Doom 64

Probably my favorite out of the "Classic Doom" games (Doom, Doom 2, and this game). I think it comes down to the atmosphere-- Aubrey Hodges' soundtrack, the redesigned enemies, and the castle-like architecture in most of the later levels gives the game its own creepy feel, and it's one I wish more games had. The levels are mostly really well-designed too, with my main complaint being the overuse of Hell Knights and Barons of Hell in many places. I also feel as though the Lost Souls are way too aggressive, though they do become manageable the more you deal with them. Pain Elementals spitting out two at a time now might still be too much, though. The weapons are also pretty satisfying-- Admittedly, the shotgun/super shotgun isn't as badass as the Doom 1/2 one, but to be fair, nothing really can. It's still a very satisfying weapon, as is the rest of the arsenal-- Especially the fully-powered Unmaker. On that note, getting the Unmaker and Demon Keys is a really neat way of encouraging you to go find the secret levels-- And encouraging you to do secret-hunting in general. You get to absolutely embarrass the Mother Demon and beat her in seconds with the fully-powered Unmaker and it's great. The game can be tough at times, so being able to effortlessly destroy the Mother Demon at the end is a great payoff. The extra levels added with the 2020 remaster are great too, and feel ripped right out of the same cloth as the originals. Not to mention the remaster itself is great-- In the sense that it doesn't even feel like I'm playing a remaster. It just feels like the original game, and I mean that as a compliment. This game, even with the remaster, still feels like it's flown under the radar for a long time. But I hope that changes, because Midway knocked it out of the park with this one.

Classic Doom gameplay with uniquely excellent atmosphere thanks to a masterful soundtrack and some solid sound and lighting design. It's a shame the labyrinthine levels and excessive key-collecting and switch-flicking hamstring the action and flow so often.

Doom 64 is a game I knew about for a while but never played it. I heard mainly mixed things about it and didn't really care for the graphic style, I tried playing it on an emulator a year or 2 back but could never really get into it, and then I picked it up for like 2 dollars on a PSN sale and decided to check it out since many considered this to be a true successor to the first 2 games and it basically plays like an older Doom game and probably the last real Doom game before Doom 3 made the Doom series a full 3D FPS game. Doom 64 actually is a solid enough entry, its similar to Doom II in ways, but it really fails to reach the height the first 2 Doom games or even Final Doom reached. Doom 64 has decent enough design and it has the same weapons and most of the same enemies as the first 2 games, except for some reason they didn't include Revenants in this, which I guess is okay since Revenants have those annoying cheap tracking missiles. Archviles are also missing but they were a love/hate enemy for me too. Doom 64 is also pretty easy and I was able to finish most of these levels with relative ease, and the enemy placements just isn't really interesting.

I think what really disappointed me most about Doom 64 was the level design and final boss. The levels just felt a bit too straight forward and simplistic, and enemy placement didn't offer much challenge. The game does fix this in the final few levels, but for at least 3/4 of the game I found I could just breeze through most levels fine. Plus the game seemed to overload me with healing and armor so even when I did struggle I knew it wouldn't be long for me to get healing back. The other thing I didn't like were the enemy designs. Some of the enemies in this were alright like the Spectre, Hell Knight, and even the Imp design was alright, but then some enemies in this just look kind of silly and too cartoonish. I really didn't care for the Mancubus, Pain Elemental, or Cacodemon designs in this. The graphics of this is kind of ugly because they go for a full 3D, rather than more of a 2D design that the first 2 games had. The graphics of the first 2 games have aged gracefully because 2D graphics tend to always look decent, where 3D ages a lot faster, I mean just look at early PS3/360 games and even a few early PS4/Xbox One games to see what I mean in terms of 3D graphics not aging as well as 2D.

The other thing that really holds this back and almost made me want to lower this game to a 3 is the final boss. The final boss consists of a massive gauntlet of enemies, then once you take them out a boss comes that literally can kill you in less than 5 seconds, even if you at full health and armor. It has missiles that track you and are faster than you so you can't run away from them and it has a fire attack that shoots from all directions and knocks you back if it hits you. It'd be fine if these attacks didn't damage you much, but one hit from any attack can take out at least 30 or 40 points from your health. The boss has a ton of health and if you fought the enemy mob before the boss you'll have almost no BFG ammo and limited rockets. I think I only had 20 or so rockets when I fought this guy and he took all 20 rockets and almost all the machine gun ammo and then at least 10 double shotgun blasts. I had to use like 100 save states to beat this guy and even then I still died about 100 times and this boss was super frustrating and annoying, and I played only on the normal difficulty. If I played this without save states and had to do this only ultra violence/hard difficulty, I would have probably thrown my console out the window.

Still despite the less interesting level design, weird enemy design, and awful final boss, this game is still decent and definitely feels more like a classic Doom than Doom 3 or the modern Doom games, but I just feel it could have been more, you can tell this game wasn't developed by ID and it shows. I feel at best this is around on par if not maybe a little better than TNT Evilution in Final Doom.