Doom Review

The joke about the 2016 Doom is that it spent years in visible development trouble and then shipped as the most self assured shooter of its generation. The decision that saved it was making health a reward for aggression: stagger a demon, close the distance, and the glory kill hands back exactly the resources you need to keep going, so the safest place in any room is inside the fight. Chainsaw for ammunition, glory kill for health, and cover shooting stops being a tactic and becomes a mistake.

Arenas are built as loops with verticality on every tier, so you are always circling and never retreating into a corridor, and the demon roster is tuned so each one demands a different kind of movement from you. Mick Gordon's score does what very few soundtracks manage, tracking the state of the encounter rather than the level, and it became the most imitated game music of its decade. The story is a running gag about not caring, which works for precisely as long as it stays short, and the multiplayer was an afterthought nobody kept playing. The campaign is the argument, and it is unanswerable.