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.