DOOM 64

Playtime: 11.8 Hours

Played the main campaign and the Lost Levels on the hardest difficulty (WMD), didn't have much trouble at any point in the game because the difficulty was designed to be playable ,not a joke difficulty like DOOM 1 & 2. I also did one "Fun" level just for the achievement, but I missed a demon key in my main campaign playthrough so I had to go back with a password to get the other achievement. Ended up 100% clearing the achievements for this game since it didn't really require much extra effort.

This game was fun. I've never actually played one of the old DOOM games without mods adding vertical aiming (Brutal DOOM back in the day, mostly) and I don't think I will after this, so this was a very novel experience for me. To be honest, I'm not really a big fan of how much auto-aim was needed in this game to get that to work. The game does aim up & down for you, but it even adjusts your aim horizontally sometimes, and the automatic target lock means you can't decide which enemy you shoot at if there are a few of them bunched up on screen. It also makes the RL a huge hazard to use - it's not uncommon for it to aim straight down at the ground when trying to hit something below you.

With that said, this is a very solid rendition of the classic DOOM games - it's very different from the PC releases (it's not just a port, as I always thought it was). The game tries to add some atmosphere with a more muted soundtrack, but in practice that just meant that I played it with some other noise in the background - streams or other videos mostly. This attempt at a brooding atmosphere didn't work at all for me personally, and I think it's actually kind of silly given how quickly your character can move, plus how your character can sprint faster than anything else in the game. Atmosphere aside, the maps are great fun to play and interesting to explore, making great use of the lack of jump to showcase some really cool movement tech in secrets, and as a way to clearly show where you need to go while blocking access (usually by sticking a knee-high fence that doomguy can't handle). Both the main campaign maps and the Lost Levels aren't of particular note in my opinion - they're just very solid, very fun maps.

Enemies and weapons are also pretty much as expected - both very solid, but they don't represent a huge evolution from the PC DOOMs either. Animations seem to be a bit gutted for some reason (for example, the SSG reload is barely animated at all here) but weapons sound and feel reasonable aside from that. Likewise, enemies aren't anything too special - pain elementals suck since they spawn TWO juiced-up lost souls at a time now in this game, but pretty much everything else feels mostly untouched. I guess there's also an imp reskin that shoots faster projectiles but that's barely worth mentioning, but I didn't feel like there were any other key differences in the enemy mobs. Cyberdemons are still as scary as ever, and the BFG sucks nuts in this game. In its place, doomguy gets the Unmaker (related to the Doom: Eternal Unmakyr) which absolutely shreds enemies once you grab the Demon Keys found in the secret levels. This thing is so absurdly overpowered in this game that it kills the final bosses of both campaigns in just a couple of seconds (and stunlocks them while you murder them), so I really don't have anything more to say about them... because I never actually fought them.

I don't know how much more there is to say about this game; I've done pretty much everything it had to offer (outside of a couple of "Fun" levels I never cared to finish) and while I enjoyed it greatly, I can't say I have any particular interest in playing through the game again. This was very, very well worth my one playthrough but this one definitely felt like a one-and-done experience.