I played Doom 1 the other day to kill some time, and I ended up spending 4 hours on it - hugely entertaining. Then I got sad. They don't make them like that anymore. I texted a friend who totally agreed with me.
But why?
It's a relatively simple game where you can't even look up or down. The objective is to just reach the other end of the level. All you do is run and strafe and shoot monsters. Story? Pfft.
But maybe that's just it? Doom is simple by today's standards, but it got the basics spot on. The shooting feels good, it feels fulfilling. It's fun. It's pure.
The level design is actually excellent...corridor shooter it may be, but the levels are really well designed.
Where I feel many shooters fall flat is that they fail to even get the basics right, like the satisfaction of simply shooting an enemy. Also, regenerating health and the duck & cover system is, imo, rubbish. Doom made life tough by throwing swathes of enemies at you, and there was nowhere to hide. It was intense. How intense - how much fun - is it to hide behind an indestructible object and just pot-shot enemies, who don't even use cover properly and inevitably will pop their heads out from behind cover, so you just sit there and wait?
It was fun for 5 minutes but it's run it's course as a gameplay mechanic, imo. Been there, done that.
Obviously we can't sit and play Doom for the rest of our lives, but it does highlight that getting the basics right is more important than adding some nonsensical story, useable vehicles and supposed non-linear level design just for the sake of it, or to appear more sophisticated. Linearity can be a good thing, a great thing even.
I loved Borderlands 2, but all the driving got insanely boring and the enemies couldn't use cover properly for tuppence. Okay, so it's not a traditional shooter but at heart it's still a shooter.
Think of what would happen if they launched Doom 4 tomorrow. I bet it would have sniper rifles, regenerating health, duck & cover (or something close to it) vehicles, non-linear level design, some sort of deeper storyline than Doom 1...and it would be all the worse for it.
From a member on Metacritic:
"I had never played a doom game before I downloaded this on xbox live and I was really surprised by how good it was. Even though the graphics are dated, the game play is actually a lot more fun than most modern fps games."
From another:
"I never played doom 1 before it came with doom 3, so I never knew what all the rage is about. I didn't realize I would have so much fun playing it. It was more fun than a lot of the modern games out nowadays. The shooting and hit detection was spot on and the shotgun so satisfying. The game was both challenging and fun to find secrets and get to the exit"
Which emphasizes the point of the video, IMO.
