ever had AI involved within a game, the general consensus of the games was to have the player character as often the SOLE protagonist in the game or if there were other characters, they took a sideline to the fighting. In rare cases where there were AI involved such as Marathon with the Bobs and depending upon which timeline of an exploding universe, aliens and monsters on your side but they never beat the level for you. Often they’re cannon fodder or just pointless distractions, even while games like Strife had a whole army help you teleport in and attack a base, only you had the gun that could kill the boss and that was hidden away from the army so the fight was just one on one. Marathon had a small army of virtually invincible teammates towards the end of the game but even then, the plot leading up to explained everything and hitting those enemies meant a thick fast plasma death, they only lasted a level or two anyway. Even games like Quake, Half Life etc, didn’t have heavy involvements of AI as allies and in cases where you needed them, it was brief, it was quick and it didn’t involve them doing much fighting, if any.

Modern shooters seem, though not all and I will happily accept that, to have this ethos of putting the player as part of something bigger and not really letting them have the fun of doing the real stuff. This is particularly true of war based games where you’ll spend the level running through and gunning down an forever spawning army of pratts before someone else turns up to win the day at the last second. It becomes heavily anti-climatic, though I can appreciate that “in a real army, everyone does things and everyone wins the day” but this isn’t a real army. It’s a game. There’s a limit to the realism and beyond that it becomes dull and pointless to watch all your hard work supposedly paid off like a weak orgasm, by someone else who was scripted to always have their fun at the end at the cost of all your build up. That’s right, you’ve become a fluffer for a computer game character because they get to star in the porn and you just sit at the side with a dribbly mouth going “I want that... I worked for it”

Anyway...

I’m not solely against the new wave of shooters, I find the multiplayer modes and team modes are usually good fun for those with fast stable internet connections, which I don’t have, so fuck them too. No. Seriously, they can be very enjoyable but a lot of them have become rather generic, in particular I acquired a demo of a game based on being a sniper in the jungle, much like that one level in Modern Warfare 3 for one part of that level, but this is a whole game based on that.

Whoopee.

Now can I have a whole game based on just punching a block for a mushroom to fall out? Forget the platforms and levels, I want 25 hours of HD graphics, bloom lighting effects and bonus stipple alpha (get THAT reference and I’ll be impressed) and just focus on a 12 hour story of how blocks need to be punched, 2 hours for flashbacks, the first boss is brick and moving up to the final showdown, my fist vs. a 17story block of solid steel with over the top orchestral accompaniment while crying about how I lost the love of my life to a Lego brick.

Doesn’t sound too bad now.

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.