Doom II: Hell on Earth

When Doom entered the arena of games, the world was never the same again. It looked like nothing people had seen before, what with super console graphics, a real sense of immersion, and a multiplayer mode connecting up to four blood-crazed players over a network, all on a system with a historically poor reputation for gaming. Its ending left millions of gamers on a cliffhanger, all while id Software preoccupied fans with the ability to create their own WAD levels and assets. As that happened, a mere ten months later, the awaited sequel was released. Doom II was not intended to be the company's radical leap forward, unlike its masterpiece it concurrently worked on and published two years later, Quake. Instead, it was a new game with new levels that changed only what had to be. Let's find out whether id Software took all opportunities to do just that.

The game continues where the series left off after the events of "Thy Flesh Consumed" from Doom, where our hero finds upon returning to Earth that it has been overrun by the same alien race he battled in Hell. On Earth, the monsters hold the entire population captive with nobody to free them unless it's the only human who made it out of Hell alive, logically. If a thousand hellspawn cannot kill Doomguy, instead being the ones killed, what can? Frankly, the monsters do expand their assortment of fighters, and we see for the first time zombies with chainguns, Flying Spaghetti Monsters (I made that joke last time) that spawn airborne flaming skulls, monsters that resurrect their slain allies, and arachnids armed with plasma guns. The only real weak enemy is the pale counterpart of the hulking Baron of Hell: the Hell Knight, but everyone else poses a reasonable threat, including the chaingun zombie, who surprisingly can shave off a player's health points as a good diet pill would pounds. However, Doomguy is blessed with another weapon he can add to his arsenal. If the chaingun were good enough for players who could afford more bullets, then a shotgun with two barrels is good enough for players who can afford more pellets. It is true the double-barreled shotgun has a slower firing rate than the regular shotgun and is better suited for short-range targets, but it expends more shells per minute and has almost three times the firepower. Okay, the expenditure itself may not be appealing, but you cannot deny lining up the enemies, pulling the trigger at point-blank range, and watching as many as four die at once, and I bet you can score more with weaker foes. This leaves rocket missiles as the only kind of ammunition that can be fired by only one weapon. Everything else from the last game is intact.

Apart from a new health power-up and the fact that the levels are no longer divided into episodes, meaning that the run is a long, continuous chain of 30 levels plus two secret levels between which the player never leaves their favorite weapons behind, there is not much else new to talk about Doom II. I thus have plenty of writing space to write about my experiences with the game, which are quite similar to its predecessor. I can write about watching my sorry fiends collapse and fall over ledges. I can talk about the two game's emphasis on speed and the fact that they both resemble a stop-motion black comedy sketch series with characters made of clay (that is how their sprites came to be) I can also write about two new monsters I did not mention: a skeleton who fires missiles and menacingly makes the player feel small, and an obese guy to whom, in spite of his dual flamethrowers, being large is clearly a weakness. Of course, I should be writing about what is better or worse about the sequel, which starts with its levels. Although I had little against the original's, I find that the sequel's level design has improved as a result of gaining more experience from id Software's own level editor. The levels are larger, but more importantly, they all just seem more carved and less flat. The secret areas are useful because the player can find powerful weapons very early on in the game if they know where to look based on visual or structural cues or simply on a whim. Even the secret levels feel more rewarding as secret levels, and are clearly a homage to another great piece of work. The story also seems more developed. While it is still bare as the game heavily favors action, the idea of rescuing the world population and then the world itself sounds more interesting than simply surviving a laboratory disaster and trying to contain its aftermath, and more reminiscent of one giant Die Hard film, where instead of a dozen or so terrorists taking hostage a skyscraper, it is the deepest depths of the Earth capturing its whole surface. If you were bored of the boss fights from the first game where the most convenient strategy involved "circle-strafing" and shooting the bosses, you will find that the climactic fight with this game's boss requires tenfold strategy. It is chaotic, monsters do not stop spawning, and Doomguy can only kill so many with what limited ammo and health spheres he has and must find a way to destroy the highly memorable boss before he is overwhelmed.

By refining only the superficial parts of the game, the core of the gameplay is left as great as it was the last year. Unfortunately, it also means the bad fundamental parts from the first game crept their way into the second. The levels all have similar 2.5D architecture where rooms are never stacked one above another, and the game still suffers from being based on the shallow premise used by other old FPS games of shooting enemies for the almost pure sake shooting them. I may be judging it harshly because I grew up with more story-oriented shooters like Half-Life, but the schadenfreude I reap from the grisly carnage I cause my opponents becomes a brief bore when the killing is dragged out, which often happens after the first few hours in a period. For a standalone sequel, not much has advanced technically, and that itself is a regression. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any new good feature other than what I described. There is still no looking up or down; the game automatically aims the player's gun toward the closest enemy in the center of the screen, but, with the levels larger and seemingly more vertical, I wish I could see further above or below or manually aim at my foes since autoaim cannot always detect those far away. To throw in a few suggestions that would have made the game a more meaningful upgrade, the graphics could have been scaled up to Super VGA and its multiplayer expanded. As disappointing as that sounds, I actually prefer this game over Doom personally. As much as it is not an all-new game, with what few improvements, Doom II strangely feels like an all-new game. I cannot pinpoint why it does. Is it the super shotgun, an expanded cast of monsters, or the boss fight? Maybe it's the combination of all of them that somehow fundamentally alters how I perceive those improvements justifying it being a full game. Whatever the case, all I know is that the WAD community responded positively to the increased variety by developing more levels for the second game.

