93. Doom II (PS4)
Unfortunately my family didn't get a PC until 1999. Even more unfortunately, we couldn't afford anything high end or even average, so we ended up getting so budget build my cousin put together. While I was still absolutely stoked to have my own PC to play games on, the reality of the situation was my PC would barely run any contemporary, late 90s games (unless you want to consider playing what looks like a glitchy slide show "running" it). Even games that were several years old didn't run great. In fact, pretty much if a game was newer than 3-years old, there's a good chance my first family computer could barely run it, if at all. A good friend of mine took pity on me around this time and actually gave me a bunch of his old PC games he no longer wanted. There were some real gems in there, but the jewel in the crown of his pity donation to me was Doom II.
Like many games I grew up with, I never actually beat Doom II as a kid, but I guess in a way I did "beat" it with the aid of cheats. Since there, I've never done a legit full playthrough of the entire game, so I decided to do something about that. With Halloween next month, I figured Doom II would also be a good appetizer to prepare me for much more hardcore horror games once October rolls around. Aside from my childhood nostalgia for this game, I've unfortunately come to the realization that Doom II is pretty much inferior to its predecessor in nearly every way. And that's despite the addition of new enemies, bigger levels, and the introduction of the classic of classic FPS weapons, the Super Shotgun. The new enemy types are often cited as a big reason why Doom II is inferior to Doom, however it goes well beyond that. Yes, the Chain Gunners and Archvile's suck ass to fight, but my main gripe personally is the level layout and design of a big chunk of Doom II's levels. In fact, I'd even go as far as to say, a third of Doom II's levels aren't great and some are even kind of terrible. Bigger is not always better, and this is a major variable in which levels are the worst.
These large, often open levels really disrupt the pacing of Doom II's gameplay. They all mostly start off promising enough until you kill everything in sight and are then left to just wander around until you hopefully figure out where to go or where some stupid key is hidden. This is made even more annoying my Doom II requiring some light platforming, which is never great for the most part. Everything just lacks the same intuitive, well planned and thought out structure present in nearly all of its predecessor's levels and unfortunately it really made this game drag at parts. If not for the same crisp, precise, and fast paces shooting gameplay, the over abundance of crappy levels would have really brought this game down further, but in the end I only enjoyed Doom II a little less because of it. And for the record, there are also a lot of really great stages in Doom II as well; I just wanted to throw that out there in case I accidentally gave the impression Doom II was just crappy stage after crappy stage. It certainly isn't.
Other than that, Doom II's visuals are nearly as good as the original's albeit most stages aren't as interesting as the Mars Base or Hell levels in Doom. Nor are the overall production values. I'm assuming this is because Doom II was literally released just a year later and I'm certain ID wanted to get this out while their first game was still the talk of the town (for better or worse). The audio is also great in Doom II, but again, not as good or memorable as it was in the first game. That really is saying a lot since Doom II's OST is a similar set of midi metal tracks like the first game that sound pretty awesome for the most part. Enemy, weapon, and environmental sound effects are mostly the same and unaltered which is how they should be imo.
In many ways, Doom II reminds me a lot of Doom Eternal. I don't mean that in the sense that Doom II's basic premise of Hell attempting to take over earth was the same, but rather both games took the template laid out by their predecessors and tried making it better. Unfortunately all that ended up happening was both games tried doing too much with what was already an excellent formula and just created something that felt more bloated and less refined. And like Doom Eternal, Doom II is still a great game despite this, but in the end, you kind of just wish you were playing the first game instead. (9/4/25) [38/50]
