Love/Hate: Doom (1993)

Surprise! It’s time for a new Love/Hate series here on IC2S! This one was actually was a surprise for me too. I’ve got a list of potential future Love/Hate articles and I’ll generally decide what series I want to write about long before I even start playing. However, I picked up Doom (2016) in a Steam sale a year ago and played it purely for fun. Then I decided to check out Doom 3. Then I grabbed Doom Eternal on sale. Then I decided I wanted to play the originals too. So here I was, more than halfway through the entire series, when I finally thought “well, I’ve now decided I’m going to play every game in Doom the franchise, maybe I should write some Love/Hate articles about them?”

Naturally, we’re starting where the series began: 1993’s Doom, the granddaddy of the first person shooter. I had never played the original Doom before this. The closest I’d come to it were some PS1/N64-era shooters*: Star Wars: Dark Forces, GoldenEye, and the Turok games. They were all reasonably fun, but I was always getting frustrated by the maze-like level design, which made progression damn-near impossible without significant trial and error (or a walkthrough). This, unfortunately, left me with a pretty sour opinion on pre-Halo first person shooters (and even that game’s level design was trying my patience at times), so I just never bothered to try them. Is the original Doom an outdated relic, or does it still hold up in 2026? Read on to find out…

Doom is one of the most re-released games of all-time (to the point where there’s an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to its various official and unofficial ports). I’m not even going to bother going over all of them and their (often major) quirks. For the sake of context though, I played the recent Doom + Doom II compilation for this playthrough. As its name would imply, it brings together Doom and its first sequel in one package, plus a bunch of bonus episodes and major unofficial expansions and sequels.

Also, before we get into my thoughts on this game: I’m going to be pretty picky with the media that I’ll be covering in this series. I’m only going to be going over the stuff in the Doom franchise that I find notable or particularly interesting. I don’t really have much interest in covering the plethora of fan-made Doom expansions (officially-endorsed or not) and mobile spin-offs this series has seen over the years. It’s cool that this stuff exists, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just supplemental content that doesn’t provide a particularly unique experience. I started playing these games for fun, and I’d like to keep it that way!

*Actually, that’s not quite true. I had also played Super Noah’s Ark 3D for a laugh. It was a terrible first impression of the idtech engine, and only reinforced my complaints about old-school first person shooters.

Love

• Core Gameplay – You’d think that a 30+ year old game would have pretty clunky gameplay, but Doom still feels rock solid.
  • This is the first person shooter before all the frills and innovations of the past three decades became standardized. There’s no Y-axis: if you point your gun in the general direction of an enemy, they will get hit automatically. You rarely ever need to do any sort of fine aiming. You never have to reload your guns. The gunplay is great, and isn’t harmed by its extremely simple mechanics.
  • I also really have to highlight Doom‘s movement system, because it’s probably the main thing that makes it feel so good to play, even today. Doomguy moves so fast, smoothly, and precisely, which gives the game a relentless pace.
• The Metal-as-fuck Arsenal – It’s incredible that Doom, the granddaddy of the first person shooter, is still one of the coolest video games of all-time. A lot of that is down to the creatively brutal weapons you get to use. Your main weapon is a goddamn shotgun? That’s so cool! The chaingun? Fucking awesome. The rocket launcher? Amazing. The plasma gun? Incredible. There’s a fucking chainsaw that’s here for no other reason than to let you dismember demons? Holy shit, thank you!!! Then, of course, there’s the BFG9000, which literally stands for “Big Fucking Gun”. Gaming peaked with Doom, and it’s been all downhill since.
• Cool Mechanics – Despite the simple gunplay, Doom still has some shockingly innovative and impressive mechanics up its sleeve.
  • First of all, there’s the foundational stuff, such as exploding barrels and shotguns being able to hit multiple enemies. These are very basic by modern standards, but it’s amazing to see them here at the very genesis of the FPS.
  • However, the absolute coolest Doom mechanic which hasn’t been replicated elsewhere is “monster infighting”. If an enemy accidentally shoots another enemy, the one who was hit will turn around and shoot back in revenge until one or both are dead. This is just cool to witness in general, but it also conserves ammo, and it’s satisfying and fun to trigger it intentionally! There are entire strategies which revolve around getting enemies to fight each other, which helps give Doom such a unique flavour.
• Old-school Ultraviolence – Doom is impressively gruesome, with copious amounts of blood and shredded bodies left in your wake. This must have looked absolutely insane back in 1993, but 30+ years later it’s all just so charming thanks to the impressively-detailed sprites. Annihilating hordes of enemies still feels fantastic, in part thanks to how visceral this game is.
• Iconic Enemy Variety – It’s impressive just how varied and distinctive Doom‘s cast of enemies are. They all have very distinct combat roles, all of them feel fun to fight, and they all feel appropriately challenging. If I had to pick a favourite though, I’d probably have to give it to the humble Cacodemon, these things are a joy to encounter and are have the perfect mixture of difficulty and strategy involved in all of their encounters!
• Secrets – Another really charming thing Doom does is fill its levels will all sorts of secrets. The game will straight-up show you awesome items which are out of your reach, not-so-subtly encouraging you to try to figure out how to get to them. When you do figure it out, it always feels amazing, and the rewards are always well worth the effort. It makes you want to explore every corner of these levels, and the end-of-level screen even shows you how many of the secrets you found. It’s another one of those fundamental design decisions at Doom‘s core which is just pure fun!
• Action-Horror Themes – Doom isn’t really regarded as a horror game nowadays, so it’s pretty interesting that there was a clear effort to make this first Doom feel legitimately scary at times. The game loves to ambush you with demons at just the perfect time to induce panic, often after you’ve picked up some key item in an empty room. It also loves to play with its lighting, often putting you into near-darkness, or hiding an enemy out of sight in a shadowy corner. You can definitely see why id Software would go full-on horror with Doom years later, but that’s a story for another time…
  • Also related to this, I have a hard time figuring out if the occult imagery in this game is meant to be sincerely edgy or tongue-in-cheek. It’s full of the sort of “dangerous”, Satanic Panic-esque imagery that would make an 80s middle-class white woman clutch their pearls in distress*, but which is so silly and toothless that it ends up being funny.

