Doom. What is there to say? You sprint through rooms and halls, spraying a hail of bullets at waves of demons. Or at least, that’s what I thought when I booted up Doom 64 for the first time. As someone who plays FPS games pretty often, but also someone who respects deadlines, I picked the second hardest difficulty: “I own Doom!”. I quickly hopped in, picked up the quintessential Doom weapon, the shotgun, and felt comfortable with my choice as I breezed through the first couple of levels. Just as I started thinking that maybe I should have opted for the hardest difficulty, I was swarmed on all sides and my character was dead on the ground. “Must be a fluke,” I said to myself as I hit restart. I proceeded to charge in guns blazing… and die in a matter of seconds. Naturally, I threw myself headfirst into the problem another 5 or so times before I decided to change my style of play. This time, I worked carefully around angles, taking potshots at enemies and shutting doors to block returning projectiles. It took longer, but after a few minutes the floor was littered with demon jello and I was grabbing a keycard. It was then that I realized the combat in Doom 64 isn’t a mindless exercise in painting the walls red, it’s a puzzle — a carefully orchestrated dance where the player must be constantly aware of their surroundings and the tools at their disposal.
The first, and perhaps most important, factor complicating Doom’s combat is the physical space that the player navigates while fighting. The player starts the game in a space station, the spaces are claustrophobic and compartmental. Trying to run through an area often results in the player getting quickly cornered, a situation which means certain death in Doom. To avoid this happening, you need to quickly assess the threats in the room and develop a plan to avoid them. This feels straightforward, almost not even worth mentioning. Except that the threats most players, myself included, focus on are those posed by the enemies in a room. The much more important threats in a room are the spatial ones. Understanding the choke points, elevation, and the cover is the most crucial thing to the success of the player. Most of the enemies don’t pose much of a threat on their own, almost every attack is easy to avoid and a few shots are enough to do most of them in. The challenge comes from dodging and weaving through the space in a way that keeps movement fluid and predicting how the enemies will adjust to collapse on the player. This process is fast-paced and tricky but means that the game is focused more on spatial awareness and pattern recognition than having good aim. This totally defied my expectations of what the genre-defining FPS game would play like, and as I progressed deeper into the game I began thinking of each room as a mini-puzzle. The level design of Doom 64 feels totally unlike any other game I’ve played. Where most FPS levels feel like generic rooms for the player to show off how much they’ve been practicing their aim, the levels in Doom totally change how you need to approach combat. Some stages drop the player at the front of a maze and ask them to methodically clear out long hallways, while others surround the players entirely and force them to carve out the best path. By rooting the difficulty of the game predominantly in positioning, Doom can give players the feeling of being a space-marine who makes literal demons afraid of him, all while not overpowering the player to the point of boredom.
But, at the risk of undoing my hard work to convince you all that Doom 64 plays out like a puzzle game, Doom is a game where you shoot demons. For many people, the best part about shooting demons in Doom is the veritable personal arsenal at their fingertips. Doom 64 has a total of 10 guns including Doomguy’s fists (trust me, they are guns) and each one alters the experience of shooting in interesting visual, audio, and gameplay ways. While the less FPS inclined reader might think of this as a pick your flavor of gratuitous violence (which it isn’t not), I believe it adds meaningful depth to the combat. Each weapon has unique benefits and drawbacks including effective range, damage, rate of fire, reload speed, and ammunition capacity. What this means in practical terms is that there isn’t one right gun for every situation. In fact, for most encounters, there isn’t a right gun at all, and players need to switch quickly between different weapons to survive. Enemies like pinkies, big pink blobs, are slow and have a lot of health. Small and fast enemies like the lost souls, flaming skulls that fly, are weak and dive onto the player. On the one hand, a rocket launcher would easily clear out the pinkies from afar, but the same weapon will often result in the player blowing themselves up against enemies like the lost souls who get very close. This is a basic example, but it should be clear that the player has to quickly decide what enemies to shoot when and which weapons to use. When you add in more enemy types with their own problems and limited bullets for each weapon, just deciding who to shoot first can be quite a choice.
All of this being said, I don’t think that Doom 64 is a perfect game, and I think it embodies a lot of problems with the FPS genre as a whole. However, I do think that Doom 64 has a lot to teach players about genre, and about the assumptions embedded in genre labels. I would urge players who usually avoid FPS games to try out Doom; you will be surprised by the depth that can be revealed in a game that seems to just be about shooting people. I know that I personally make snap judgments, but playing Doom 64 with an open mind has taught me so much about level design, balancing difficulty with player power, and about why the tools game designers give players matter so much.
