This has been on my to-do list for a while now – since I played the original DOOM last year, in fact. I had every intention of playing through the lot of them on Switch, but then Eternal got a digital-only release, so I ended up getting physical PS4 copies…for a fraction of the price. Damn Switch tax. But perhaps this was for the best – first-person shooters are best experienced on a TV screen with a proper controller in hand after all…and docking your Switch is, as any civilised person knows, heresy of the highest order. Plus the Pro Controller isn’t all that comfortable, and trying to use that…thing you can slot the Joycons into is even worse.

Anyways, here’s DOOM. Rip and tear, etc etc.

Playing this coming off of BioShock is almost comical in a way considering there are 9 years and 1 console generation between their releases. Not much really changed with the FPS genre during that time, did it? Did we hit a plateau at some point that I wasn’t aware of? Because I can think of several ways this genre could be improved upon. But then I look at the likes of Breath of the Wild and remind myself that “progress” for progress’ sake is most definitely a bad thing. Why fix it when it ain’t broken, etc. Nothing wrong with sticking to your guns, if you’ll excuse the awful pun.

DOOM was great. It throws you right into the action from the beginning and doesn’t let up at all for the entirety of its campaign, which is just about the right length to be satisfying without dragging on for too long. Some of the levels DO drag on a bit, and the earlier stages of the game were pretty dull to say the least, but by the end of it I was having an absolute blast.

But I have to admit, it didn’t really FEEL like a Doom game until I went to Hell and started seeing signature demons that I recognised from the first game – which, by the way, all looked great! From the irritating traditional red-skinned demons that took forever to kill in the first game (and took forever to kill in this one, too) to the floating eyeball things. They’ve all got names, but I have no idea what they are. There was a very lovely compendium that I completely ignored, because the lore just wasn’t all that interesting. The narrative was similarly threadbare and idiotic, and the times I had to stop and listen to some robot waffle on before I could go back to blasting things with the shotgun’s grenade launcher were absolute torture.

My only takeaway from it was that humans were trying to harness energy from demons and Hell and it went predictably wrong…and I wonder how phenomenally stupid people would have to be to try and tap into the forces of darkness. Someone must have paused at the idea of trying to exploit HELL, surely. Good lord. As far as excuses for video game plots go, that is by far one of the most painfully contrived I’ve come across in…years. Maybe I would have gotten more out of it if I had stopped to read the lore that was scattered around the place – not even narrated, save for the demon lore! – but…well, the presentation really wasn’t that interesting, and the main draw here was blasting things to pieces with guns.

And it was very, very satisfying blasting things to pieces with guns. There was a nice selection, although it would have been nice if they had done something a little different with ammo. Having my Plasma Rifle share ammo with my Gauss Cannon when I want to use both of them is a bit of a pain in the arse. Weapon mods were a bit of a mixed bag as well, so the end result was that there wasn’t quite as much variety as I would have liked and I was forever running out of ammo, because this game was VERY stingy with it unless I broke out the chainsaw…which had a very limited supply of fuel, and seemed to need most of it to take down a single demon larger than the standard ones running around everywhere chucking fireballs for the sake of it. I never really struggled, but it was a little constraining at times. The boss battles were nice, though! They were a good break from the running-and-gunning, and required a little bit more thought to them, which I can appreciate. They felt like a nice reward for persevering through wave after wave of demons.

Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from things, and with Tales of Arise on the horizon – FINALLY – playing shorter, more violent games like Doom before I sink back into a long JRPG that’ll actually require me to engage my brain is exactly what I need. It’s a perfect outlet for frustration and a good way to switch off for a while as blood flies and things explode.