Love/Hate: Doom 64 (1997)

Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! In this article we’ll be covering Doom 64, the final entry of the “classic Doom” era. Doom 64 was considered the overlooked black sheep of the franchise for a long time. There are many reasons for this, but since it was re-released in 2020, Doom 64‘s has undergone something of a reappraisal amongst long-time series fans. How does it hold up for me compared to the other classic Doom titles? Read on to find out…

As I said, there are two versions of Doom 64: the original Nintendo 64 release and the 2020 remaster for modern consoles. By most accounts that I can find, the differences between these versions are minimal. The most substantial additions are a save state system and a handful of newly-crafted “lost levels” which connect Doom 64 to the modern Doom games. I played the re-release on my Steam Deck, but you can play whatever version is most convenient for you: it won’t make a major difference to your experience.

Love

• Graphics & Aesthetic – The most immediate difference between Doom 64 and the other classic Doom titles is its far more moody and evocative graphical presentation.
  • Firstly, the graphics in Doom 64 are higher-resolution and, as a result, have more detail than they did in the first two Doom games. This lends Doom 64 a far less cartoony art style. The game also has significantly more animated textures in its environments and skyboxes, which make the levels feel more lively. The latter levels have a lot of edgy, 90s charm thanks to the flaming skyboxes, which make you feel like you’re battling your way through hell!
  • Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, Doom 64 has a very evocative lighting system. The first two Doom games feature some limited lighting effects, but they were used very sporadically, so most levels were left feeling very flat. The PS1 port of Doom changed this, adding lighting effects throughout the levels, which had a tangible effect on the way that version of the game felt. The same team which ported Doom to the PS1 also made Doom 64, and you can tell that this same design philosophy is shared between the two. It’s not just about light and shadow either, as Doom 64 has a copious amount of coloured lighting, which really punctuates the moment-to-moment gameplay (for example, if you’re walking down a narrow, empty corridor with a sickly green hue to everything, you’re subtly being prompted to be on the lookout for an ambush).
• Eerie Soundtrack – Another big difference between Doom 64 and classic Doom is its soundtrack. The development team drew on their experience porting Doom to the PS1 here as well. That game dispensed with the PC version’s heavy metal bombast in favour of a brand-new ambient soundtrack by Aubrey Hodges. This new soundtrack was inspired by industrial music and has a horror tone to it, which makes for a very eerie soundscape. Doom 64‘s soundtrack follows these same cues, and is very minimalist. You can often forget that there even is a soundtrack at times, but when it does make itself known with strange chants or dissonant clanging sounds, it gets genuinely unsettling. While I wouldn’t go so far as to classify Doom 64 as a full-on horror game, as the rest of the game isn’t designed to scare you, the soundtrack does at least make it reasonably unnerving.
• The Weapons – With the updated graphics comes updated weapons! All the guns from the previous games are still here and perform about the same as ever, but some of them have gotten major visual overhauls which make them way more fun to use!
  • The chaingun feels so good to fire in this game. Firing it causes the entire screen to shake from the recoil. You feel like you barely have control of it, which makes it feel powerful (even if the gun itself has fairly average damage potential). In terms of raw performance it’s a decent gun, but in terms of pure aesthetics and feel, this is a joy to use!
  • Then there’s this game’s chainsaw… which isn’t just any ol’ chainsaw. No, it’s a double fucking chainsaw! Goddamn I love Doom‘s metal as fuck mentality! The only way you could improve on this would be if there was a triple chainsaw too.
  • Then we’ve got the plasma gun, which is as cool as ever. However, I think that this might be my favourite rendition of it thanks to its less-annoying firing sound and the game’s lighting system, which makes every projectile cast a bright, blue glow which illuminates the area around it. Creating a little light show every time you pull the trigger makes this weapon a visual feast every time you fire it!
  • There’s also the only new gun, the Unmaykr, which fires rapid-fire laser beams and uses the same ammo as the BFG and plasma gun. While it’s not that great by default, you can find secret keys which permanently upgrade its power, to the point where it becomes the most powerful weapon in the entire game.

Mixed

• Enemy Variety – Doom 64 has all the enemies from the original Doom, plus the Mancubus, Hellknight, Arachnotron, and Pain Elemental. On the one hand, this means that we’re mercifully spared from having to deal with Revenants, Arch-viles, and Chaingunners. On the other hand, you definitely will notice that there’s less variety to the enemies you’re encountering. On top of this, Doom 64 under-utilizes the Mancubus and Arachnotrons… which sucks, because I really enjoyed fighting them in this game. Instead, the game has a total boner for the Baron of Hell, who shows up nearly as often as Hellknights do (which, if you’re not aware, are supposed to be the weaker, more common version of the Baron of Hell). I do like the Baron of Hell, so this isn’t a major issue, but a bit more variety would have been appreciated.
• Slower Gameplay – Doom 64 really pulls its punches in regards to the speed of gameplay. Maybe this was done because the N64 controller was less precise than a PC would be? Whatever the case, there are rarely more than a few enemies onscreen at once and the game ends up being a hell of a lot less frantic. In this regard, it’s far closer to the feel of the original Doom than it is to Doom II. I’m pretty neutral on this change myself: I generally had a good time with Doom 64‘s gameplay structure, but it’s a notable enough difference that it bears mentioning.
  • That said, I know for a fact that the N64 can handle a hell of a lot more enemies on-screen than it might seem. The final level, The Absolution, chucks DOZENS of demons and projectiles at you at once, so the slower gameplay pace was clearly done for artistic rather than technical reasons.

