Videogame Review: Doom 2

 

Doom 2 is a great shooter that I enjoyed despite its terrible level design. The supershotgun is the shit, and new enemies like the Revenant, Mancubus, and Archville add additional strategic demands that weren't present in the original. It's also about a 16 hour experience, even though much of that time will be spent figuring out where the hell a door is, or if Sandy Pearson decided to put an invisible switch in this level. Unlike the original game, Pearson was the main map designer, and while he can technically put a level together, the maps of Doom 2 frequently devolve into mazes that confound the player. Finding invisible switches and doors behind walls should never be  a requirement for progression, and while design standards have certainly changed over the years, with objective markers and hand-held progression being the norm, I think this shit probably didn't fly back in 1994. Having just read Masters of Doom, which revealed that Doom 2 was more or less a quick cash job while Carmack developed the technology that would be displayed in Quake, I'm somewhat surprised that I ended up liking the game so much. id got so much right with Doom that even mediocre level design can't kill the fun of emptying a double-barrelled blast into a room full of imps, or dodging a Pain Elemental's barrage of Lost Souls while firing rockets into its grotesque form. To be fair, it's really just the second episode that sucks. The space station levels, as well as the final sequence in hell, are much improved over the city levels. However, the levels are still very abstract and missing the detail and geometric sophistication that Dark Forces would achieve just a year later. The Jedi engine was more advanced than the tech in Doom; it allowed buildings to be constructed on top of each other and for player to look up and down. Still, despite its shortcomings, Doom 2 is a decent experience even in 2024, especially once you get into the habit of searching its levels for secrets. It's also fairly difficult, even on Hurt Me Plenty difficulty. It took a good forty minutes for me to beat the Icon of Sin, although that's more to Doom 2's lack of finesse aiming than my lack of skill. I think Doom Eternal's designers took a lot of inspiration from Doom 2's encounters, because both games sure love shoving the player into a small to medium-sized room filled with powerful foes. I wonder if the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages will be a survival-horror reboot a la Doom 3 (I doubt it). Check out Doom 2 on any major digital distribution service, where it will mostly likely be sold for a fiver. I played it on Game Pass, and my version worked flawlessly on Windows 11 and also included the Master Levels expansion, as well as X Box achievements.