Everyone who has played the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare remembers the AC-130 gunship level. This level plucks you from the thick of the action and temporarily sticks you in front of a TV screen inside a very large aeroplane that’s orbiting a kilometre above the same engagement; said aeroplane also happens to have a gigantic howitzer mounted on the side of it, and so for the duration of this level it’s your job to fire phone box-sized shells at groups of baddies who look like ants from your lofty perch, who don’t even know you’re there and who wouldn’t even have the option of fighting back if they did. When I first played this level I thought it was making a point about the impersonal, dehumanising nature of modern warfare, and that there was something deeply unsettling about the power of life and death being in the hands of people who can (and do) treat it just like a videogame. The AC-130 level is one of the reasons I came away with a pretty high opinion of Modern Warfare and its apparent anti-war message. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the real reason the AC-130 level was in the game: the developers just thought being able to commit indiscriminate slaughter from 1,000 metres altitude was really cool¹.

The reason I’m going with this somewhat tortured introduction to a review of Doom Eternal is because I think Modern Warfare proves something very important: that art is always going to be subjective to a greater or lesser degree, and so it is very possible to make an excellent videogame entirely by accident. Somewhat to my dismay it turns out that this is a very relevant lesson to apply to Doom Eternal; id’s 2016 reboot of Doom was and is excellent, but based on the experience I just had with Doom Eternal I’m starting to think that might have been entirely down to dumb luck.

Doom was a very story-light game. Famously so, in fact; four years later I still see people talking about the game’s first (and best) joke, where somebody calls Doomguy up on a computer terminal and offers to tell him all about the game’s plot, and his response is to punch it into oblivion mid-sentence. The almost total excision of the story allowed Doom to focus on what it did best: extremely tight combat arenas where you laid into a series of constantly-spawning demons with an increasingly preposterous array of weapons, with the occasional brief quiet moment where you could chase after the many secrets id had scattered throughout its levels. In hindsight, though, it looks like the barebones plot might have been a serendipitous product of Doom’s troubled development process rather than deliberate intent on the part of id, especially given that there are a few moments in Doom where it actively goes against this ethos. I’m thinking in particular of the bit where you wander into the robot CEO man’s office and he physically locks the doors behind you, forcing you to listen to him spouting exposition for the next five minutes. I bought Doom to shoot demons, it had proven to be remarkably good at letting me shoot demons, and yet here was this weird five minute segment where I wasn’t allowed to shoot demons.

In the context of Doom this moment is nothing more than an isolated oddity, of course, but it was something my mind kept going back to again and again while I was playing Doom Eternal. I suspect much more of Doom would have been like this if id had had their way, because it turns out that all of Doom Eternal is like this. Where Doom ruthlessly cut away at its story until all that was left was what was necessary to tie together the combat encounters, Doom Eternal would very much like you to read its 90,000 word Doom fanfic. Did you want to know about the internal politics of Hell? The detailed backstory of how Doomguy got his demon-killing powers? The exact reason the demons need human souls? All this and much more will be revealed as you play Doom Eternal, and all of it is the most unbearably adolescent tripe you’ll ever have the misfortune to suffer through. In Doom, that five minutes of exposition stood out for how unusual it was, but in Doom Eternal you’re not allowed to go more than five minutes without somebody calling you up on your radio to vomit up yet more cliched, hackneyed backstory full of Capitalised Proper Nouns and which plumbs all the worst depths of videogame writing.

The worst part is that where Doom seemed to take what little story it had left and twist it into gentle self-mockery — with the absurd premise of the Scientology But With Demons UAC causing the demonic invasion by mining Hell for energy, and Doomguy’s sole character trait being “too angry to die” — Doom Eternal plays it almost totally straight. It’s utterly, absurdly overinvested in its own fiction, and while it is aware that people liked Doom 2016 because it was funny, its own approach to humour is to mindlessly repeat catchphrases and memes in the mistaken belief that this, on its own, is enough to qualify as side-splittingly hilarious. The Huge Guts line from the Doom comic is uttered aloud by characters in the game not once, but twice. The Scientology joke is back and Doom Eternal is determined not to let you forget it, with almost every single level featuring a pleasant PR hologram spouting corporate mantras about letting the demons eat you. It wasn’t funny the first time I saw one of these holograms because Doom had already done the exact same thing, and it definitely wasn’t funny the fiftieth time. During the early parts of the game you keep running across audio logs left by a woman who says she’s a scientist but who in actual fact is the president of Doomguy’s fan club, as they quickly descend into pathetically fawning hero worship that uses the phrase “rip and tear” multiple times. The quickest way to sour me on a joke is to beat me around the head with it; it’s why the last decade of people screaming “THE CAKE IS A LIE” on internet messageboards means I can no longer go back to Portal without vomiting. Unfortunately those same people appear to have graduated to actually writing their own videogames, which is the only reason I can think of as to why Doom Eternal’s plot and humour are both about as subtle as a brick to the face.

The most frustrating thing about all of this, of course, is that Doom Eternal absolutely did not need any of this stuff.  One of the advantages of working with Doom as an IP is that you don’t need to waste your time on an elaborate story and world-building; the original plot of Doom 2 was “Demons have invaded Mars, and now they’re invading Earth.”, and so the plot of Doom Eternal should have been “Demons have invaded Mars, and now they’re invading Earth.” That’s it, job done, and you can then spend the resources that otherwise would have been wasted on writing and voice acting and cutscenes on refining some of the more ill-advised additions that have been made to Doom’s gameplay²  Unfortunately the actual plot of Doom Eternal, in so far as I could make it out, runs something like this:

“Demons have invaded Mars, and now they’re invading Earth, but actually it’s all a political ploy by the Khan Maykr (some kind of angel thing?) to harvest human souls to turn into Hell energy to power her homeworld, and she’s corrupted the ancient order of warriors that the Doomguy is part of, and also it turns out that Doomguy got his powers by being put into a Captain America machine (part of an irredeemably shitty backstory that diminishes him from “elemental force of nature” to “budget off-brand superhero”), and anyway you should use your Celestial Locator to find the three Hell Priests and kill them and then find the robot CEO from the first game so that he can dribble plot-vomit into your ear while sending you back to Doomguy’s home world to pick up another version of the red sword he stole from you at the end of Doom (why can’t I just use that one?) because you need it to get into heaven to kill the Khan Maykr. Then you shoot a really big demon and the game ends.”

