Doom - PlayStation 4

This game is HUUUUGE! I almost didn't buy it because of the "Most Critical" review here. He said it was boring and repetitive. Well I just finished the campaign (finally) and if you find DOOM boring and repetitive, then you're doing something seriously wrong. In fact, the 3D campaign map levels on each of the chapters allow you to do as much or as little exploration as you like. New demons/monsters/weapons are constantly introduced as you make progress. Great gameplay is rewarded with suit enhancements and weapon mods. The challenging learning curve keeps you on your toes and engaged throughout the entire game.The worst part of the game is the very beginning where you have a silly pistol for killing overpowering demons. Melee is your best friend here. But once you start ramping up with the shottie & assault rifle, things become much more balanced while very challenging. I still have DOOM for my Atari Jaguar system and I remember playing it, but didn't understand much about the whole "story". The story of Mars and Hell is explained so thoroughly in this version that you won't have any remaining questions. It's that complete.There are always little nitpicky things in every game. That's just going to happen because not everyone plays the same way. One of mine in this game is how you're in the midst of battle and your primary weapon runs out of ammo, then you're automatically switched to the shotgun instead of your "alternate" weapon. This requires an extra gun swap step to replace the shotgun that can get you killed. Another is the runes system. In the first few levels, I didn't even know what Rune Trials were. Still, I completed 6. But to actually USE the runes you earn, there has to be a set number of Rune Trials completed. To use 2 of the 3 rune slots, you have to complete 4 trials while 7 must be completed to use all 3 slots. This is just stupid. It's like earning 6 weapons, but only being able to use 2 of them until you earn the 7th weapon. Needlessly complicated. Should be earn a rune, open a new slot. Then after the 3rd, the player should decide which of the earned runes to use in the 3 slots. Surprised this wasn't changed during testing.Long load times didn't bother me so much. Never waited more than 20-30 seconds at the most. Obviously a colossal amount of coding is fed into the PS4 at some of the levels when loading. This could result in hardware bottlenecks as much as software. I'm forgiving in that respect. The only other thing I found annoying is once you go to a certain point in a chapter, there's no turning back. For example, there was one time I needed a Blue Code Key to get into a "Secret Place". I looked in room after room and couldn't find it. Then I went in one room, got in a big demon fight and could no longer return to the Secret Place after it was over. I understand trying to keep players moving forward in a linear fashion. But it would be nice to know that "if you go here, you can't turn back".With that said, this game is PERFECT! It's obviously the best FPS ever, which should be expected from id. But it's also the best game ever created for the PS4. I played the campaign for HOURS and HOURS, and I still feel like I missed so much because it took a few chapters to figure out everything that was put into this game. It's simply massive! This alone makes DOOM's replay value much higher than other PS4 games. When you add in the SnapMaps feature of programming your own levels, DOOM is hands-down the number one replay value game ever released for the PS4. Nothing else is even close. id always encouraged modding with the original DOOM and Castle Wolfenstein before modding was cool. It's great to see that forward-looking philosophy transferred over to this DOOM version.Don't let a bad review steer you away from the best game on the PS4! You'll be using every spare moment for the next few days fighting hordes of demons.....and you'll enjoy every single KILL.

Based on other reviews I expected a premium nostalgia fix out of this game. I wasn't a huge Doom fan as a kid, but that was one of the classic titles where the whole FPS genre found its footing. What I love about this reboot particularly is how well it captures the ethos of the original game, and how much technical and aesthetic depth it adds in its re-visioning of that old game world. Its aesthetic dips back into that grimy 80s/90s industrial metal and goth period. It's not just dark, it's jet-black. I knew the game could deliver at least that much. What I felt less certain about was whether or not its monsters and demons would prove interesting. They do, for sure. Not only do they look vicious and terrifying, they move and attack like something out of hell. The pace of the game is fierce and constantly forces you to plan your attacks more strategically. The weapon and suit upgrade systems really adds into that. I've seen so many games where upgrades basically make you stronger, so you can deal more damage to enemies that take more to kill, but it's basically the same game the whole way through. In Doom, the upgrades provide technical complexity and sophistication so that your style of play evolves - and not just in the campaign mode, but in multiplayer as well. That's exactly how it should be for the FPS genre, and especially for the reboot of one of earliest FPS games.As a side note, one thing I LOVE about the campaign mode is that it kept it's story dumb, just like the original. Let's just be real: Doom IS dumb, and always has been dumb. Let's not pretend it's something it isn't (e.g. intellectual). The story, if you want to call it a story, is basically that humans colonize mars (totally not practical) looking for resources like energy (again, totally not practical), accidentally find a gate to hell (dumb), go into hell (super dumb) with the hopes of exploiting its energy (this is where the story goes full retard)... it's like, wait, what??? Seriously, it's like a five year old kid came home from school after eating too much sugar and told this story to some game designers, and the game designers were like, wow, that's incredibly stupid, we're going to take that and conquer it it all the way. And now we have Doom. We're very grateful for it.Oh yeah, the multiplayer is fun too (duh).