Anyone that thinks the glory kills ruin Doom 4's combat flow most likely haven't even played the game, many of us were worried that they would break the flow but they're quick, satisfying, and turn enemies into loot pinatas... they don't hurt a damn thing, they actually KEEP you in the combat flow.
When I perform a Glory Kill, my vision is focused for a moment on this poor sod I'm brutalizing.
During this moment, I am unable to tell what is going on around me. I don't know how the enemies around me have repositioned themselves, I don't know whether I'm even being attacked to begin with, and I don't know how long the i-frames will carry me. The enemies are cheeky buggers and will keep running circles around my field of vision. I have to constantly keep track of them so I don't get a nasty surprise in my back.
After this moment, I have to reorient. I have to look around and check where the enemies have moved to, where I can move to, where the incoming projectiles are, and what to do next. In an isometric or third-person game, this wouldn't have been as much of a problem. I could still see what's happening around me while performing an execution, and reach a decision on what to do based on what I see before the execution animation even ends. This is impossible in a first-person game because your FoV is limited, you're working off incomplete information, and the enemies are certainly not sitting there twiddling their thumbs until you're done.
In a more reasonable situation, I could rely on my hearing to gauge the situation outside my FoV. Unfortunately, the audio mix in nuDoom is such utter trash that makes it impossible to pinpoint the direction of a sound made by an enemy. To make matters worse, performing a Glory Kill fades out the music and all other sound to focus on the sound of the bone-breaking impact, at the expense of turning you deaf to everything else for a moment, even though that everything else may have held important information key to my survival.
This lapse in time also tends to make me vulnerable to attacks the moment the Glory Kill animation ends alongside my state of invincibility. According to the developers, no
new attacks will be initiated while you are performing a Glory Kill (I call bullshit). But this means that attacks with more wind-up, such as the Imp's charge fireball or slower arcing fireball instead might hit me the moment I regain control. Other enemies could be huffing my ass while I am performing a Glory Kill, and follow up with a melee swipe the moment the Glory Kill ends, leaving me with unavoidable damage. If the i-frames extended for a second after I regain control of my character, this may not have been as much of a problem.
A sensible response to this would be that you shouldn't use Glory Kills when you're completely surrounded. But then it brings up the question of when it's the right time to Glory Kill. Because arena design is so open, you're always bound to be in the line of fire of an Imp or something. It's often more sensible to Glory Kill lone enemies in remote parts of the arena where you are less likely to suffer 50HP of unavoidable damage (on Nightmare), but that goes against the intended purpose of using it to be more aggressive when you're better off only using it in safer situations. You may get lucky and not get hit, but this makes the success of a Glory Kill only more uncertain and unnecessarily random.
The rewards behind Glory Kills also play a factor in when to use it. On normal health, they drop around +5-10HP depending on the enemy. On critical health, this can go up to +50HP. Basically, there's no point to using Glory Kills when on high health, when you get a measly award at the risk of losing ten times as much health. Health drops can't exceed your base health cap like health bonuses in the originals could, so why bother? You can save ammo for doing so, but ammo management is a joke once you get the chainsaw anyways. Ninja Gaiden 2 did something more interesting by making almost-dead enemies which had to be executed with a special execution move even more lethal wben almost-dead than they would normally be, turning them into a high priority target. In nuDoom they just stand there waiting to get killed.
You should only be using Glory Kills when on low health. But enemies will already drop extra health on any kind of death if you are critical. Performing Glory Kills will probably drop more, but generally it's not worth the risk of losing 50HP and situational awareness, so continuing to kill enemies the regular way should be able to sustain you alongside regular placed health items.
If the gist is to know when to perform a certain move which locks you in place and leaves you vulnerable to attacks when the move ends (like throws in a beat 'em up) based on the situation around you, then the first-person perspective is a bad fit. Good positional audio design and suitable enemy design could alleviate this (else why would you suppose none of the enemies in Devil Daggers are projectile-based?), but evidently that was not the intent.
On lower difficulties Glory Kills are always useful when the amount of attacks happening at once is lower on top of attacks dealing less damage, but on higher difficulties things veer into "unavoidable damage" territory, making Glory Kills essentially a noobtrap you're better off not using at all outside the learning stages. The problem is that the game never treats Glory Kills as a crutch, so people believe it is an essential mechanic up until Nightmare when they realize Glory Kills are actually holding them back.
Considering the constraints of a first-person game, I keep saying that being able to perform Glory Kills through a dash move (which Eternal will incidentally feature) and then dashing into enemies to ram them for more health would be a more elegant way of doing this since it wouldn't lock your position or vision in one place and actually literally preserve momentum. Doom VFR did something identical, replacing having to press F for Glory Kills by just telefragging staggered enemies.
Nevermind that there's actually runes that mod the glory kills to be faster, give you further reach, make enemies drop armor too, and give you a speed boost upon performing them.
Man, if only these were features enabled by default instead of being locked behind upgrades to maintain the illusion of having a greater amount of content than the game actually does.
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