Now, on the face of it this is no worse than any number of videogame plots that have been inflicted on me over the past three decades, and if it were being treated as the paper-thin excuse for shooting demons that it should be then I wouldn’t have nearly as much of a problem with it. Mere excuses don’t have this much time wasted on them, though; my half-remembered summary really doesn’t do enough to convey how frequently the plot intrudes on the business of shooting demons, to the point where it is impossible to ignore it. Before we even get to talking about the gameplay, Doom Eternal feels bloated and flabby, with too much time spent riding lifts and cable cars while somebody jabbers on and on about the socio-political power structures of Hell and their underlying economic basis, or in cutscenes where (sigh) the game’s bad guy makes a video call to tell you how their plans are continuing uninterrupted and they’re totally going to win even though you just got done beheading all of Hell’s executive-level leadership. Think of any obnoxiously terrible videogame storytelling trope and the chances are it’s in Doom Eternal, a game which should have barely featured any story at all, let alone one so sprawlingly, incomprehensibly overwritten that it rivals the worst of Blizzard’s output.

And this bodes extremely poorly for the part of Doom Eternal where you do actually get to shoot the demons. After all, if the story didn’t get cut despite it massively weighing the game down, then id definitely weren’t going to be anywhere near as introspective as they needed to be when it comes to the additions they’ve made to Doom’s core combat loop. I almost suffered whiplash when starting Doom Eternal for the first time because of how quickly the following were introduced:

• A grenade launcher, used by pushing Left Ctrl.
• A second type of grenade that you fire out of the grenade launcher, switched to with G.
• A flamethrower, activated by R.
• A charged melee attack called a Blood Punch that periodically replaces the otherwise useless regular melee on the E button.
• A platformer-like mid-air dash move, Left Shift.
• The chainsaw, on C.

This is a lot of additional buttons to get my head around during a combat encounter, for all that they take advantage of Doom not needing to use those buttons for other things like crouching or sprinting — and where a more sensible game would perhaps stagger the acquisition of these abilities out over the first half of the game so that you have time to get used to them, Doom Eternal splats the lot of them at  you within the first hour of gameplay. As a consequence Doom Eternal’s early combat stutters and stumbles as you try to remember just what abilities are at your disposal, fumbling over keys that your brain is screaming at you should be a reload button or a crouch button because there’s been no time to build up the muscle memory for their new function.

The ironic thing is that there is actually a good game design reason why Doom Eternal gives you basically your entire moveset for the game inside of the first sixty minutes of gameplay. You might recall Doom’s Glory Kills, where you could perform finishing moves on wounded demons to earn a little health top-up, and its revamp of the Chainsaw, which was a limited-use weapon that instakilled a single enemy and caused ammo pickups to fountain out of their dismembered corpse. Both of these were, in Doom, useful methods of supplementing the regular ammo and health pickups you found in the environment, but Doom Eternal flips things around so that the regular ammo and health pickups now supplement the health and ammo you get from Glory Kills and the Chainsaw. If you’re getting short on health the game wants your first course of action to be punching a demon so that you can extract their precious health-juice; if you’re low on ammo it wants you to chop one up instead. If the Chainsaw is now the primary method by which you get your bullets, then they have to give it to you in the first half hour of the game. The Flamethrower does a similar thing for armour, where you can set a bunch of enemies on fire and then shoot them to make armour plop out of their scorched carcasses. Doom Eternal’s combat is all tuned around your having health, ammo and armour on tap like this, as well as the magically recharging grenade launcher, and this is why the opening hour of the game is such a breakneck learning experience as it throws you all of the tools you’ll be using during the next eleven.

On the face of it this isn’t such a bad idea, and if the weapons and enemy damage had been balanced similarly to Doom I’d be broadly positive about it even in spite of the initial bumpy ride. Unfortunately Doom Eternal doesn’t want you to just be occasionally pushing that Chainsaw button and that Glory Kill button; it wants you to be pushing all of its buttons all of the time. To encourage this it both shrinks your maximum health and ammo pools — Doomguy starts the game being able to carry just 12 shotgun shells at once, which is laughable — and makes both health and ammo alarmingly ephemeral.  A single punch from a basic Imp will deal around 30 damage, which is kind of a big deal when you start the game with a maximum of 100 health. An Arachnotron will take all 12 of your shotgun shells to kill unless you get really close, which is a bad idea because every single enemy in Doom Eternal has devastating melee attacks. You are constantly running out of bullets in this game, and even once you’ve fully upgraded your maximum ammo via one of Doom Eternal’s many, many progression systems you’ll still run completely dry on at least two ammo types approximately 30% of the way into a given combat encounter because the big enemies soak up a truly ridiculous amount of damage relative to the amount that you can dish out in one go; even your bog-standard Mancubus can eat three blasts of the Super Shotgun before pitching over, which is one-quarter of your total shotgun ammo. You need to be constantly Chainsawing and Glory Killing and Flamethrowering things just to keep going.

The health situation is, I suppose, not too bad. Doom Eternal’s combat struck me as significantly clumsier than Doom’s despite the enhanced movement options provided by the double-jump, dash, and the new grappling hook attachment on the Super Shotgun that can be used to pull yourself to distant enemies. There were a few too many occasions towards the end of the game where I found myself pinned against a wall by large enemies (or by the shields created by the new shield-spawning enemy) and couldn’t escape to find a weak demon to Glory Kill to refill my health. I suspect that this is half the reason the incredibly game-y extra life system exists, where you can pick up big green 1UPs that are consumed whenever your health is reduced to zero and which give you a brief few moments of invincibility before filling your health bar back up to maximum, and which felt like nothing more than a crutch to try and support the combat through these unexpectedly clumsy moments and ensure that the player never actually ends up suffering a bullshit death. Mostly, though, the Glory Kill system works, along with the fact that most of the bigger demons drop a smidgen of health whether you Glory Kill them or not; this put me in mind of how Rage 2 did it, but it worked in Rage 2 (it was pretty much the only thing that did) and it arguably works for Doom Eternal.

