Brutal Doom – Mod Spotlight

 

 

Doom. Oh you silly rascal. If you’re like me and played the game back when it was still somewhat popular, you remember it being a blood-soaked kill-fest with a definitive no-bull*hit altitude. Now, if you try to play it today, it’s a clunky, old-school, repetitive grandfather of a game that cannot hold a candle to the modern gaming experiences. That is to be expected, of course, with all the advances in gaming industry and whatnot. But, then again, you want to play the original Doom as you remember it. An archaic, messy, badass FPS that makes you grind your teeth because of the adrenaline boost you get while playing. Brutal Doom is what we’ve all been looking for, people.

The bulk of this modification was created in three years, by a single modder. As you will quickly see after starting it up, it’s exactly what the badly informed general public thinks Doom is. Running on the exact same framework the original game did back in its heyday, it does precisely the same thing, only much better.

Starting with the character movement, the mod offers quite a lot of modernised features that make the whole game that much more enjoyable. Fully enabled mouse aiming, for example, brings a whole new dimension to the action, while crouching and jumping allow access to previously unavailable areas and a more dynamic combat experience. In case you think easier aiming guarantee an easier game, you’re dead wrong. To leverage your own character’s upgrades, all enemies now have improved AI, new attacks and loads of additional animations to boot. Those god-forsaken Imps, for example, can now pounce at you in attempt to deal additional damage, while fireballs move faster and are more damaging. And don’t count at the enemies being stuck in the level’s framework anymore.

There’s no more progression regarding the weaponry, either. In the vanilla, every weapon you found was better than the last one, with an occasional caveat that would force you to compensate for the lack of ammo for bigger guns. Not with Brutal Doom, though. Every single firearm has been either replaced or upgraded, and they all wreck absolute chaos on the poor demons. Even better, nearly every weapon comes with additional firemodes or iron sights that are sure to make you want to experiment with them as you progress. The new damage model is introduced, too. Whereas shooting an enemy sprite in Doom always dealt the exact same amount of damage regardless of where you might hit them, Brutal Doom gives every monster multiple hitboxes. Shoot the zombie’s legs off and he will fall to the ground in agony, shouting for help. Blow its head off and, totally unexpectedly, it’ll promptly die. The initial „fist“ weapon is now an extremely effective melee combo system, and will provide you with kicks, one-two punches and similar badassery.

As you blast your way through the revised levels of the game, you will find your fellow marines trapped and wounded by the demon bastards. Naturally, you can brofist their faces to release them and make them help you on your future endeavours. Their effectiveness in field puts all of our modern AI helpers to shame, I can tell you that. They’ll even do fully animated finishers (you can do them too!) as they cut their way through the enemy hordes. And the manner in which you and your pals ravage the hordes is brilliantly executed, too. With extreme amounts of new gibs and blood sprites, there will be much more icky red stuff that there previously was. Also, every puddle of blood and every piece of flesh will remain where they fell until you wrap the level up.

In the end, the one thing that was sorely missing from Doomguy’s arsenal was the ability to flip the enemies off while yelling profanities at them. Good thing Brutal Doom adds that too, for all your cinematic needs. Playing Doom with this mod makes the game look like a fan-rendered video, rather than actual gameplay. It’s fast, it’s fun, but above all else – it’s brutal. If you’re a fan of the franchise hyped up for the inevitable Doom IV release, download it immediately to soothe yourself. iD Software will be hard pressed to nail the atmosphere of the old Doom games better than this modder has.