Can't say much for performance, it's decently optimized, though I still get a fair amount of texture pop with my machine (i7 4790, 16gb ram, Geforce GTX 970). Combined with the already impressive motion blur, I actually started getting motion sickness... So some tweaking is in order.

On to the gameplay..

Atmospherically, I'd say it's where Doom3 should have been. It's not classic doom, but they finally added some color to the palette.. I'm not far enough in the story to comment, so it feels a little disjointed as to how/why you're there. Right off the bat the "glory kills" get gimmicky. At this point I'm using it as little more than a way to make short teleport/invulns around while I smash imps (who are actually relatively dangerous, if only because they're short) The weapons are dissapointing thus far. There are no fists by default, the pop gun is meh, the shotgun is loud but meh (spread is too tight compared to the doom shotty) the plasma rifle is blah, and the rocket launcher is less blimpy and less boomy but still SORT of there..?

I found the berzerk, it's not quite as fun, it feels like a permanent glory mode, you go one-shot things with your fists (rip and tear) and it fades like any other powerup.

I saw some commentary on how the steam achievements are fairly lame, and while I agree, they force enough in-game mini-challenges on you to more than make up the difference. Lots of gimmick-your-way-to-upgrades for your weapons.

I'm not entirely happy, and I'm not as angry as the multiplayer made me.. It's fun for now, and there are enough nods to the original series (and some keen sounds for those paying attention) to mollify me a bit.

More as I have more time.

maybe not 60 but you should get a good solid frame rate

Is OK, don't need you to go to those lengths (video card).  I'll be holding off on buying for a while anyway, so I can wait and scrounge up some change at some point if my hardware isn't pleasing enough.

Re:  Doomguy doll:  That just made my day. 

Someone posted a full playthrough on Ultra Nightmare difficulty if anyone's interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6J352J_RG8

*Slips back into the shadows.* 

The game is pretty fun when you first start because Bethesda did a good job dressing it up to seem like more than it is. In the beginning it seems like there actually is a legimate amount of exploration to break up the mindless "arena" segments, and as you keep finding pockets of armor, ammo, and new guns, you fall for the illusion that it actually plays like the old games.

In particular, the "Heavy Assault Rifle" saves a lot of the early game, allowing you to pick off weaker enemies from a distance by tapping off bursts and single shots, instead of going through the same tired shotgun + glory kill routine over and over again. Headshotting imps and possessed soldiers through its scope is legimately fun, when the occasion arises, and supports the illusion that you can actually move through the levels methodically rather than always blindly running and gunning.

However, after several hours the illusion begins to wear off, and the ugly truth of this game's rigid "arena" structure shows through. At its heart, this game is just a series of GOW-style horde mode arenas, with empty "exploration" segments strewn between to make it seem like a real FPS campaign when it's really not.

Despite the "run and gun" cliche ascribed to the original Doom and Quake campaigns, there was a methodic way of playing through them. You wanted to carefully pick enemies off in manageable chunks wherever possible. You learned to anticipate traps, and "slice the pie" to section out safe areas. All of these techniques comprised an overall strategy designed to avoid the exact situation Doom 4 exclusively puts you in, which is to be completely surrounded with absolutely no recourse other than to blindly run in circles around the room shooting haphazardly until enemies stop spawning in.

The arenas in Doom 4 are a lot like the later segments of Doom 3, where the devs couldn't even be bothered to build monster closets into the architecture any more, and resorted to constantly spawning enemies straight into the room at abritrary locations. The only difference is the spawn effect is not so cringe-enducingly long, and they throw a lot more enemies at you at once.

Still the central problem with "spawning in" remains: it eliminates the central player skill of spotting enemy aproaches and ambush points before they happen. Rather than trying to anticipate and watch the door, staircase, or elevator the monsters are going to jump out of, you pretty much just have to turn your brain off and wait till you are coimpletely surrounded to start shooting.

And it's not that Doom 4's "arena" areas are impossibly overwhelming either. If anything it's the opposite. Bethesda has designed the monsters to be so ineffectual that even when you are surrounded from all sides, they rarely hit you at all...even when you stop to make glory kills for several long seconds. When you set the difficulty to Ultraviolence a single hit from even the lowest enemies does a lot of damage, and yet most of the time you survive for ages because the enemies are incompetent.

There is some technique to it, but it's mostly a matter of resource management. You have to remember to glory kill every so often to keep your health up, because there are too many arena waves between the exploration segments to rely solely on health picked up off the map. You have to keep track of your chainsaw gasoline; not because the chainsaw is indispensable as a melee weapon, but because chainsawing badguys replenishes ammo for your other weapons and you'll run dry without it.

You inevitably will die from time to time, and yet it never feels like it's due to a crucial tactical error, or some curveball you could have dodged if you saw it coming. Inevitably when you die it's just due to some random enemy that hit you from behind, which you couldn't have possibly seen coming, because the arenas are always so full of enemies constantly spawning into random locations that you can't possibly keep your back covered ever. All you can do is rely on the incompetence of the enemies to not kill you when you're surrounded, a hands-off approach that works all the time, except when it randomly doesn't.