By contrast the way Doom Eternal handles ammo is an unmitigated disaster. The chainsaw has been revamped so that bigger enemies require all three of your fuel pips to kill, while smaller enemies require only one. The first fuel pip recharges while the second and third must be filled up by picking up fuel cans scattered around the environment, since we’ve apparently learned nothing from the decade-old Human Revolution energy bar debacle; only rarely will you be able to chainsaw a Cacodemon or an Arachnotron, and otherwise you’re reduced to hunting for the smaller zombies and imps in order to refill your ammo counter. The game is at least aware of this, and constantly spawns in low-level enemies during both regular combat encounters and bossfights so that you’ll always be able to chainsaw something.

Except when the ammo pools are so small, and when I have to chainsaw a zombie soldier five or six times in a given fight to replenish them, all you’ve actually accomplished here is to add a traditional reload button to a Doom game — except now you have to push it while standing next to a demon. That’s it. That’s Doom Eternal’s big brainwave, and in order to implement it and encourage the player to use it they had to make it so that you get a mighty 12 shots with the Super Shotgun before having to reload. I really liked Doom’s combat and weapon design because you were constantly switching weapons to deal with specific enemies and situations; by contrast you’re constantly switching weapons in Doom Eternal because you don’t have any bloody ammo. You have no idea how frustrating it is to switch from your Plasma Rifle to your shotgun only to see the No Ammo popup, and then to the Rocket Launcher which shows the same popup, and then to the Chaingun which — sigh — shows the same popup, and so you switch back to your Plasma Rifle while looking for a zombie to chainsaw, except while you’ve been distracted with this little weapon dance you’ve lost an absolute shitload of health. It twists the intense, joyfully exuberant gameplay of Doom into something parsimonious and miserable, like what it was really missing was for the player to have to count out the precise number of shots needed to down an imp so that you can conserve ammo.

While I did eventually get used to all of the different combat abilities Doom Eternal offers, and there were occasional moments when these abilities all meshed together quite nicely and I could see what id were going for, I never got used to the way it handled ammo. This ensured that the combat remained extremely stop-start until the very end of the game, with little chance to establish any kind of rhythm; there were maybe half a dozen fights in total where I didn’t have to drop what I was doing to find a small demon so that I could perform a violent bullet top-up. It’s a deliberately different design philosophy from the first Doom, and a worse one; where the Chainsaw was presented as an additional option that you could tie into your combat flow in a way that suited you, and where weapon switching was something that the player decided to do in response to different threats, Doom Eternal instead forces you to do these things via artificial ammo shortages. It’s a much more prescriptive approach that strips away the cerebral part of Doom’s combat, and this is why I went through the last three levels of the game absolutely bored out of my mind; it had long ago run out of new things to show me, and since it insisted I push all of the buttons it had given me in every combat encounter with no real room to mix things up on my part I had in effect been playing through the exact same fight over and over and again for the last three hours

That is, unless a Marauder decided to show up.

In spite of the above terrible design decisions, Doom Eternal can still occasionally be fun. The dash move is a genuinely good addition to the combat and there’s a new damage model in place that lets you progressively blow chunks out of the bigger demons until they’re nothing but bones, and it’s quite satisfying to visibly wear down a Baron of Hell until he starts flashing and you can rip his head off via a Glory Kill. Unfortunately it appears id’s designers were also aware it was still possible to have fun despite all of their hard work to the contrary, which is why they’ll periodically send in the Fun Police in the form of a Marauder enemy. This is a demon with a permanent shield that makes him completely invulnerable to being shot. Let me repeat that: there is an enemy in Doom Eternal, a game that is ostensibly about shooting demons, that you are physically not allowed to shoot. He’s allowed to shoot you with both energy blasts and a shotgun, as well as periodically summoning a flaming hellhound to cause you grief, but you’re not allowed to return the favour unless it’s during a vanishingly small quarter-second window where his eyes flash green and he runs forward to hit you with his axe. This is your cue to shoot him with your Super Shotgun — you can forget using any other weapon (except maybe the Arbalest) as his vulnerability window is very very small and you need to pack in as much damage as possible, so I really hope your Super Shotgun isn’t showing the dreaded No Ammo popup at this point in time. Of course it would be too much to hope that they’d compensate for his tiny vulnerability window by only expecting you to do this once; no, instead you have to repeat this process eight or ten times before he’ll go down.

The Marauder first shows up as a boss, and as a boss he’s not too bad; his stupid overpowered gimmick and bloated healthpool fits in that context and there’s nothing else around so you’re free to devote your full attention to him, and if he were actually a boss he’d only show up once ever. Unfortunately he continues to show up afterwards as a miniboss, and this makes him so much worse because you know exactly what you have to do to beat him and it involves precisely zero thought on your part beyond dodging his attacks. What it does involve is a lot of waiting around, and so every time the Marauder shows up you know that you’re going to be spending the next three minutes staring at this idiot as he jumps about instead of shooting him in his stupid face. I hated the Marauder not because he was a particularly effective enemy but because he was boring as fuck, and it got to the point where I was physically screaming at my monitor the last couple of times he appeared because the campaign was already dragging on for hours past the point where it should have wrapped up and when the Marauder shows up everything just… stops. More than anything else in Doom Eternal the Marauder embodies the game’s emphatic insistence that I spend large portions of my time not shooting the demons, which rather goes against everything Doom is about.

