DOOM died before this hit store shelves
Written: Jan 28 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: 2 new episodes, 64 levels total
Cons: Absolutely nothing new since DOOM 2 except for a couple MIDI songs and wall textures.
The Bottom Line: They haven't improved upon the aging DOOM, just attempted to milk it's namesake for a little more cash.
|
|
|
| dopple's Full Review: ID Software Final Doom |
DOOM's time is over. It didn't have to end so soon.
The original DOOM was ID Software's much-hyped and much-loved successor to the mother of all first-person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D. DOOM featured a much more realistic 3D environment with lots of monsters, weapons, and gore. Nicely lit levels and spooky music helped immerse gamers into this hellish world - poor handling of the franchise namesake has helped them find other sources of fun ever since.
DOOM was succeeded a couple of years later by DOOM 2 - which, for a couple of months, quenched the thirst for a follow-up. It featured some crisper textures, new enemies and cooler weapons - nothing very significant, but it did the job. But DOOM 2 wasn't around long before it got it's @ss kicked. It's first serious competition, Duke Nukem 3D, featured far more realistic graphics, diverse gameplay, and varied worlds. Then along came ID Software's very own QUAKE, which changed the genre forever and has spawned many succesful sequels. DOOM has not been so lucky...
The quality of Duke and Quake in contrast to the recently released but far more primitive DOOM II was kind of killing it's reputation in the minds of most gamers. DOOM was being considered a thing of the past. So what better time than for ID Software, who was obviously capable of better seeing as they developed Quake, to pump some life into good ol' DOOM with a sequel?
Well, a sequel we would get, but it was more of a nail in DOOM's coffin than a revitalization.
First of all, it's called FINAL DOOM. That right there should be a hint at the quality that lies within. When the title of a game states right away that it is the end of the line for the series, it's obvious the developers put little into furthering or innovating on the previous entries.
And it is an accurate assumption to make. There is indeed nothing new about Final DOOM, as it features all of the weapons and enemies from the first two installments, nothing more. Same game engine and graphics as DOOM 2. This is especially disappointing seeing as DOOM 2 was outdated very shortly after it was released. And once you've played the more advanced first-person shooters, it is very hard to adapt to the repetitive textures and comparitive lack of realism of the old DOOM games.
Lastly, it's just silly to pay for 64 more levels of DOOM 2 when, if you own a previous DOOM game, you can get hundreds of new levels for free off of the internet. DOOMs engine was so flexible it allowed people to design their own levels quite easily, and a quick tour of the web will unviel many DOOM adventures that surpass the ones included in Final Doom. and no money involved. That's the cincher. These new levels weren't even put together by the original DOOM team, not even by ID software themselves, but some third party programmer! So theres no authenticity factor to consider either. Only thing that seperates it from the free levels floating around the net is the silly price tag (originally a laughable $50, now $25 via ID's website).
There is one special feature to the package - DOOM '95, a neat program that launches Final Doom or either of the first two games from within windows, allowing you to tweak the settings more and play the game at more eye-pleasing pixel resolutions. It might have added to this packages overall worth, but Doom'95 is now available as freeware over the internet, so again - no reason to buy it!
That said, the 2 brand new 32-level episodes here aren't total crap. In fact, one is pretty good, and the other is *extremely* challenging. Evilution is the more fun of the two and features fairly inventive level structures, but nothing new. The Plutonia Experiment is the second episode and one that many find horribly impossible to complete without using the famous cheat codes. To make up for the lack of new elements, the designers seem to have just tried to screw you up. Mainly annoying booby traps and endless mobs of enemies. I find this less than stimulating, but when using such a tired game engine I guess they had to do something.
CONCLUSION - if you stumble upon this for free, give it a try. But don't pay money for it. It's not worth it - if you own DOOM or DOOM 2, just download some new WAD files. If you don't own DOOM, there are dozens of better first-person shooting games that have come along since - the most popular now being Quake III Arena, Half Life, and Rogue Spear (and many more, but those are the biggest of the past few years I know of). FINAL DOOM is just a cheap attempt to milk the aging DOOM franchise one final time without actually improving on it.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dopple
|
|
Reviews written: 140
Trusted by: 6 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.