Doom

"Avoid at all costs!"

While Doom (and it's subsequent sequel, along with Ultimate Doom) for the PC were, and still are, some of my favorite games of all time, I cannot say the same for the port of Doom that was brought to the SNES. I had never even known about this game being on the SNES until I found it at a garage sale one day. Buying it for just 5 dollars, I thought that it would revamp my passion for Doom. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

STORY 5/10
Doom doesn't make it's story known throughout the game, and you probably wouldn't know about the story, unless you read a strategy guide or whatnot. In general, you are a marine trapped on Mars, which is swarming with undead creatures of all sorts. You must fight your way away from this dreadful place.

GAMEPLAY 7/10
Doom, as is well known, is a first person shooter, meaning you see the game through the eyes of the character you are playing as, a marine. You are given a handful of weapons (not nearly as much as on the PC game) and you go through levels, blasting and killing everything that moves except you. While this concept is fun, the games graphics make it a chore to play. Also, the framerate tends to dip and makes the game even more frustrating at times.

GRAPHICS 1/10
The first thing that you will notice, and the first thing that lessens this game, is the graphics. On the PC, at the time, they were some of the best graphics around. Not the case for the SNES version. It tries it's damndest to be 3D, and to look good, but it fails. Simple objects in the environment are hard to see, let alone enemies. If an Imp was three feet away from you, it's hard to notice. Environments are muddy, compressed versions of their PC counterpart. I got a headache after playing this game for a while-sometimes you really have to squint just to make something out. The only thing that really looks good are the gun graphics. Enemies appear to just be little smudges, which makes it much, much harder to play. In closed environments, it's practically impossible at all to see enemies.

SOUND 6/10
The sound is not that bad at all, and all the sound from the PC version has generally been ported well, even if it is severely compressed. My only gripe here is the sounds made by weapons and enemies-not really up to par with how they should be.

CONTROL 8/10
Well, the control is not bad, either, though you can't customize it to your preference. Very simple controls here, and not a problem at all.

FUN FACTOR 2/10
This is where the score completely plummets. With the fact that this game is such a mess graphically, it becomes extremely hard to enjoy. Add to this the fact that you cannot play WAD modifications of the game, as you could on the PC and you have an extremely un-fun, dull game that I wish I kept my 5 dollars on. Almost everything that made the original Doom fun has been muddled up here in this game. And, while it's still Doom, which means it still has great action suspense, and deaths, don't expect any of these qualities to look good. Maybe it's because I like the original so much and hate to see this game pass off as it, but I just don't like this game. This is one game that should have just never been ported to the SNES.

BUR OR RENT?
All in all, if you have the PC version of Doom and are considering the SNES version for the sake of nostalgia, reconsider. Play the computer version instead; this game is just a bloody mess in a different way than it should.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/03