(Now that I think about it most of Doom Eternal’s new enemies are shielded in some way. There’s the spider thing that spawns static shields for itself and other enemies, and the Archvile which teleports in enemies while projecting a shield around its front arc, and the Doom Hunter which has a body shield that’s only vulnerable to Energy weapons. However, while they are annoying all of these enemies have exploitable weaknesses that mean you don’t have to stop shooting them entirely, you just have to shoot them in a different way. It’s only the Marauder that so thoroughly and enthusiastically breaks Doom’s core gameplay concept.)

The last not-shooting-demons thing Doom Eternal makes you do is suffer through its platforming sequences. I’m less angry about these existing because FPSes have included platforming segments since the dawn of time despite the fact that they have, almost without exception, utterly sucked. However, they’re still worth mentioning because of two things. One is that since Doomguy now has his dash move, Doom Eternal’s platforming segments are a little more baroque than you might expect from an FPS, with horizontal bars dotted around that Doomguy can swing off of to gain height and recharge his double jump, and some incredibly inconsistent climbable surfaces that he’ll automatically attach himself to if he dashes into them (great!) but which require an additional button press if he’s just jumping into them (why!). Often these have you navigating a lot of empty space over bottomless pits, or dodging ridiculous obstacles like slowly-revolving flaming chains that have been lifted straight out of a Mario game, which brings me to the second thing that makes the platforming worth mentioning: there are several points in the game where it requires you to be Doom Eternal’s equivalent of pixel-perfect with your jump and dash timing, which is slightly ridiculous given that even modern platformers have fundamentally rejected this as a concept. Given all of the other obstacles Doom Eternal flings in the way of my enjoyment my repeatedly plummeting into a bottomless pit ranks fairly low on the annoyance scale, but it is there and it is annoying.

After suffering through twelve hours of the story, the abilities, the ammo balance and the enemy design — and only making it to the end after taking a two-week break in the middle to recover my wits — I have to say that Doom Eternal is a game thoroughly at war with itself. Almost every new addition actively works against the core gameplay provided by Doom 2016 instead of enhancing it. You could cut half of the new mechanics out completely and it would be a far superior experience, while cutting the entire story would both dramatically improve the game and make me far more forgiving of its numerous other missteps; given that Doom Eternal had a smoother development timeline and a solid base to build on I was expecting a much more well-rounded product than the bloated, overindulgent and self-important mess that we eventually got. It’s not quite the worst example of game developer hubris that I’ve seen as there’s enough left over from Doom to make the final product aggressively mediocre and forgettable instead of outright bad, but it is one of the most disappointing. Doom 2016 was a promising sign that id had shaken off their decade-long malaise and were about to embark on a new era of making some of the most exciting FPSes around. Sadly Doom Eternal demonstrates that this was a false dawn, and that they’ve reverted to their previous form of making technically accomplished yet uninspired games that are stuffed to the gills with questionable design decisions. I’m not going to expect great things from them in the future.

The post Thoughts: Doom Eternal appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Some of my friends have asked me why I even bought Rage 2, since I didn’t exactly enjoy the original and the sequel wasn’t looking like anything special from the previews. My answer to them was that I just wanted to blast things with a shotgun for a few hours, as that’s a genre that’s been somewhat underserved this year (so far), but the real reason is that I really, really wanted to open the review with a “You can’t spell average without Rage” joke.

Unfortunately this makes Rage 2 doubly disappointing, as it’s turned out to have fallen some considerable way short of even that rather dubious target.

When I think back on my time with the original Rage I can’t remember all that much. I remember that the driving was dull, and that there were no sidequests to speak of, and that using John Carmack’s last major contribution to id Software’s engine — megatextures — in a game with such uninspired visual design largely resulted in it having some very pretty rocks and not much else. The high point of the game was some distinctly above-average weapon variety that went very much against the prevailing trends of the time, and which livened up the otherwise subpar combat considerably — however, given that both Wolfenstein and Doom 2016 took that high point and leveraged it into a pair of excellent reboots it has to be said that Rage, on the whole, was not a concept or a franchise that was particularly crying out for a sequel.

Yet one now exists. And now, having played it all the way through, I have to wonder why on earth Bethesda bothered to resurrect the IP: it is exactly the game you would picture when considering what a sequel to Rage would look like. Rage 2 is set in a bland, samey open world that has all the depth of a puddle. It features a car that you can drive around said open world, but the vehicular combat is pointless and the driving physics are just out-and-out terrible. Its plot is virtually non-existent, it barely has any scripted missions, and most of the content is just your standard open-world fare of clearing enemies out of the little question mark symbols that pop up on the map every three-hundred metres or so. It does have a moderately satisfying combat loop, with most of the ingenuity the original Rage displayed around weapons being transferred to a set of magic powers that make individual fights against stock mooks flow quite nicely, and this is probably one of only two reasons I made it to the end of the game. The other is that if you cut out the driving and the question mark locations from the equation, Rage 2 is about two hours long.

Nearly all of this was true of the first Rage. Despite an eight-year gap and the primary development responsibilities being handed over to Just Cause developers Avalanche, Rage 2 has ended up being almost exactly the same goddamn game, replete with almost exactly the same mistakes. True, it’s been built from the ground-up to be open world this time instead of the weird halfway house of the first game, but that just means it’s lost the vast majority of its scripted missions. In their place are the set of standard open world “activities” that, in Rage 2, mostly consist of getting out of your car and shooting things. Most of the time it’s a small clump of buildings that must be cleared of bandits, which come in Basic and Armoured flavours but which otherwise lack any variety in how the player deals with them. Sure, there’s a bandit with a bat that whacks grenades at you, but he dies if you shoot him with a shotgun. There’s a bandit with a rocket launcher, but she also dies if you shoot her with a shotgun. The only reason I distinguish between Basic and Armoured bandits is that the Armoured ones take two shotgun blasts to kill. Occasionally a bigger enemy will show up that would actually take some time to kill with just the shotgun, which is why you’re also carrying around a rocket launcher. And that’s most of Rage 2’s encounters in a nutshell: you shoot everything with the shotgun until there’s nothing left to shoot. There’s the occasional robot sentry turret sitting out on its own that’s actually the most dangerous enemy in the game by several orders of magnitude, but all you really need to defeat one is a handy piece of cover and some decent reflexes; for everything else, the shotgun is king.