*Or make a modern-day Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist piss themselves over the decline of Western civilization.

Mixed

• Thy Flesh Consumed – Doom originally released with three official episodes, but with The Ultimate Doom, they released a bonus fourth episode which has been in most ports ever since: Thy Flesh Consumed. While it’s cool to get more Doom, this episode is a massive difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game, because it was being designed for players who had played the shit out of Doom and Doom II already and needed a stiff challenge. This makes it feel ill-suited as an official fourth episode, especially for someone going through these games for the first time. In my opinion, it just isn’t very well-designed, more concerned with being a brutal challenge as opposed to a tight, fun experience.

Hate

• Dying – Sure, it never feels good to die in a video game, but dying sucks in Doom. There are no checkpoints, so you have to restart an entire level when you die. However, that’s not even the bad part: you lose all of your gathered weapons and ammo when you die and get stuck with nothing more than the shitty pistol and your fists, which both struggle to even kill a basic imp, let alone larger enemies. This can make some levels feel borderline impossible to complete unless you already know the map layouts and where to get some weapons that can actually do damage.
  • There’s a solution to this problem though: you can save the game whenever you like. This is great to have, and keeps this from being a truly crippling flaw, but it also becomes kind of annoying in its own right, since it heavily incentivizes frequent save scumming and punishes you severely if you do not.
  • This is also somewhat offset by the game’s cheat menu. If I didn’t have “idkfa” to instantly get all guns and ammo when I forgot to save at the start of a level, I may not have finished the game at all.
• Key Hunts – My biggest problem with old-school first person shooters has always been their confusing, maze-like level designs which revolve around looking for keys. It’s never been a particularly compelling gameplay loop, even here in its most pure expression. Doom‘s first episode is pretty simple to navigate, but the maze-like levels do get noticeably more prominent the further in you get, and by that point I was finding myself starting to get lost. It’s definitely more tolerable than many of Doom‘s imitators and successors, but it’s still a notable frustration and easily one of the weakest aspects the core gameplay loop.

I was shocked by just how much fun Doom still is in 2026. Is it any wonder that the boomer shooter subgenre has taken off in the past decade? There’s still a genuinely compelling gameplay style here which modern-day shooters have innovated themselves far away from. That’s not to say that modern-day shooters suck (far from it), but it gives a game like Doom a distinctly unique flavour that you can’t get elsewhere.

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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