Finished on Nightmare Extra Lifes mode. 8 lives left at game end. 1st try was a failure at Taras Nabad. I went in completely dry so I'm quite happy with this performance.
General thoughts:
- Most of the weapons feel pretty good. Only the rifle really feels like it drops off. Much improved over Doom 2016 where the entire first half of the weapons are entirely obsoleted by the 2nd half. In further testing it out I found the full auto shotgun mod to actually be pretty decent when upgraded. The main point is that its also significantly more accurate than regular fire in addition to firing quicker. It also obviously gets a lot better once you've got all your other ammo types covered, since as a shell-guzzler you need another weapon to take over when you run dry.
- Weapons still have the problem of Doom 2016 where they are primarily defined by their alt fire rather than their base weapon value. I think the only gun with which you'd want to use the primary fire consistently is the plasma rifle. Ironically enough its the primary fire that fuels the secondary heat blast but its also the only primary fire that is really good enough on its own.
- Game looks good and runs exceedingly well. Seriously everyone should be licensing this engine. Shit runs better than Doom 2016.
- Most of the monsters are well designed as an individual encounter or low-number encounter. The mini-encounters between the big fights where 2-4 enemies just come in or are already fighting as you walk in are good. If the whole game was like this it'd be much better
- Encounters with huge numbers of enemies get tiresome. The issue is that there really isn't much variety in how you actually deal with the enemies in the end. In OG Doom 2 you had to take particular care to dodge a bunch of mancubi differently from a bunch of reventants or a bunch of barons. And if there were chaingunners somewhere you had to figure that out ASAP and deal with them while dodging the rest. But in DoomE this is not the case. Every enemy is effectively handled the same way: pressing your dodge button constantly. There's neither hitscanners nor really any kind of enemy that uses much indirect fire that you have to be careful not to dodge into. So huge mobs of enemies just sort of degenerate into being a huge mob of enemies rather than something you have to understand and deal with on an individual monster level. The only monsters I really did so in DoomE were the mancubi (because their DPS is just too big), the cacodemon (similarly high DPS and very easy to pick out), and the archvile (for obvious reasons, just use your ice grenade and unload a rocket orgy).
- Dash is a neccesary consequence of too many monsters that are too fast and too aggressive. It should not exist. Protip for ANYONE making ANY game: If there is a key in your game that is so predictably, repeatedly pressed as to simulate a metronome when played with a mechanical keyboard then you have screwed something up somewhere. It is no longer what, as Sid Meier would say is the core of a game, a series of interesting decisions.
- Removing ammo management from the game is a catastrophically bad decision. Some will say "but I run out of ammo constantly!". The problem is that this isn't a symptom of poor ammo management, it's a symptom of forgetting to press 'C' for too long. There is no time in DoomE where you shouldn't be using the best gun for the situation. Even in Doom 2016 there was a sense of "I should probably use something slightly weaker for cleanup", because if you weren't using the infinite ammo rune you could still run out of chainsaw fuel for ammo drops (and ammo drops weren't nearly as big in 2016 I think). This also screws up the chainsaw's balance, no longer do you have the interesting choice of deciding to use 1 of your 3 chainsaw fuel on fodder to get ammo or saving all 3 in order to have a get out of jail free card if a baron of hell spawns 2 feet to your left and corners you. But then there's so many enemies in DoomE that if you get cornered by one and bodyblocked for even 2 seconds you're probably dead so w/e.
- I really quite liked the semi-ironman mode of Extra Lifes mode. In fact I'd say that this was the one thing that kept me going to the end. While all of the actual fights became a haze of every enemy type in the game spawning every fight, having an overall challenge of finishing without dying too much was something to strive for.
- Fuck the Marauder x2 electric boogaloo. HE'S INVINCIBLE TO BOTH SUPERWEAPONS AND THE SWORD CAN'T EVEN HURT HIM WHEN HE'S STAGGERED???????? Thankfully he only appeared at the end of waves until the end of the game, and most of the areas have much more room and obstacles to put space between him and you while you mop up. Also, tell me if I'm a complete fucking idiot, but did anyone else not figure out that you can kill his dog until beating him several times? I assumed that as the only non-corporeal enemy in the game that it was immune to being shot or something.
- Fuck the imp-phantom thing also. I'm not going to waste time going through the in-game codex but you'll know what I'm talking about, its the imp that teleports. It looks almost exactly like the imp but can't be chainsawed. I think I've died the most to this fact out of everything else but the marauder. *hits C expecting to dash forward 20 feet and get desperately needed ammo* *fails and spends 2s limply spinning around a chainsaw because its not an imp* *turns around to look directly at the not-imp and presses C again, thinking it was just another case of bad detection the first time* *again fails, don't get expected several seconds of invincibility and free health/armor, dies because dash was on cooldown*.
- It gets quite tedious "farming" supplies before you end encounters by killing the last big baddie. In fact a lot of difficulty comes down to whether you accept this tedium by the end game. Almost every arena will have distinct waves that only occur once all of the biggies of the previous wave are dead, and by keeping the one least deadly baddie around you can farm up the ammo and health/armor you used dealing with the wave you are currently on. But of course, this takes time. The supershotgun thankfully reduces a lot of the tedium of waiting on the flamer but its still tedium. The end game is kind of trivialized by this because no matter what the next wave has you can generally deal with the biggest enemies in a very quick fashion as long as you have 150 armor/200 health/full stock of rockets and turret ammo/freeze grenade available.
- I dislike how hard it is to actually get enemies in a staggered state to perform a glory kill. This is something that Doom 2016 did just right: enemies had a fairly large range of low-health in which they'd enter the stagger state. In DoomE it actually gets way too hard to do this. Suddenly the game is about figuring out how to NOT kill enemies by dealing so much damage that you can't get health out of it.
- Tutorials and help text for fucking everything is obnoxious.
Overall game could be drastically improved if dash was removed, player move speed was increased a bit, chainsaw auto-refill was removed, enemies were generally some combination of less mobile, less numerous, or less aggressive.
I don't think this game is that different from 2016, for whatever that's worth. The stuff they added just makes it more tiring, so much so i'm playing it piecemeal otherwise i'm sure i'll get tired of it and won't finish it.
Nah, it's definitely really different. It's all about how dash works in combination with too many enemies and how it changes encounters from using the environment to break up enemies to running around in a circle while benny hill music plays. It's also about how you can consistently guarantee huge health/armor/ammo drops no matter what is going on while in Doom 2016 you were still highly dependent on what the level provided you.
