Final Doom

"Final Doom? LIES! *cough* Doom III *cough*"

Introduction
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Anyone who is a gamer has to have at least heard of the Doom name. The first two, and by far the biggest and most popular versions were Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth, both initially for the PC.

I can remember the day I played Doom for the first time (not too long after it was first out). It was a delicious experience, and after playing the demo of the game only once, I bought the full version of the game (well, actually my parent bought it for me..same thing :P).
I loved Doom, and played it quite a lot for the first six months or so of owning it. I heard that Doom II: Hell on Earth was in development some time after buying and loving the first game. I instantly wanted Doom II, and within the first month or so of its release, I had bought it. Doom II was equally as great as the first game, and while not really improving too much (other than better graphics, and the super shotgun >:P) Doom II itself was well worthy of the pourchase of anyone who owned, and loved the first game.

After Doom and Doom II had both been released, the Doom series was pretty much finished….. or so it seemed. And, almost everyone was ok with that. As two great games has come, and perhaps it was time for ID software to move on.

Both of the first two Doom games began to find themselves moving onto other platforms, like the SNES, Macintosh, and Sega 32X. For some reason or another, a few years after Doom and Doom II were sitting around collecting dust, ID decided that one last Doom game would be released… and they meant, last game, it would be called Final Doom.

Final doom was to be the first Doom game to run under windows… it was also supposed to be the biggest, and greatest Doom experience yet. But personally, I don’t quite find Final Doom up to the standards of Doom and Doom II. Read on to find out why…..

Gameplay
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I’m not really sure what it is about Final Doom, but for me, it just doesn’t feel like Doom and Doom II.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the basic gameplay and ideas of doom, allow me to explain.
You’re a badass marine, sent to fight hordes of aliens who have come to piss people off, and kill whatever they come across.

Doom is all about a few key elements. Kill every enemy in the room, move onto the next room, kill al the enemies in here and so on.
You’ll come across three kinds of locked as well, blue, red and yellow. To open a blue door, you’ll need to find the blue key, to open the yellow door, you’ll need the yellow key and so on.
Sometimes, to open secret doors, areas etc you’ll have to hit one of many different switches about the place. Sometimes these will be obvious, and in plain sight, but other times they may be well hidden.

To help you out on your quest are a few weapons…. You have your fists (will steel, spiked knuckle duster which are weak, and can only be used at extremely close range), your standard pistol (relatively weak, in the big picture, but often all that you have, until you find something better), single barrel shotgun (nice and beefy), double barrel shotgun (oooooooooooh yeeeeaaaaaaahh… this gun rocks. It’s very powerful at close range, and is loud!), machine gun (fast firing, fairly powerful if used right), plasma gun (shoots out high powered electric plasma balls very quickly), rocket launcher (do I really need to tell you how powerful this is?) and finally, the BFG (name: Big ****in’ Gun…. And as the name suggests, this is a big ****in’g gun…..extremely powerful but slow firing).

Throughout the levels you’ll find pools of acid, explosive barrels, human bodies, and body parts tokenised (is that even a word?) in the form of heads on spikes, people hanging and so on. The environments of Final Doom are really quite good. They are eerie, and help set the mood very well.
The competition your up against, is varied, and comes in force. You’ve got pistol wielding marine like people, who also come with shotguns. Moving up a notch are the machine gun marines. There are also brown imps who will claw you up at close range, and fire energy balls at you from a distance.
Moving on even further you’ll find the really evil enemies…. Who, compared to your health of 100, have quite often over 10 times that amount. There are robotic spider like gigantic brains, who come in two sizes, and are very deadly, shooting out yellow energy balls at a great rate of speed, you also have demons who’ll fly up to you and attack, as well as two legged pink creatures that will run up to you and chew you a new poo hole. Moving up the ranks even further you’ll find thins that are best described as big giant goatey thing, who’ll fire rockets at you, energy balls and more. The list goes on and on, but you are already bored enough, right?

At times, you’ll seem very outnumbered, and that’s because, well, you are. You’ll have to fight off loads of sometimes weak, but mostly powerful enemies throughout all of the levels. Often facing 10+ enemies at once. Fear not however, because there is plenty of heath and ammo scattered about the levels if you know where to look.

Even though the gameplay is very basic (shoot everything in room, find right coloured key for door, open, shoot everything in room and repeat) the way that it has been executed is great.

I still can’t quite put my finger on why I don’t find Final Doom as fun as Doom and Doom II…. Which is a pity, because basically, I am left with no real means of justifying this score.

Still, when not compared to the almighty Doom and Doom II, Final Doom delivers a fun, difficult and engrossing experience.

The Doom games, were the second revolution of First Person Shooters, the first being Wolfenstien 3D which was the first mainstream First Person Shooter out.

If I was to recommend you one, or two Doom games, Doom and Doom II would have to be the ones, but Final Doom, while not up to the standards of the first two games is a great first person shooting experience.

8.7/10

Graphics
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Graphically, Final Doom was a step up from Doom and Doom II. But it would want to have been, considering it came out a few years after they did. Mainly, the thing you’ll notice is the game runs in a much higher res than the first two games.