Well, I suppose that reductive description is actually doing Rage 2’s combat encounters a little bit of a disservice. Taken as an isolated, atomic game element they’re not too bad as you have several abilities to play with as you shotgun your way through yet another bandit horde. There’s a Rush ability you can use to close the distance quickly; a double-jump that can be upgraded to clear any barrier less than two storeys high; a charge-up ground-pound that will suck in and then bowl over anyone in the radius of effect. I was using all of these regularly during combat, as well as abusing the health drops that spew out of every enemy on their demise — one of the few things Rage 2 does that I found genuinely quite interesting was to treat the player’s health pool as an alarmingly ephemeral thing, since enemy fire is actually quite damaging and if you’re trading shots at range you’re likely to quickly have your health whittled down unless you chug some of your limited supply of health potions. If you charge into the midst of an enemy group your health vanishes even more quickly, but when you’re up close you also have the chance to pick up these enemy health drops, which are a bunch of little blue vials that behave much like Doom’s Glory Kill health orbs. As long as you’re killing and getting the health drops, you can ensure that the rate at which you gain health exceeds the rate at which you lose it as a side-effect of being in the middle of a bunch of angry, tooled-up wasteland raiders — but the moment you stop, even if it’s to take cover or reload, your health starts dropping at a precipitous rate.

So Rage 2’s combat is built along the opposite lines to Bethesda stablemate Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Unlike TNC, Rage 2 very definitely wants you to be in the thick of things, blasting away with your guns and using your powers with wild abandon. It’s structured its entire combat design around enabling that gameplay style, and it is the sole part of Rage 2’s design that actually lands properly. Rage 2’s up-close gunfights are about as good as anything on offer from Doom or Wolfenstein — at least to start with, before overfamiliarity has bred a healthy amount of contempt. Once you’ve invested in a few upgrades for your weapons and powers you can get into a zen-like combat flow: shoot, shoot, shoot, ground-slam to knock anyone nearby over, reload, shoot again. The shotgun is an excellent example of videogame shotguns, with a generously wide aiming reticule and a visceral sense of meaty force; because it’s a one-hit kill on most enemies if you can fill more than 50% of the reticule with their body (and because you can’t die if you keep on killing) the fights are very much like being in a shooting gallery, servicing targets one after another as quickly as possible. And despite the lack of real threat from the enemies, Rage 2 somehow avoids this experience becoming fully stale for, oh, a good five or six hours. It’s just that fun to shoot people.

Which is, incidentally, the last time you’ll hear me using the word “fun” to describe Rage 2. The rest of it is full of messy design that’s either incomplete or not joined up in the slightest, pasted over an open world that’s criminally underdetailed in both the narrative and literal sense of the word. I know that Ubisoft, for example, have roughly one trillion outsourced artists working on each of their games because that’s what it takes to get them looking as stunning pretty as they are, and Rage 2 is a great example of what happens when you don’t invest that effort: muddy textures, featureless locations and a lot of skyscrapers that are just big grey boxes that look like they’ve been slapped together in the level editor for the original Quake. It’s already struggling uphill because every game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ends up including a disproportionate amount of grey and brown, but after this and Mad Max it’s looking like Avalanche don’t have any more of an idea of how to make a wasteland look interesting than Bethesda themselves did with Fallout. Every set of buildings use the same corrugated iron shacks; every mutant hideout uses the same set dressing that looks like it’s been scooped directly out of a toilet. This lack of fine detail is a major contributory factor to none of these places feeling like places — they’re just geometry that’s been slapped together by an encounter designer for you to clamber over during a fight, and once the fight is over their value to the world’s sense of place is effectively zero. It takes a lot of work to stop an open world getting bland and samey, but Rage 2 feels like it’s barely even trying.

Then there’s that design problem. Rage 2 has a dizzying array of currencies and upgrade points and reputation meters and none of them have had more than the most cursory amount of effort put into them to make them engaging to deal with. Take car upgrades, for example. The moment you get out of the tutorial you’re given a car which is pretty much a carbon copy of the one from Rage, complete with dual auto-tracking miniguns as the default weapon. You can upgrade it with some cursory additional bits: a bigger set of cannon, some missiles, a couple of health upgrades — nothing too flashy, but effective enough as an incentive to try and get the corresponding currency, which is Car Parts. You can buy Car Parts in shops and occasionally get them out of chests, but your main way of getting Car Parts is by doing the Convoy events that crop up on the map every so often, which involve you chasing down and destroying a heavily-armed collection of bandit vehicles. Convoy events always reward you with Car Parts, so you duly go off and do a Convoy or three and buy a few upgrades — and then quickly realise that you’ve bought every worthwhile upgrade the starting car has to offer. There are other vehicles in the game, but you cannot upgrade them; the only use for Car Parts is to upgrade the starting car and you’ve already maxed it out. Since Convoys don’t offer any other reward, and since they’ll just ignore you if you don’t shoot at them, you can in turn just ignore them from that point on. The problem with that, though, is that chasing the Convoys is the only time you will engage in vehicular combat in Rage 2. It isn’t tied into any other kind of event or any of the plot missions. So you’ve just wasted time upgrading your car to do an event type that you have no further use for once you’ve upgraded your car. And believe me, the vehicle combat is nowhere near fun enough to justify engaging in for its own sake. It’s completely segregated from the rest of the game, and an excellent example of why I think Rage 2’s design, on the whole, outright sucks.

