Players work their way through numbered levels, which offer a series of wave-based gunfights against increasingly large and difficult cadres of hellspawn. Once you strip away the story, the game sticks to simple structure of its original entries. If you try to think about them too hard, you’ll lose interest. (In the future, energy from Hell harvested on Mars powers the Earth.) There are a few characters as well, though they mostly exist to deliver exposition and/or personify key objectives. As the story unfolds, it offers just enough background to keep gaming’s modern, lore-hungry audience from scratching its collective head.

Simple enough, right?ĭoom’s narrative is a façade - a means of disguising the game’s simple structure as a grand adventure. After establishing he’s on Mars, the goal quickly becomes clear: Kill all the demons and close the portal that’s letting them cross over from hell. He wakes up on a lab table, demons at his throat.

Run, shoot, kill, repeatĭoom’s single-player campaign puts players back in the shoes of the un-named space marine. Doom is a brilliant homage to a classic, but falls short of achieving something new. However, what begins as a refreshing slice of a bygone era eventually drags out into a repetitive slog. It may, in fact, be better at recreating the sensations you felt playing the original than going back to the classic. Rather than jump back in with a demon-skinned linear shooting gallery, the new Doom straps modern gameplay systems on to the classic run-and-gun arena shooting of its youth. After more than a decade and a full-blown revolution within the genre it helped create, the title change was a rightful acknowledgement that Doom is a historic series, but has not been part of the conversation for a while. When it was announced two years ago, developer Id Software revealed the game would not be called “ Doom 4,” as the press had inferred in process stories and rumor round-ups, but simply Doom. The game shares narrative elements with its predecessors, so it isn’t a reboot, but it doesn’t directly build on the mechanics or story of Doom 3, so it wouldn’t be fair to call it a direct sequel, either. It’s hard to exactly classify the 2016 version of Doom.

Doom 2016 game manual