Doom is one of those FPS titles that had been on my games to play list for a while. I finally had a chance to play it. Here are some of my quick impressions:

Doom 2016 Review in 2024

Doom is an interesting game. Released in 2016 it offered several fresh ideas as well as reimagining of old ones. It is an enjoyable title overall though I consider it slightly overrated. Here are some general observations:

• There is no reload: That’s right. You cannot reload in Doom! A lot of people seemed to like this idea and praised the developers for making the game more immersive. Personally, I am a compulsive reloader. I like to reload every couple of kills or whenever I get the chance. It is satisfying and comforting – the reload animation, the sound affects, the HUD showing bullets shifting to your cartridge – That is good stuff! In Doom, I constantly found myself hitting the “R” key but nothing happening – It is an empty feeling!
  
• Weapon Upgrades: Doom features a weapon upgrade system. You can increase your weapon’s rate of fire, reduce reload speed. In fact it seemed like most upgrades focus on the speed with which you can fire rather than on the damage you can cause with it – You don’t have the option to increase the overall damage of a weapon. It would have been nice if guns had easy to read damage ratings and you could just increase them. Overall, I found the upgrade system less than satisfactory and wanting more from it.
  
• Infinite Grenades: You have an infinite supply of grenades, but there is a recharge system. You start off you equip only one grenade at a time (upgradable to three) – once used you have to wait before you can utilize it again(though, If you pick up a grenade you get it instantly without needing to recharge). This also seemed like a weird design choice to me. A lot of players said they never felt the need to use the grenades – For me, old habits die hard. I like throwing grenades and would have preferred if I could use them more liberally.
  
• The rocket launcher seemed weirdly underpowered
  
• Chainsaw is a tactical option: Enemies drop more ammo when killed with a chainsaw. This, together with the glory kill mechanic encourages getting up close with the enemy. I found that the last hour or so of the game required a fair bit of tactics in terms of which weapon to use and when – the rest of the game was quite easy to get through (on Normal difficulty).
  
• The story seems to take itself too seriously
  
• The graphics are serviceable – Some of the environments look very good in 8K resolution.
  
• The game performs well – I played Doom at 8K resolution (via Nvidia DSR) on an RTX 3090 GPU and an AMD 5600X CPU. The performance was very impressive with frame rates within the 60 – 100 range for the majority of the game. This is quite good – I have played much older games where 8K is unplayable with this setup.

Doom 2016 8K Screenshots