Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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DOOM

Platform: PC, PS4, XBONE, Switch, Switch Lite (reviewed), and a dozen older consoles as well

Completion: Completed all four episodes, although my actual completion rate within each level varied. Some levels I missed a bunch of stuff, whereas, in others I found all items/secrets and killed all the enemies. I also replayed an episode or two on PC.

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DOOM is commonly regarded as one of the most important and influential video games of all time. Besides helping to spread the popularity of the FPS genre, it also made at the time unparalleled use of 3D space, full texture mapping, extreme violence, and uneven level geometry within 3D space. I've never actually given this series a go beyond the widely contentious DOOM 3, however, so I wanted to change that. What better place to start than with the demonic grand-daddy of the genre itself?

The structure of the game is very weird. The first episode of the game, titled Knee-Deep in the Dead, featured eight episodes and was distributed as freeware. This, more than anything else, contributed to the game's almost immediately titanic impact on the industry, having been installed across 10 million computers by 1995 (following its 1993 release). The second and third episodes, The Shores of Hell and Inferno, were contained in a paid version that was only available at the time via mail order. It was only upon the game's re-release as a boxed, commercial product that the fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed was released.

Every episode features eight normal levels, one boss level to cap off the episode, and one secret level. Progress carries between levels in an individual episode, but not between episodes, meaning that, at the beginning of every episode, you're forced to scrounge for ammo like at the beginning of the game. Despite this, there are little screens featuring narration that give the episodes of the original DOOM a minor sense of continuity.

I do want to emphasize how minor this is, though. Aside from these screens and some early bosses showing up later in the game as minibosses, the original DOOM (or "The Ultimate DOOM," as the commercial release in 1995 was called) is really just four short games packaged together. Episode themes as well as level design varies drastically between the various episodes.

The first episode features one of the most iconic environments in video game history, and begins in a UAC (Union Aerospace Corporation) facility on one of the moons of Mars, Phobos. You play as a nameless space marine (dubbed Doomguy by fans, who seems slightly distinct from the Doom Slayer of DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal) who fights off a demon invasion and, eventually, fights against two Barons of Hell so that he can transport to Deimos, which is also overrun by hellspawn. The militaristic and technological setting of this episode combines with maze-like levels. In general, you'll spend the bulk of these episode trawling the hallways of various installations looking for blue, red, and yellow keycards in order to unlock various doors. A level will end when you reach a specified endpoint, with the level completion screen afterward informing you of how many secrets you found, what percentage of the monsters you killed (there's a fine number in each level), and what percentage of the level items you collected.

The second episode is set on Deimos, and, thematically, is similar to episode one, except for certain changes that emphasize the increased demonic influence in this location. Some levels, for example, require colored human skulls instead of key cards to open doors, and the misty mountain view from Phobos has changed to one outlined by blood red clouds. At the end of the episode, you defeat the Cyberdemon in charge of the invasion of this moon and, discovering that the moon is hovering directly above an opening to Hell, decide to rappel down to the abyss itself to confront the forces that engineered this invasion in the first place.

Episode three is set fully in Hell. The walls have become more fleshy-looking, impaled humans and lava are everywhere, and, in general, the architecture is and level structures are less orderly in terms of their design. It's here you confront the Spiderdemon who engineered the demonic invasion of the moon bases.

Episode four is supposedly set on Earth, although its chaotic, fractured level design and demonic design motifs seem to suggest otherwise. It's in this episode that we learn Doomguy's true motive (it was probably a joke, but I like to think it's true, and it's in the game's narration, so... sticks out tongue): he wants revenge for the death of Daisy, his pet rabbit, making him, I guess, the supernatural, sci-fi-themed version of John Wick. Anyway, the (ostensibly) Earthly setting of this episode suggests that it's a sort of prequel to DOOM II: Hell on Earth.

The game distinguished itself upon release by being a very fast, brutal game. The antithesis of the sort of plodding cover shooters that were en vogue last gen, DOOM is a game where you will die if you are timid. The best defense is a good offense, and nowhere is that more true than in this game, where you best chance of survival is usually to charge into the fray and start gunning down demons like a maniac. That doesn't mean you don't take note of your environments, of course. There are a variety of ways in which you can minimize damage from large groups of enemies, and certain bosses pretty much require you to take cover behind buildings and walls, but, in general, I found that when I was sprinting around at full speed, shooting my enemies point blank with a shotgun, they often didn't even get a chance to damage me.

The narration screens in DOOM often opt for eye-bleedingly awful color combinations, for some reason, making all this damn text a bit difficult to read at times

The biggest downside of DOOM is the enemy variety. For a game where you kill demons, there just aren't a whole lot of different ones here. You have a couple of demon types that look like generic soldier dudes, complete with guns. You have Cacodemons, which are like giant floating balls that spit fireballs at you. You have Imps, which... shoot fireballs at you. There are normal pink demons which aren't really much of a threat, because they can only hurt you if you let them get right up in your face. There's also an invisible variation of this enemy, although their outlines are clear enough that they're still easy to avoid and kill. Finally, there are Lost Souls, which are flaming skulls that flying around and try to bite you.

