The Last Word on Doom

Okay, here it is, my final Doom assessment:

Campaign: The single player campaign gets better, and becomes about as entertaining as I recall Doom 3 being. They just spread the "plot bits" out more evenly this time (as you might recall Doom 3 had it all front-loaded, except for the sundry transcripts you could find throughout the game). But after a few hours of playing it's feeling a lot like the classics to me, in a not uncomfortable way. I also like that each level can be finished in about an hour, which means you can enjoy it in bite-size pieces if the fast Doom pace is otherwise too fraying on the nerves. A solid A, but maybe more of a good B+, as I'd feel more highly if I didn't find the color palette of yellows and greens so odd.

Custom Map Madness: Snap Map is awesome and will extend longevity of the game for me, although map tools look daunting, and are beyond what I want to do. But that said, some people are already recreating classic Doom I and II levels rather nicely in Snap Map. A+

MP Madness: Multiplayer is a glorious OSR mess....OSR video game style, of course. It feels like old Id as you might remember it, which is great if you liked that sort of thing. For me? Not so much. It also introduces some modernization, including level up mechanics and a ridiculous level of character customization, judging by the badasses I was playing with online. Interestingly the crowd by the speaker sounded mostly like older guys. No venom-spewing 13 year olds during my pathetic attempts to reaquiant myself with hyper-fast run-and-gun gameplay. Not my cup of tea, but that works for me....I'm led to believe the season pass is for 3 DLC packs that are all about the multiplayer, so I can resume ignoring it and stick to the campaign and snap map for my fun. D- for me, B+ for everyone else, I suspect.

A Doom Downside: no split-screen support that I can find. This is important when you have kids! But maybe not a horribly big deal, since my kid is too young to play Doom. We'll stick to Battleborn instead, about which I'll tell you a great deal more soon, as Battleborn is the dark horse title I have been completely swept away by....and my kid, too. C- as split-screen is still relevant, sorry publishers. Some people still like co-op couch gaming, and nothing you do to stop it will make me buy two copies for my household.

Cliff Blezinksi (of Gears of War fame) critiqued the glory kill (critical strike) options in Doom as being too excessive. I just want to set the record straight that what Cliff is demonstrating is envy, at how cool they are in Doom and how easy they are to execute, unlike the horrid chainsaw mechanic in Gears of War that is effectively the same deal (except of course how the chainsaw in Doom works quite nicely and without some timing button press issue that makes it nearly impossible at times).

Final Verdict: A solid A for the single player component and a B+ for the multiplayer if you're in to that stuff; this could have benefited from split-screen support and offline bot play options, but the snap-map feature makes up for the absence of these options.
A-
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And now! Let us never speak of Doom again on this blog. For a while at least. Now where's the Quake reboot, Id/Bethesda? Hmmmm?