VERDICT: Doom II is a step forward in id Software's early anthology of games, albeit not a dramatic one like Quake. It as a full standalone game, I bemoan the weaknesses of the original game creeping into this one, as well as the lack of substantial improvements to the Doom engine and, to a lesser extent, the gameplay. Because little has changed technically from a game already considered one of the greatest, I decline to rank it on the same tier as Doom. However, having a double-barreled shotgun as a common weapon that packs quite a violent kick is a nice addition, meeting new enemies keeps the experience fresh, the levels and the story are better developed, and, because of the additions, Doom II itself deprives players of practically any reason they would want to design WADs for the original game. It is a surprising feat the guys over there pulled off changing so little from the original and still meeting our minimum expectations for a sequel, and my rating reflects upon that statement.

I was about 10 years old when I hold grasp to this game... It was like an epiphany for me. I have never played the first "Doom", but when you are a 10 year old, you don't care, let's just play the game. I just couldn't get enough of this game. Every time I played it, I was possessed! I was pretty much an insane gamer just for "Doom", and when I got the cheat codes... how delightful was that. But, enough about that part of my childhood, let's dive in.

According to the story, you are the same marine as before... the Doomguy, as we call him, finds himself on planet Earth, and he finds out that the Earth itself was taken over by demons and turned it into a hellhole. So, you take your guns and... just go to save the world. It's basically simple stuff, really. There isn't much you can do. Just run around kill monsters (with various weapons, for every occasion, of course), finding key cards to progress through the level. You have boss fights on the end of every episode (episodes are continuous), or you have a multiple large opponents. The Doomguy could just walk, or run fast and that's it. In later years, they added a jump and crouch.

So, what is exactly so good about "Doom 2", or "Doom", or "Doom Ultimate"? Why is it still holding up, even today? Well, almost 24 years ago... graphics were top notch, but today, they are just bunch of cubes... without any real, rendered form. The edge that holds even today is that graphics team were very dedicated and imaginative and they designed monsters, demons, weapons and levels the best way possible at that time. The sound effects were just awesome and they are holding up even today. Gameplay is amazing. It's dynamic and simple, and it's doesn't have time to explain itself. That's what I like about these old early 90s PC games... they were not that big and not that pretentious to give us a bunch of story details at the beginning of the game for example... and to move your character through an endless tutorial, or "story mode", that you need to follow. It was a time when games just cut the crap and start shooting. AI for the time was nothing special, it was about to get more perfected as the time goes by. So, that's it... nothing more. Everything else is so simple that is not even worthy of mentioning. We have aliens, monsters and demons... I don't know which inspirations were used for them, I think it's something from the Bible... when it comes to hell monsters and demons and other things.

That is just fascinating, that there was no some good explanation for the demons with whom are you fighting. Who are they? Are they aliens from some deep space and they came from some space hell? Did demons showed to us in the form of hellish creatures from Christian bible? Who knows. And that's what I like the best about this game. You just have to use your own imagination. The same thing goes for the level design. You just can't tell if you are on earth. There are maybe few levels that suggest that you are, in fact on earth. But the others... well not that much. And I love the design of levels in the game, just great. It also set you in the imagination and questioning yourself... "where the hell am I?"... There are of course some new weapons and enemies and they are good.

In conclusion, what to say? It IS one of the best FPS games ever made from that old time when the things were simple and it holds today far more better than you realize. How do I know that? Just look at bunch of modes and various other "Doom" versions on line. People enjoy making them and other people... enjoy playing them. Doom is one of those games that just never gets old. Play it and enjoy it...

This was one great game! The soundtrack keeps you motivated to fight. The level design kind of makes up for the limited number of creatures to fight. This is kind of uneven. Some of the middle levels were harder than the latter. It could have been spaced more evenly. But the experience is gritty. Considering that this was the early 90's, I'm surprised they pulled this off. The quality is astounding for what they had to work with. All the controls are tight. The way the sprite bobs when you walk. The ending was disappointing. It just became a very hard 3D platformer, when they could have just added another character.

Doom II in a lot of ways feels more like an expansion than it does an entirely independent game and though I don't think it's quite as consistent as its predecessor, that doesn't stop it from being a hell of a fun time and a worthy follow up to arguably one of the most influential games of all time.

The levels are bigger, more complex. There's essentially twice the amount of demons to slaughter, both in number and variation, with inclusions such as the Revenant, Hell Knight, Pain Elemental, Mancubus, Arch-Vile and Arachnotron being introduced into the franchise. The music is just as bangin' as ever with Bobby Prince returning to compose and we get a brand new toy to play with in the form of the iconic Super Shotgun, a tool synonymous with both the franchise and its protagonist.

Step back into the gore-drenched boots of the Doomguy, avenge your beloved Daisy and save the Earth from demonic invasion.

Doom II feels like a refinement and though it's difficult to stand side by side with the cultural Goliath that was Doom (1993), its important to remember that the franchise would not be what it is today had it not been for this game.

8/10.

The Doom series is one of the most exciting first person shoot em up video games! The characters, monsters, and the action makes this game a fun non-stop playing time! Below is a brief look how I think the game is!

Game Play: The game play is very good. There is really basic controls here and is easy to perform. Novice gamers should have a good time here!

Graphics: The graphics are wonderful especially for the first Nintendo. The backgrounds are really beautiful!

Difficulty: The game is easy but as it goes on you find out that it will become more difficult!

Music: The music is great! Just fantastic catchy tunes through out the game! In My opinion its some of the best music ever in a video game!

Sound: The sound is great. Nuff said!

Overall: I have always loved Doom II! If you like excellent shoot em up games then I strongly recommend you play this game!

To purchase this video game check out Amazon.com!