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One of the most celebrated FPS franchise giants has finally returned to the House of Mario. Going back more than two decades, Nintendo hardware has always had a unique relationship with the series. Doom for the Super NES, sluggish though it may be, was a technical showpiece for Nintendo's 16-bit machine while the Game Boy Advance conversion felt like holding the future in your hands. There are echoes of this in Bethesda's Switch port of the Doom 2016 reboot. This is mobile technology pushed kicking and screaming to its absolute limits. Against all odds, developer Panic Button has succeeded in bringing the entirety of the Doom experience to Nintendo's latest machine and it mostly works, though the brutal nature of many of the compromises may well be too much for series purists. In assessing this port, a little perspective is required. The fact it exists at all is somewhat miraculous, and we can't go in expecting a pixel-for-pixel match with the PS4 and Xbox One versions.
Let's start with the good news. This port is content complete, and every level from the original release is present and correct. There was concern that stages would need to be divided up to fit into memory but that's not the case at all. Encounters play out just as they did on the more powerful console platforms, and every stage is presented as a complete experience. Every enemy, weapon and feature is present and accounted for and that's an important thing to consider. After all, Doom 3 for the original Xbox, a comparable port in terms of accomplishment, featured levels which were reduced in size and complexity to work within the constraints of the system. That's not the case here.
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