It’s not an isolated example either, with the same bum note being hit again and again no matter where you turn in the game. Even the combat isn’t immune; a lot of time has been spent getting that close-range combat flow to feel right, but one thing I almost never did in Rage 2 was something I found myself doing all the time in the original Rage: switching weapons. Frequent weapon switching in an FPS is a fairly reliable indicator of good enemy design. Your weapons should be seen as tools to solve the problems posed by different types of enemies, and if you have a good variety of enemies you’ll be changing things up as you encounter each new type. It’s a satisfying thing for the player do; you’re thinking on the fly, picking the right tool for the right job when different enemy combinations mean the answer isn’t always obvious, and lending a more cerebral aspect to an experience that’s otherwise just entirely a matter of reflexes and hand-eye coordination.. As good as Rage 2’s shotgun is, my being able to get by with the shotgun and just the shotgun in every non-boss encounter belies some deep issues with its weapon and enemy design. Part of this problem is that the shotgun is arguably too good: it’s sickeningly powerful out to midrange and it has more than enough ammo to kill everyone in the average bandit camp several times over. But the major issue, as I see it, is that Rage 2 hands you a bunch of innate powers that you have to get right up into an enemy’s face to use and a health system that will sustain you when you’re nose-to-nose with some slavering wasteland mutants — and then gives you precisely one weapon that actually supports that playstyle. Oh, I suppose the assault rifle is also a decent weapon for running and gunning if you ever somehow ran out of shotgun shells, but everything else I used was either absurdly situational (the flame revolver) or else was designed to be used at range and thus rendered utterly redundant by the rest of Rage 2’s combat design (the rail gun).

I used these weapons a couple of times and almost died — and more importantly, had to spend a distressing amount of time standing in one place doing precision targeting for less damage than I would have inflicted with one shotgun blast — and then never used them again. Based on that experience I also stopped looking for new weapons to pick up in the wasteland; they’re scattered around in Arks that you have to hunt down, but since I didn’t see a literal chainsaw on the menu I didn’t see the point in wasting time acquiring guns that would ultimately just be worse than the one I already had. Again, it’s a lack of joined-up design, and one that’s arguably harder to understand than the car combat and upgrades being totally pointless: it feels like the weapon designers and the combat designers didn’t talk to each other at any point during Rage 2’s development and so it ended up having a set of weapons that only briefly overlaps with its combat encounters — but the weapon designers and the combat designers should have been the same people. It’s impossible to design one without designing the other, and there’s no excuse for the two of them feeling quite as disjointed as they do in Rage 2.

I haven’t spent any time yet talking about Rage 2’s plot, and for good reason: if I spent much more than a couple of lines laying into it I’d have expended more effort on Rage 2’s plot than Rage 2’s writers did. I’ll just say that after you get out of the tutorial there are a grand total of seven plot missions in the game, none of which take more than fifteen minutes to finish once you subtract the excessive amount of driving from one place to another that Rage 2 makes you do as part of any activity. The driving itself is curiously joyless for an Avalanche game; the car handles like a brick and nearly every single thing in Rage 2’s world — from rocks to fences to tiny plants that your heavily-armoured gunwagon should crush into the dirt — is a collision object that’ll stop you dead in your tracks. Any time you try to go offroad you’ll run into dozens of these collision objects and it makes taking a shortcut an absolutely miserable experience, and one that’s somehow slower than following Rage 2’s ridiculously windy roads. Since there’s no actual vehicle combat in the game (unless you’ve suffered a blow to the head and suddenly find yourself in the mood for taking on a Convoy) this means you spend a distressing amount of your time in Rage 2 slavishly following the stupid purple navigation chevrons the game helpfully overlays onto the road whenever you mark an objective on the map. It’s somewhat staggering, but Rage 2 is an open world game with fuck all to do in terms of actual exploration — the driving is too painful to do anything other than follow the road to your next destination, and the world is so bland that there’s nothing interesting to find in the wasteland even if you did.

Which brings me back to the question I got halfway to asking in my opening paragraph: why on earth does Rage 2 exist? It’s a sequel that falls far short of the standard set by its decidedly mediocre predecessor, let alone the (relatively) polished modern open world experiences from other AAA developers that it’s supposed to be competing against; it’s a sequel that, rather than learning from the original’s mistakes, instead repeats every single one of them while doubling down on the mediocrity as hard as it can. Nearly everything about the game outside of its combat feels like it was phoned in, like Avalanche got handed the IP by Bethesda and told to make a game out of it, but their hearts weren’t really in it. I don’t pretend to understand the inner workings of Avalanche, and I don’t want to accuse them of not having any investment in the game they were making because I have no doubt there were more than a few late nights involved in getting Rage 2 out of the door, but that is what it feels like. My personal suspicion is that somebody at Bethesda noticed that Gearbox had spent several years chasing their own tails instead of continuing the massively-yet-inexplicably popular Borderlands series, and so decided to dust off the closest thing to it that they had lying around — the Rage IP — and gave it to somebody who might be able to do a decent job with it, but for whatever reason the drive wasn’t there from either the developer or the publisher to actually make it happen. And while I would have laughed in your face if you’d told me this would happen immediately after I wrote my Rage review back in 2013, it would at least explain why I’m reviewing — and largely hating — Rage 2 in 2019. That and my proclivity for bad jokes involving worse puns.

The post Thoughts: Rage 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m writing this review of Doom on a sunny Sunday probably less than 24 hours before the gaming sites get their own reviews up. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to say, but I predict they’re going to be fairly surprised at Doom’s proof that id Software do still know how to make a cracking FPS. I know I certainly was.

Honestly, if anything is to blame for that surprise it’s a combination of Rage being extremely tepid and Bethesda’s marketing department targeting all of the pre-release coverage of Doom at the CoD-devouring masses. It didn’t look great. The multiplayer beta made it look even worse – it moved clunkily, sounded awful, and just generally felt wrong, like they’d tried to turn Doom into an off-brand version of Halo. Fortunately for Doom the multiplayer was handled by a completely separate developer and can probably be consigned to the dustbin of history; the single-player has been developed solely by id Software — and despite their dwindling pedigree, there were a few lonely islands of promise in Rage’s ocean of mediocrity that indicated their talent wasn’t entirely dead. From the way Doom is structured I also think they’ve taken a long hard look at what fellow Bethesda stable-mates Machine Games did with Wolfenstein: The New Order, as the general approach Doom takes is almost identical; it fuses modern metagaming elements and quality-of-life features with core gameplay that feels retro, but which is so responsive and polished that it can only have come out of years of experimenting with how to update that gameplay for the modern era.

