DOOM II

Description of DOOM II

Did you love Doom? Then you’ll probably love Doom II, because it’s largely more of the same, just with a few tweaks, new enemies, new weapons, and some technical improvements. Doom ended with Doomguy returning from Hell Mars to find that Earth had been overrun by demons and was being merged with Hell. It’s up to Doomguy to find where the invasion is coming from and put a final end to it. The major noticeable changes are the inclusion of the double shotgun (yay!) and the removal of the overworld map on the intermission screen (boo!). Additionally, rather than being broken up episodically in the tradition of many shareware games, Doom II consists of 30 consecutive levels, though these are broken up thematically with story-text interludes. Everything you could possibly like about Doom is there: true 3D environments with rich textures, varied-light environments (perfect for springing those jump-scare death traps), excellent dark and heavy bleep-bloop music, lots of guns, lots of monsters, pentagrams, and gore. Doom II’s levels are not substantially larger than those in Doom, but the middle section of the game features an interesting level design experiment, using big, open levels with multiple buildings to simulate the cityscape that Doomguy is fighting his way across. The actual gameplay remains more or less unchanged. Doomguy still can’t jump, nor can he look up and down. Given that Heretic would be released only a few months later, it would’ve been nice for look to be implemented, especially for the cityscape levels. Jumping wouldn’t be implemented in the Doom engine until Hexen; “momentum jumps” have to suffice. One of the places where Doom II really shines is in its soundtrack. The dark and atmospheric tracks mixed in with the hard and heavy “metal” tracks really solidify the relationship between Industrial music and First Person Shooters which would reach its first zenith when Nine Inch Nails provided the soundtrack for Quake. Like the original Doom, there is a vast surfeit of fan maps and mods (including total conversions, that gave us weird stuff like a Sonic the Hedgehog fangame made entirely in Doom!), which means the possibilities are virtually endless.

Review By P. Alexander

External links

• Mod DB

• PCGamingWiki

• WSGF