For video game creators, however, a new beginning is often racked with questions.
What, exactly, do you choose to show players first?
How will you introduce them to something they’ve never seen before?
Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening levels.
Doom II’s opening level is similarly brief and short-lived, coming with another 30 second par time.
This is another first-time playthrough for me, and oh god, I hate it already.
Even firing it feels yucky.
Worse, it’s easy by design.
The hierarchy of enemy types feels weird and out of wack.
There’s no clean throughline from start to finish.
To me, this feels like a game that’s simply pandering to its player base.
But it loses all sense of drama and build-up in the process.
From the moment you start a new game file, it takes approximately ten minutes (ten!)
before you get your first gun, and another nine (NINE!)
before you have anything to actually shoot.
“What the heck am I playing?”
I wrote in my notes.
“Dead Space?”
Dead Space, of course, didn’t exist yet.
This is a serious, grown-up demonic invasion happening in real time now, you dummy.
There’s no running off to find ‘secrets’ and cheat your way to bigger and better guns anymore.
Your cries of idclip are meaningless here!
It is, admittedly, quite a good horror game.
There’s even an imp that does a headcrab-style lunge at you upon opening a door.
But I wouldn’t say it’s Doom.
scrabble to grab a nearby pistol and fire your way to freedom.
It feels very much like old Doom again, albeit through the lens of twenty years' worth ofmultiplayerdeathmatches.
(A question that Doom 64 failed to ask its players by only bringing the Pinkys forward).