As with all Dooms before it, Doom is set on a Martian base that’s currently suffering the predations of a demonic invasion launched from Hell. And as with all Dooms before it, Doom’s plot is largely disposable gumpf, albeit somewhat self-aware gumpf that has a subtle sense of humour about it. For the most part it manages to avoid intruding on the actual gameplay; this does make the 3-4 “cutscenes” where you’re forced to put your gun away and listen to one of the two non-Doomguy characters in the game monologue at you all the more jarring and I’d rather they weren’t in the game at all, but the reason they’re so noticeable is because they’re so at odds with the rest of the game, which is the most arcade-y shooter I’ve played since Bulletstorm. It feels like a good update of classic Doom, mixing up frantic battles where a horde of demons chases you around the room while you try desperately not to die with quieter episodes where you explore in the name of finding secrets and easter eggs. The fights actually put me in mind of the excellent Devil Daggers for how fast and action-packed they are, which is appropriate since Devil Daggers was itself inspired by Doom.

A typical Doom level is laid out thusly: you proceed in a more-or-less linear fashion through the map, disposing of a basic background level of monsters on the way, until you reach a big room that’s laid out like a classic deathmatch area, with lots of raised platforms and nooks and crannies full of ammo and supplies, as well as a powerup or two. Sometimes there’ll be an extremely prominent button for you to push or an item for your to pick up, but just as often you’ll have no warning before the doors slam shut and demonic beasties start warping in. Doom’s enemies are almost entirely comprised of returning favourites from the originals — Imps, Hell Knights, Pinkies, Revenants, Mancubus…es — and while many of them do have projectile attacks that you have to dodge (they don’t get any hitscan weapons, so you always have a chance of dodging) they all love to get up close and personal. You also love to get up close and personal with the new Glory Kills mechanic, but only when you’ve staggered an enemy by reducing them to near-death; otherwise it’s backpedal o’clock while you fire a selection of extremely meaty guns at the encroaching enemy horde.

I was a little bit worried about Doom’s guns after enduring the multiplayer beta, but each of its nine weapons is really fun to use and gets a thorough workout throughout the entire game. There’s no magazines to reload and only two weapons have scopes you can sight down (these are rarely used because staying still in Doom is death), so the R key and right mouse button are instead reserved for switching between and using each weapon’s alternate fire modes. Each gun has two, and they’re unlocked by finding powerup drones hidden in particularly inaccessible places on the map; these alternate fire modes are a mechanic that’s been stolen wholesale from Rage, but that’s fine because it was the one part of Rage that worked, and it worked really well. It is if anything even better in Doom, with each fire mode ensuring a gun retains usability and versatility throughout the game. For example, there are two shotguns in the game: a bog standard combat shotgun you pick up in the tutorial, and the classic double-barrelled Super Shotgun you can get 4-5 levels in. The Super Shotgun would ordinarily make the combat shotgun irrelevant, but it’s saved by one of its alternate fire modes turning it into a grenade launcher. The Plasma Rifle gives you a choice of firing a stun pulse or a wave of superheated plasma in a wide arc. The Rocket Launcher can either lock on to an enemy and fire a volley of three rockets, or else have its rockets detonated mid-flight for a far more powerful explosion; this is particularly good for hitting enemies floating in mid-air such as the Cacodemon.  The Gauss Rifle has a Siege Mode, which is heavy on the ammo and takes a little while to charge, but which fires a single hugely powerful blast that’ll penetrate through multiple enemies and which will kill a Baron of Hell in two shots.

It’s Doom’s treatment of series classic weapons the BFG and the Chainsaw that’s probably the most interesting change here, though. These aren’t accessed via the number keys like normal weapons, but instead have their own dedicated keys for activation. This is because they function more like one-shot powers in a shoot ‘em up; the BFG is basically a smart bomb that’ll clear out all baddies standing in front of you, while the chainsaw will instantly kill any single enemy and cause them to drop a ton of ammo. Both of them function as get-out-of-jail-free cards for using in a jam; the chainsaw is designed to be used when you’re running low on ammo so that you can refill and get back in the fight, and the BFG is a panic button to be used when you’re facing overwhelming odds.  Each of them has a very limited number of uses and a very limited number of refills during a level, so you have to choose the moment to use them with care.

A typical battle in Doom has you switching between 3-5 weapons very very quickly according to the situation. Aside from the rocket launcher there’s no weapon that really functions as a one-size-fits-all; they’re all useful in different situations and so you find yourself switching from the Heavy Assault Rifle for sniping Imps to the Gauss Rifle for eliminating a tough target like a Mancubus to the Super Shotgun for the point-blank disposal of a Pinky. You use every aspect of the room to its fullest; Doom’s protagonist now has added mobility thanks to a double jump and the ability to mantle platforms, and you have to use all of it as you keep moving, moving, moving around the room, sprinting down corridors and leaping off ledges while taking out any monsters that cross your path. More stuff will spawn in as you finish off the first wave, and most of these arena encounters slowly scale up their monsters as the fight progresses, starting off with Imps and Possessed Soldiers mixed in with the odd tough enemy like a Mancubus, moving on to multiple Revenant and Hell Knight spawns and then finishing with something appropriately huge like a Baron of Hell. The big monsters function as an appropriate crescendo for a fight that’s been going on for a good 3-4 mayhem-packed minutes, and once they’re down it’s time to take stock of what’s left of the room, pick up any ammo/health that you missed and move on to the next arena.