Considering the saminess of the attacks patterns and enemy types, there isn't a lot of strategy involved in this game, and you can pretty much mindlessly run around shooting everything without much of a concern. The game is challenging (on higher difficulties, which I played on... starting with Hurt Me Plenty, and then the one above it), but mostly for reasons that I think weaken the game as an experience.

The few bosses there are seem kind of weaksauce as well. The Barons of Hell... throw green fireballs at you instead of normal ones. They deal a lot more damage, but they're not tremendously harder to avoid. The primary annoyance of this enemy is how long it takes to kill one with normal weapons. The Cyberdemon is better insofar as he actually has a unique attack, which is... to spam rockets the instant he sees you. This means, antithetical to the rest of the game, you'll need to slow down to a crawl, hug buildings, and take potshots at this annoying dude until he dies, which takes a while. The Spiderdemon is even worse in this regard, because, while you can avoid the Cyberdemon's rockets, the Spiderdemon's chaingun attack is pretty much impossible to dodge if you're exposed. So... again, hugging the walls and taking potshots around corners until he's dead. DOOM is at its absolute worst combat-wise when you're fighting these things. Unlike the rest of the game, speed and ferocity are punished.

The level design in this game... a lot of people like it, but I didn't really take to it. The early levels are manageable mazes, but I disliked the game's tactic of having walls randomly open up behind my character and being hit with a barrage of enemy projectiles all at one. The secrets are mostly mindless, and often involve running around hugging the walls of the UAC facility, trying to find random locations that'll open up and reveal bonus resources. The puzzles throughout are also a bit braindead, and involve a lot of running back and forth between areas to hit switches.

Later in the game (particularly episode 4), the level design breaks down, as it relies on bizarrely uneven floor space, poison/lava floors, and enemy ambushes to increases the difficulty. Perhaps this is meant to reflect the character's increasing closeness to demons and Hell, although I didn't really appreciate the design cheapness in many sections.

I alluded to this just a moment ago, but in lieu of actual enemy variety, the game likes to throw giant hordes of demons at you to freak you out, sometimes trapping you in rooms without warning. Of course, there's little in the way of space or objects to interact with, so, more often than not, it just becomes a matter of whether you have the ammo to mow down the enemies quickly enough because they can gang up and kill you (there's no jumping in the console versions of this game, so it's not like you jump over enemies when their sprites are hogging the screen around you.

One really high point of this conversion, as of the latest patch, is the framerate. While I'm not sure how helpful it actually is, since I believe the enemy animations are still animated at 35fps, the general feel of the game has been boosted to 60fps, giving movement that lovely, butter smooth feel that games with higher framerates tend to have.

Otherwise, this release was patched to correct image quality issues and deliver a really authentic DOOM experience.

But what would an discussion of DOOM be without focusing on the weapons available to the player, especially given the game's laser focus on demon-killing action? The arsenal isn't terribly diverse by modern standards, but it was a massive selection of weapons in a game released almost 27 years ago. You start off with the pistol, which... sucks. Thankfully, if you like to poke around, it's not long before you stumble across your first shotgun, which has much more of a visceral feel to it. And, considering how accurate it is even at long distances, it's usually my weapon of choice in this game. Over the course of the game, you gain access to the chaingun, which uses pistol ammunition, but fires at an incredibly high rate, making it ideal for taking down mobs of weaker enemies, the plasma gun, which is possibly one of the most powerful weapons in the game at both close and long range, the rocket launcher, which... has some uses against bosses, or in LARGE arenas, but makes it so easy for the players to damage themselves accidentally by standing too close to the target of their aggression, and the BFG9000 (which, yes, very famously stands for "Big F***ing Gun"), a hyper-powerful nuke of a weapon that is unfortunately so slow to fire and cumbersome to use in general that, more often than not, I just ended up ignoring it.

Melee-wise, you can get a chainsaw, which is cooler than it sounds, because you REALLY want to keep your distance from most of these enemies. You can also punch demons, but, really, don't. It's neither satisfying nor effective, and is only a last resort when you find yourself out of ammunition.

The 'feel' of the controls in this Nintendo Switch Lite playthrough were my biggest issue with the game. I don't know how much of this is the Switch Lite having thumbsticks utterly unsuited to games involving aiming and how much of it is my long-standing issue with playing shooters on consoles in general, but I generally found it really difficult to precisely aim at enemies as quickly as I needed to. After trying out a source port on my PC to compare the feel, the difference was astounding. Playing this with the stick felt sort of akin to being bundled up in a straight-jacket.

Thankfully, for people who do like to play shooters on consoles, aiming is far easier in DOOM thanks to the complete lack of Y-axis control. This game was originally designed to be played with just keyboards, so if you have an enemy lined up on your X-axis, you'll hit them, even if they're at a radically different elevation to you. It takes a bit of getting used to if you only have experience with most modern shooters, but it does lead to very fast, fluid, satisfying carnage with a minimum of aiming needed.

