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Tricky one, Doom. Tricky one to reboot, or deboot, or whatever it is that id Software has been tasked with this time around. Tricky lineage to negotiate. How do you expand upon a game whose force and purity all but created the pace, mechanics, and look of a generation of shooters? How do you do that, all the while knowing that in the sheer unadorned potency of the original game there is something that can only ever be damaged by elaboration? Returning to Doom, surely the temptation is to make Doom more complex - but complexity only makes it less like Doom. Amazingly, though, despite the odds stacked against it, the new Doom feels a lot like, well, a lot like Doom. It has that same headlong rush, that same engine of wet splatter chugging everything forward. I've been playing through the campaign while trying to work out how they've done it, how developmental hell turned out a game that is such a joyous blast to play. And I think a big part of the game's success comes down to one weird thing: the guy you're playing as in Doom is playing Doom.Before we go any further I should probably add that the guy you're playing as in Doom is also, for most of the campaign, just an arm. Okay, two arms on the rare occasion when he needs to smash a fist into his palm or yank apart a set of jammed doors. Doom isn't the first game to do this by any means - it's not the first game to give you a near silent protagonist, or give its first-person camera some kind of presence in the world. What's different about Doom is how much charm it gets into such a small set of animations. This Doom, above and beyond all other things, is a game of great charm.
So yes, the guy in Doom is playing Doom. You can tell this from his heady mixture of enthusiasm and impatience that permeates all his actions. Look at him picking up a new weapon: the sheer joy with which he reaches for the chainsaw or the rocket launcher. "You! Here?" he seems to be thinking. "You are really going to help me with the next bit of Doom that comes around the corner!" Look at him mantling, hands gripping platforms and pulling him up with the breathless pace of a kid at their first sport's day. Look at him clenching through a health recharge. Look at the way he plays with the bobblehead secrets he finds littered around the place. This isn't a person who's worried about wormholes from Hell and all the shady things a Martian drilling company has been doing on the sly. This is a guy who's just glad to be locked in a building with a bunch of shambling jelly people to shoot to pieces.
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