And that's pretty much the gist of it. The game is not horribly unplayable and for the first few hours it's actually pretty fun. Unfortunately, the arena gimmick just gets really repetitive after a while, causing the firefights to blurr together into a mindless, forgettable mess. The exploration segments are supposed to break these up, but there is no legitimate combat in the exploration segments; just pockets of unarmed zombies which are so harmless you could go take a piss without pausing the game and still come back in time to kill them before taking any significant damage.

Seconded on the arena fights. I think I made a crack about feeling like I was playing a DooM/SMASHtv mashup at one point.

My current rune build has me almost literally chain-glorykilling just about everything in sight, I've given up the pretense of controlling fights and now I just kind of soften things with the upgraded combat shotty and then get all friendly with their insides.. I'll grant that this doom is "fast" only because the enemies tend to be faster than you are. I was doing a lot of jumping so that the inertia from attacks I could not move fast enough to dodge would knock me back and give me some space.

Also, I'm going to have to bind the weapon-select wheel because the default number binds are ALL jacked up...


All in all, at the end of the day the campaign is more worthy of the Doom name than Doom3 was. Enemy attacks are more fluid, and with the exception of OBVIOUS fodder characters they remain relatively dangerous throughout.

My primary remaining gripe is that it periodically REEKS of me-too-ness.

Former humans (posessed) - Somewhere between covenant elites and GoW's locust horde. Complete with *point-wortwortwort*

The Doom Marine's storyline is a bit too masterchief-y for me.

Hayden.. *sigh* Ultron..

The powerups and their artistic direction... Visually, they're bland and/or incomprehensible, and DooM never needed Quake powerups...

What they DID seem to get right is the tone of Mars and the Hellscape.

I ran into an old friend, and that fight was fun--though formulaic, and utterly devoid of the nostalgia I was hoping for.

I'm not quite done, but I seem to be nearing the end as the plot becomes increasingly thin and I'm running out of things other than the optional mission challenges that pose a serious risk to my health (turns out I AM the most dangerous thing in Hell.. to everyone/thing involved)

Also, eyestrain and motion sickness issues have not been resolved yet, more tweaking to follow. The increased focal-and-motion-blur to hide texture pop is painful, and utterly unnecessary with my hardware.

*nods*

This is a huge bone toss to the console crowd, but the PC is left feeling.. Well, left out; again. We're used to a LOT more from a product..

In the end, I liked the campaign, warts and all. But I feel let down as a whole.

Angs7's review in numbers -

Campaign - 8.5/10
Multiplayer - 2/10 (I may end up playing some more of this eventually, just for achievements, I see zero redeeming value here)
SnapMap - 5/10 (feeling generous, this is a pretty basic/crappy mapper for anyone familiar with classic modding, but it's a pretty big deal for the console crowd)

Sound (8/10):
Campaign music is a pretty solid merger of Doom3 and Doom Classic. Plenty of nods to the classics (secret unlockable texture issues aside), and a ludicrous amount of audio easter eggs slipped in. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the very NiN spin on the dynamic riffs, but allowances can be made for trying to bridge generations.

Weapon audio makes me sad here, it's just.. limp.. The organic noises are decent though.

Gameplay (8.5/10):
Let's get this out of the way first: L-I-N-E-A-R... If you miss/forget a secret, there is often no going back.
Ambush spawns and secrets are a bit on the weak side, I think there was ONE proper item trap that I can recall that ended up being remotely dangerous.
If you snipe, pass on this title. If you are expecting to progress a map tactically, pass on this title. Enemy spawns are semi-random, and often things are often such that map design has a negligible effect on combat (pigs do, in fact, fly... and that BOTHERS me..)

They managed to capture the feeling of getting up in the demons' faces and dancing. THIS they did right, and I heartily approve. With a couple choice runes, I was having a blast. Without them, things would occasionally be annoyingly slow. I dislike PLANNING firefights, or rolling with a hit because it's not adequately dodgeable when I'm not hopped up on haste or rune speed. They compromised between skill and growth-based gameplay--I'm not 100% happy, but there's enough for all so I can accept that this wasn't a title made for me specifically (which seems to be a lot of the negative reviews)

I do have to admit that I essentially ended up picking two favored weapons and largely ignoring the rest. Upgrading them just because I could, not because I had any real use for them until I had to saw something open for more ammo. Once your weapons are fully upgraded, there's almost zero reason to do otherwise, damage seems to be flat across the board.

If you still have muscle memory tied to any prior weapon bindings.. For the love of Romero, CHANGE THE DEFAULTS.. Whoever did this seems to have set them based roughly on when they're obtainable, it's like they never touched a keyboard or played a previous id shooter.

*/part1*

Something similar happened to me the first time I beat Nihilanth. He killed me just as I fired the fatal shot and I ended up lying on the deck while G-Man stood talking over my corpse.

You know what? I'm claiming it.

Yikes, that's some complicated work for something that's supposed to be simple and easy.  I'm glad you're figuring it out though.  Once I (eventually, after it goes on sale and I have some money) get Doom 4 I'll be giving whatever you cook up a try for sure.