I also love how fast you can blow through rooms and even entire levels by holding down the run button. With the right guns, this can lead to lightning-fast gameplay that's really cool in the moment.

Conclusion
Despite all of my complaints about the game, I actually really enjoyed it, and think that it has aged rather well, all things being equal. Despite seeming very basic and rudimentary now, the game was visionary at the time, and light-years ahead of the competition in many respects. Playing it entirely on a handheld device was pretty neat, but I do think that perhaps other platforms might be more ideal to experience this game. Certainly PC, where the mouse gives the player absurdly fast control over where they're aiming, but perhaps, if the thumbstick aiming feels more accurate, on PS4 and Xbox One as well.

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Beat the main story of HarmoKnight last week and completed it just now. This is a weird one. Beware. A wall of text incoming.

I held off buying it for a long time. I had played some of it previously, thanks to the demo and my sister who has the game, but I wasn't satisfied enough to pay the full price for it myself. The problem is that the game is never on sale. Or rather it wasn't until the My Nintendo discount which happened last year. I finally got it but didn't play it right away. I completed Radiohammer recently and I was still on the rhythm game mood so I decided to continue onto the next rhythm game right away. So I finally started playing HarmoKnight. How was it?

I went in knowing that I'd probably like it if I gave it time and didn't focus on its weak points. When I started, I was reminded that the game has an actual story. But I soon figured out it was nothing special. As for the stages themselves, they were really easy. I finished the story in no time. The only stage that caused me some trouble was the final boss, thanks to its final attack.

And here we get to the stupid things about HarmoKnight:

1. You have 5 hearts, make one mistake, lose a heart. Sounds good? Well, that part is great. But then there are beats you cannot miss or you'll die instantly. Each boss and mini-boss have an attack that can kill you in one shot. And it's their final attack so you better hit the note or you have to do it all over again. Some stages also have bottomless pits which work the same. These actually weren't as much of a problem as I thought they'd be based on my experience years ago. The only one that caused me trouble was the final boss.

2. The camera and enemy placement. Sometimes the level design in general. Most stages are runner type stages where you move automatically and you have to jump over pits and hit enemies on your way to earn notes which determine your final score. The problem here is that sometimes you cannot see the enemy or pit before it's too late. The camera isn't fixed like in Bit Trip Runner or Runner 2, it zooms in and out and moves in front and behind your character. The reason they did this is most likely because the game is on 3DS and they wanted to utilize the 3D effect. But it turns some stages into a memory game.

3. Speaking of memory games, the boss and mini-boss stages are memory games. You know, like Simon. They show you what's coming and you have to repeat the sequence. My biggest problem with these stages is that it doubles the time you spend on the level. And some bosses have really long animations in-between action as well. For example, I timed the snow wolf boss and it takes 20 seconds before the battle starts. And that's on the faster difficulty. It takes even more time on standard difficulty. Unlike in the runner stages, you cannot make any mistakes here if you want the best ranking. So you better get perfect fast or you'll be spending a lot of time waiting for cutscenes to end.

4. There are multiple playable characters but the other characters feel like an afterthought. You rarely get to play as them and when you do, it's only for 20 seconds or so. The main problem here is that each character only have 2 moves and the side characters just aren't as fun to play as. They knew it and that's why you barely see them. Untapped potential.

5. There's one more stage type. They're the "hold A, shut your ears and close your eyes" stages. You are on a rollercoaster in a machine with cymbals. You can hold B to extend your legs or hold A to hit enemies with the cymbals. There aren't many of these stages but all of them can be beaten by just holding A. The only reason you'd ever want to extend the machines legs are to collect some additional notes which give you better ranking. The noise this machine makes is just unbearable.

6. The hit precision seems a bit off. This was probably the main reason why I waited so long.

So I beat the game and unlocked the final world. That had some nasty levels that amplified my issues with the game. After I was done with them, I didn't feel like I was done though and I started going for Greats. The game has three rankings as far as I know, Great, Good and So-So. I only saw So-So once when I tried one the faster version of one of the Pokémon songs before I had even beaten the game. Oh yeah, there are 5 Pokémon songs here too because it's made by Game Freak. I also took notice that the game was directed by James Turner, the same guy who was the art director in Pokémon Sword and Shield.

I'm getting sidetracked. The game has two versions of each song. Normal and fast. I had a lot of fun playing through the stages again on fast now that the game got a bit harder and I knew the level layouts beforehand. It pretty much turned the whole thing around. I honestly forgot how much I hate some things about the game before I started writing this.

All in all, HarmoKnight is full of flaws but it's still a fun game. I'm glad I finally decided to play it but I'm also glad I never have to play it again.

Now the question is, should I play Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan next? Another game that my sister owns (got it for her) but I don't. Or maybe I should say I didn't. It's on its way now with couple other DS games. Ouendan 2 is probably my favorite rhythm game of all time so I don't know why it took me so long to get the original.