Or you could hunt for secrets. This was a big element of classic Doom, and it’s one that’s been fully embraced for this update. I said earlier that the levels were more-or-less linear, and there are; there’s usually only one way forward and the trick is in figuring out what it is. If they’re linear, though, they are at least interestingly linear, making good use of the third dimension and sometimes backtracking over themselves several times. This three-dimensionality is supported by an updated automap system that is honestly the absolute best implementation they could have come up with, as it both shows you where to go and shows off how intricate the geometry of the level is. Often there’ll be an area shown on the automap that you didn’t visit in the course of travelling through the level; you’ve got fairly decent odds on there being a secret of some sort located here. At other times Doom pulls the classic Doom trick of showing you the secret through a window or a gap in the wall or up on a high ledge somewhere, and leaving you to figure out how to get to it. They’re usually cunningly well-hidden despite these hints, and so secret hunting both carries the inherent satisfaction of solving a puzzle and the more tangible reward of whatever the secret contained. A lot of the time this is armour, or a powerup – useful, to be sure, but nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary — but sometimes it’s a gun that wouldn’t normally unlock until a level or two down the road — once again, hiding powerful weapons in the early levels was something that original Doom loved to do, and new Doom is no different. There’s also a selection of classic levels to be unlocked, and these are by far the hardest secrets to locate as they’re activated by levers that blend into the background geometry of the level and which don’t have the normal helper glow that other interactive objects have, but my favourite secrets by far were the little Doom action figures that play a chiptune-y snippet of E1M1’s music when you pick one up. The figures don’t unlock anything good themselves, but each of them is themed after a piece of id or Bethesda history — Quakeguy, Keenguy, Vaultguy etc. — and are honestly so adorable that I would unhesitatingly buy one if they existed in real life.

This is Doom’s biggest strength, I think; it’s not even trying to hide its origins. The gameplay is a fusion of the best of both retro and modern FPS styles, yes, and this provides a very strong frame on which to hang the game, but it’s helped along the way immeasurably by being stuffed chock-full of callbacks to the original games. It’s easy to jam in easter eggs, of course — this being a Bethesda game, there is of course the now-tiresome skeletal corpse with an arrow in the knee hidden in a cave in Hell somewhere — but the nice thing about Doom’s is that they are for the most part entirely natural. They feel like they’re done out of love for the original material rather than because they’re cynically trying to trigger players’ nostalgia glands. Importantly, Doom doesn’t really waste too much time trying to justify them, either; there’s a soupçon of effort made to tie the classic blue/yellow keycards into the world a little more naturally, but the transition to skulls in Hell is just presented to you as a fait accompli, and while there is some cursory blurb in the game’s Codex to try and explain the powerups they’re just plonked into levels rather unapologetically, because this is a Doom game and a Doom game should have the Berserk powerup. It’s Doom because it has Doom-ness infused into its very DNA, from the frequent musical references to classic tracks to the game providing something cool if you shoot the Icon of Sin in the head, again.

Flaws? Well, I’m not 100% sold on the Glory Kill system. Glory Kills were much-hyped prior to launch, and mechanically they do make sense and fit into the game flow; if you reduce an enemy to low health they glow orange and start staggering around, and this is your cue to Press F To Perform Glory Kill. A Glory Kill is a melee finisher that will cause an enemy to drop a small amount of health – unless you’re on low health, in which case they’ll drop enough health to refill your health bar to about halfway. Glory Kills therefore function as a good way to keep up the frenetic pace of Doom’s battles; if you get reduced to low health you don’t have to piss about playing cautiously or search around for a convenient medikit, you just punch out the nearest demon and watch health orbs fountain out of their corpse. The problem is that despite there being a large variety of Glory Kills in the game — you’ll trigger different ones depending on which body part you’re targeting — firing one that isn’t “Punch the demon in the face” is really, really difficult, even when you’re specifically trying to set one up for one of Doom’s many mission challenges. Because you’re only ever seeing one or two Glory Kills, and because you do them so much, they get boring really, really quickly. They don’t feel powerful in the same way that the Berserk melee kills do, where Doomguy literally rips Imps in half with his bare hands. And in a game like Doom anything that doesn’t feel powerful ends up being not all that much fun, really.

The other problem Doom has is that despite its admirable focus on frenetic, relentless action, it does unfortunately feel the need to shoehorn in some plot and some scripted events to placate the modern gamer. At first it seems like it’s parodying the need for every game to have an over-elaborate story, since as soon as Doomguy puts his armour on fifteen seconds into the game somebody calls him up on a terminal to spout Plot at him — and his response is to punch the terminal into oblivion before they’ve even got through a full sentence. Sadly this story-lite approach does soon give way to cutscenes where you’re staring at a screen while somebody monologues at you, and not only do these slow the game down unnecessarily, but they also actively interfere with the good parts of the game by occasionally locking the door behind you so that you can’t go back to earlier parts of the level. This is completely at odds with the secret-hunting half of Doom; you can replay any completed level with all your weapons and upgrades so it’s not an unforgivable sin, but it does strike me as an unnecessary one.  The story itself does have some amusing beats like the evil UAC being portrayed as Scientology But With Demons, but it’s absolutely not worth the drag effect it has on you actually getting shit done. The visuals are technically very accomplished – very crisp and detailed, and the engine is about a thousand times better optimised than whatever piece of crap is powering the CoD series these days¹ — however thanks to the game being set in just two locations it’s also rather bland. There’s a couple of moderately interesting environments towards the end, but mostly the palette is that of the reddish-browns of Mars or the brownish-browns of Hell; Wolfenstein very much has the edge here as it had some outstanding visual design to back up its gunplay. Doom does better gunplay, but its visuals are never really anything more than “okay”.

Still, these low points don’t come anywhere close to dragging Doom down. It’s far too fast and far too fun to be held back by the occasional missed beat. It’s a fantastic return to form for id Software that’s driven by a love of the series’ roots and a deft understanding of how to make those roots blossom into a sturdy, demonic Hell-oak of a game — a modern update of a retro concept that, by and large, manages to combine the best of both. Up until now I was happy to call Wolfenstein: TNO the best FPS of the last half-decade, but now that Doom exists and is good I’m not sure which is better. I might even be inclined to say that Doom edges it on the strength of its purity of design, flabby cutscenes aside; it’s too close to really call it, though, and making a game that is as good as Wolfenstein is still one hell of an achievement. Pun very definitely intended.

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