While sporting a pixelated look, Final Doom still looks decent. At the time Final Doom came out however, there were much better looking games on the PC.

Final Doom looks just like Doom II, only in a higher resolution.

All of the enemies, and items on screen are animated sprites, which look quite nice. They are detailed and well animated.

As far as textures go, Final Doom does pretty well. There is a good variety in textures, from brick and cement walls, all kinds of ground (grass, cement etc). The textures, while pixelated, are fairly well done.

There is quite a variety in the levels. They look quite different. Most levels, are mostly indoors, but you will end up going outside (over grass and amongst trees), through water and more.
Final Doom has a dark look too it, with a lot of greys and browns being used for walls and floors.

One thing all of the Doom games, have that need to be seen to be fully appreciated, are the gibs. Every single different enemy (and there are a good 30 or so of them) has its own special gibs. Shoot an enemy down with a pistol and their bloody body will heap onto the ground. Fire a rocket at them and they will explode in a glorious burst of reds.
You can see rib cages sticking out in gibs, pink organs as well as excessive amounts of blood.
Some of the semi-mechanical enemies, when they are disposed of will have parts of their machinery sticking out of the messy pile that was once them.
The gibs are beautifully animated, and are one of the must-sees of gaming on a whole….. Yummay!

Overall Final Doom has a nice look to it, but compared to other PC games of the time, looks fairly dated, because of the fact that it looks like the previous games (except in a higher res), which were a few years older than it.

8.2/10

Sound
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I’ve gotta say, all of the Doom games have had great music, and Final Doom is no exception.
The music does a great game to set the mood for you. In some levels it will be slow and eerie, and in others (like the really hard levels) it will be fast paced and tense.

Though in midi format, the music still sounds great. The music is very well put together and features a great mix of sounds including violins, electric guitars, cymbals and plenty of others.

The sound effects are also top notch. There are really two main things you’ll hear, weapons and enemies.

All of the weapons have their own unique sound effects, my favourite by far being the super shotgun…. Damn that is a beefy gun. The plasma based weapons really have great sound effects, it’s hard to describe them, but they sound great :P

The enemies themselves sound great. They’ll grown and howl in pain when you shoot them and they’ll make fierce and scary noises at you when you come into their sight. The semi-mechanical enemies sound awesome, you can hear them clanking as they move about which sounds cool.

Great music, and great sound effects. Final Doom delivers in the sound department.

9.1/10

Multiplayer
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I must admit, I haven’t been able to give the doom multiplayer much of a go, and the last time I played it was years ago. I hope I can give an accurate enough score anyway…

You can play over a modem, or against another computer via a network setup. From what I remember, there are multiplayer specific levels, and you play very basic deathmatch games. I found this pretty fun, but the opportunity to play with someone else hardly ever arose..

8.3/10

Originality
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Final Doom is basically the same as the first and second Doom games, the only difference being new levels and music. I can’t really give the game a great score in originality, but it is the third game in what was one of the most original game series (well the first game was) of the time.

8.1/10

Controls
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Apart from your basic up, back, left right, fire, open doors/hit switches and change weapon buttons, Final Doom allows you to sidestep as well….
That’s about as far as the controls go, but Final Doom is a relatively basic game, that really doesn’t need more complex controls.

8.9/10

Replayability
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If you can ever actually finish this friggin’ game without using cheats (which is nigh impossible) it can be fun to come back and play over the levels, seeing how fast you can beat them, if you can kill 100% of enemies and if you can find all of the secret areas. Once you’re sick of that you can give the multiplayer a go, providing you have a friend who has the game, and is willing to play you.

8.9/10

Difficulty
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Final Doom for the most part is hard. Some levels are pretty easy to beat, but most of them will take a few attempts.
For some reason ID Software decided that they might make some of the levels practically impossible to complete.. if you can manage to beat the entire game without cheating you are a true freak. Some levels have 100’s upon 100’s of enemies, that are about 100 times as powerful as you, which is just plain insane.
Still, if you manage to beat one of the harder levels without cheating at all you will feel a great sense of reward.

Load Times
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Hehe, I have no way of remembering how fast this game loaded on PCs when it first came out, but I will tell you that there are no noticeable load times to be found playing on my current PC :P

Pros
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(_) Loads and loads more Doom action, that was to be the final Doom game of the 2D era…… *waits for Doom III*
(_) Great music and sound effects.

Cons
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(_) Final Doom doesn’t quite manage to capture the feel that made Doom and Doom II such great games.
(_) The game is way too hard a lot of the time….

Buy/rent
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Buy. If you want to go back to the great Doom era, Final Doom will probably be your only way. If you can even manage to find a copy of it second hand. It is almost impossible to find a copy of Doom of Doom II now days. I managed to pick Final Doom up for roughly $10Us when I bought it, so it’s pretty cheap now as well.

Overall
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While not quite managing to capture the feel and gameplay of Doom and Doom II, Final Doom is still a great first person shooting romp.

Overall
8.7/10 (Rounded to 9/10 for GameFAQs)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/01, Updated 09/12/01