Hate

• Level Design – As soon as you start Doom 64, you realize that the level design is more maze-like and convoluted than in prior Doom games. It’s more akin to the dreaded mazes and key hunts that always annoyed me about the level design in 90s “Doom clones”. Admittedly, while this is clear from the start of the game, it doesn’t get too bad for one simple reason: the maps of Doom 64 are pretty small. There’s usually only a few major “arenas” in each map and then a couple corridors connected to each. Even if you get lost, the levels are small enough that you’ll stumble into your next objective in short order… that is, until the second half of the game, where they suddenly start throwing bullshit at you:
  • First of all, let’s get the game’s most persistent level design issue out of the way: the entire game hinges on pressing switches… which will activate something in another room somewhere else on the map. You have no real way of knowing what the switch you pressed did, so you just have to guess what the game expects of you. Eventually you will learn to take note of the locked areas you encounter that a switch might open up for you, but then the game pivots towards the true bullshit in the back half…
  • In level eighteen, the game suddenly changes the rules. You see, up to this point, switches could only be activated by walking up to them and pressing the “Use” button. However, in this level, they suddenly introduce a switch that’s behind bars. You’d assume that that means that there’s some other switch you need to press to lower the bars, because that’s what you’ve done for the rest of the game, but no: it turns out that the game expects you to shoot the switch. There are only a handful of switches in this game that you can shoot, and those are all for secret areas… except for this one. How the fuck were you expected to figure this out? Even more annoyingly, I then had to just assume that the game wanted me to shoot any out-of-reach switch from that point forward, which wasted a lot of my shotgun shells unnecessarily.
  • Then there’s another level (I didn’t write it down and can’t remember which) where you need to pickup a rocket launcher in order to create a platform to allow you to progress the level. At this point in the game, I had maximum rocket ammo, so I couldn’t pick this up. I then spent the next fifteen minutes running around the level, trying to figure why the hell the path forward wasn’t opening up. I assumed that I had pressed a switch that opened up some other area, but I couldn’t find jack shit. Eventually I just had to look up a video guide, but it turned out that this was another “how the fuck am I supposed to know this?” moment. Sure, if I had used my rocket launcher a bit more often then I wouldn’t have gotten stuck, but the fact that they never even considered that you might get into this situation is just baffling.
  • Then level twenty-three suddenly introduces a door switch puzzle. There are three doors hidden throughout the level with three coloured key symbols (to represent the three types of keys you find in Doom levels). I assumed that this just meant that I needed to get all three keys in order to unlock them, but what I didn’t realize was that each door has the coloured symbols displayed in a specific order. You’re supposed to use the keys to activate the switches in order to unlock that specific door. While you certainly could figure this out eventually, it’s not clear at all, nor were you really taught to pay this much attention to Doom‘s puzzle gameplay before, so I spent a lot of time frustrated trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.
  • Oh, and let’s throw in a special “fuck you” to this game’s environmental traps. Sure, they shake up the gameplay a bit, but you’re never happy to see pressure-activated arrow traps, ceilings which fall onto you and crush you, super-homing rockets, and full-on lava deathpits.
    • At one point in level sixteen, the floor just gives way suddenly and falls into an inescapable lava deathpit. If you happen to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, you die. Oh, did I mention that this happens at the very end of the level, so if you die you have to replay the entire level again (without any of your weapons, because this is a classic Doom game)?
• The Absolution – Doom 64‘s finale is a massive difficulty spike. While you might think that you’d want to relish a final challenge, the difficulty tuning of The Absolution is fucking insane.
  • So, first of all, the level opens with a crazy battle against dozens of strong demons who spawn out of three portals. While this is bad enough on its own, several of these demons are Pain Elementals, so if you don’t kill them fast, they continuously spawn in Lost Souls. If you don’t deal with the Pain Elementals fast, you get swarmed and it makes it incredibly dangerous to use your rocket launcher (which would otherwise be the best weapon to use in this situation). There are so many enemies on-screen and projectiles firing everywhere that more enemies may end up dying to friendly fire than they do your attacks. This part was a ridiculous difficulty spike, but the carnage was glorious, so I appreciated the challenge. If this was how the level ended, I would have probably loved this, but…
  • What pushes The Absolution into pure “despised” territory is the cunt of a final boss, the Mother Demon. As soon as you kill the last demon, she spawns in… so I sure hope you took as little damage and used as little ammo as possible against the swarm you just fought! Now, to be charitable, a supercharge heal does spawn in with her, but you have to get there first to use it, which is easier said than done. This is because the Mother Demon shoots out fire in four directions around her and launches four super-homing rockets which follow you around the endlessly arena and deal massive damage when they hit! Oh, and she’s ridiculously tanky – I had to land several direct hits with the BFG to take her down, but she puts out so much damage that you die in seconds. How the actual fuck were you expected to get through this without cheesing her???
  • Perhaps most annoyingly of all though is that this boss fight is basically a “fuck you” from the developers for not buying the strategy guide. You see, there are four secret levels in this game, three of which reward you with keys. These keys can be used to close the demon teleporters, which makes the first part of The Absolution significantly easier. However, their real benefit is that each key powers up the Unmakyr – if you have all three keys, then you can kill the final boss in seconds flat. It would be one thing if these keys were easily accessible to a moderately-observant player, but these secret levels are well-hidden, so 95% of first-time players are going to be facing The Absolution the way it was designed: a fucking insane difficulty spike. This is even more annoying, because the players who find all these secrets are going to be the ones who’ve put the most time into Doom 64 – y’know, the ones who’d probably relish fighting an insane challenge boss rather than just cakewalking her to death.

I did quite enjoy Doom 64. While I would say that it’s the weakest of the classic Doom titles, it’s still very close to its more well-known brethren, and its various eccentricities make it a very unique experience within the franchise that’s well worth experiencing.

Fuck that final boss though.

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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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