Love/Hate: Doom II – Hell on Earth (1994)

Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the next game in the franchise, Doom II: Hell on Earth! After the smash-hit success of Doom, a sequel was fast-tracked and released less than a year later. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the quick turn-around time, the resulting game can be broadly described as “Doom, but more”. Considering how good the original game was, that sounds awesome, but would “bigger” mean “better”? Read on to find out…

Love

• Super Shotgun – Doom II only introduces one new weapon, but that’s all that it needed: the super shotgun is a fucking beast!!! Every shot uses two shotgun shells instead of one, but it is absolutely worth it, because the super shotgun is goddamn powerful. A single trigger-pull will often one-shot every enemy in close vicinity (in fact, within minutes of picking it up, I had nabbed myself an achievement for killing four enemies with a single blast)! It also kills even reasonably-tanky enemies (such as the pinky demons) in a single shot, and most of the larger demons take only two or three shots to go down. It’s an absolute workhorse, easily one of the best shotguns in all of gaming.
  • On the other hand, it renders the standard shotgun practically redundant 99% of the time… but I don’t actually care about that, I have the super shotgun to console me!
• It’s Doom, But More – Like I said up top: Doom II is just more Doom. The engine has been updated to make the levels larger and more detailed, and more enemies can be on-screen at one time, but otherwise, this is a very iterative sequel. Everything that was good about Doom is intact here, so that means that basically everything I noted in the “Love” section there applies here too*. If you liked Doom, odds are that you’ll also enjoy Doom II, even if they do both have their own subtle flavours to set them apart.
• Swarms of Enemies – Probably the biggest difference between Doom and Doom II is that this game has SO MANY more demons on-screen at a time. You get absolutely mobbed by enemies in this game, leading to so much more chaos as your super shotgun mows down multiple enemies per shot, demons are constantly infighting, and you’re never able to stand still for more than a second. Combat ends up becoming an exercise in target priority, as you need to identify the biggest threat on the fly and take care of that first, or die a quick death. Hell, I normally like to get my own screenshots for these articles, but this game is so relentlessly paced that I couldn’t even stop for a second to get a cool screengrab mid-battle.
  • This point is especially well-demonstrated in the level “Dead Simple”. It’s a tiny arena with an exit in the middle located on top of a platform. All you have to do is press four buttons on opposite sides of the arena to lower the platform… however, there are four brand-new, extremely tanky and deadly enemies that you have never faced before defending the exit. If you manage to kill them all, then, surprise, eight more brand-new enemies appear from hidden gates and swarm you. It’s intense, with the screen resembling a bullet hell thanks to all the projectiles flying about, but it’s so fun to let loose and focus entirely on combat instead of key hunting. It was probably my favourite level in the entire game.
• Hellknight and Mancubus – Doom II introduces a bunch of new demons to the enemy roster, but by far my favourite new faces are the Hellknight and the Mancubus.
  • The Baron of Hell was always a cool enemy, but they were so strong in Doom that you rarely got to encounter them. Hellknights are basically a weaker version of the Baron of Hell, so they’re still a genuine challenge, you get to fight them far more often, and they feel like they go down in a reasonable amount of time. Hellknights are my favourite enemy in the entire Doom franchise, so I’m always going to be excited to see them.
  • The Mancubus is also a cool enemy which feels extremely challenging, but extremely fair. They fire two fast-moving projectiles which deal incredible damage when they hit, and they have quite a bit of HP to boot. However, they are also very predictable and exploitable, and their projectiles can be pretty easily dodged. Mancubus are a great example of an enemy that manages to strike a perfect balance of difficulty and fun.

*The only exception to this is that the horror elements from the first game are almost entirely absent in Doom II. Your mileage will vary on whether or not that matters, but it does make Doom II feel a bit more akin to the modern-day Doom games in terms of sheer intensity.

Mixed

• Larger Maps – The other big new feature of Doom II is the much larger, more wide-open maps. Instead of being confined to cramped corridors and rooms, levels in Doom II are often in vast, open spaces with a lot of verticality that needs to be navigated. While this makes Doom II‘s levels a lot more varied and intricate, they really magnify the issue of not knowing where the game needs you to go next. While it’s not that difficult to stumble your way to a solution, the frustration is frequent enough that it sours this aspect of the game a bit.
• Difficulty – I’m really mixed on this particular point and your mileage will vary with it significantly. Doom II is notably more difficult than its predecessor. By the time you get to level ten, the game hits a difficulty spike that can be absolutely brutal, forcing you to adapt or get run into the ground. I kept with it and made it to the end of the game, so it can’t have been so bad as to make this a true “Hate”, but the at times harsh difficulty definitely made Doom II feel less-consistently fun for me compared to its predecessor.

Hell yeah.

Hate

• Most of the New Demons Are a Pain in the Ass – Doom II introduces several new enemies to the franchise… unfortunately, most of them make you groan in frustration when they show up. Because of this, the moment-to-moment gameplay of Doom II can actually feel like a bit of a step down from the first game, since you’re often being forced to fight enemies that are fucking annoying.
  • First of all, there’s the fucking Revenant. This rocket-shooting, skeletal motherfucker has been my arch-nemesis throughout this series, I despise them. They do a ton of damage and are way tankier than you’d expect from such a lanky foe. However, in this game they’re truly awful thanks to their homing rocket, which will follow you throughout the entire level until you take damage or cause it to crash into something else. With all the chaos going on in a Doom II gunfight, it’s very difficult to even notice that a Revenant homing rocket is coming at you, let alone shake it off your tail.
  • Then there’s the dreaded Chaingunners, who lock onto you from long range and just melt your health bar with hitscan bullets until you can break line of sight. They always seem to be shooting you from somewhere off-screen, meaning that you need to waste time figuring out where the Chaingunner is before you can get to cover. Naturally, this allows them to deal even more damage to you. About the only positive things I can say about them is that they typically die to one super shotgun blast, and it’s fun to see their stupid heads explode when it happens.
  • Then there’s the Pain Elemental, which appears to be the bastard child of a Cacodemon and a bowl of turds. However, instead of shooting projectiles at you, they endlessly spawn Lost Souls (super annoying flaming skulls) to attack you! The most efficient way to kill them is with two rockets, but the Lost Souls will rush you, often causing you to die from explosive splash damage for your effort. You can’t even try to rush the Pain Elemental to get rid of it before it becomes a problem, because if you kill it before it has spawned multiple Lost Souls, then it explodes and spawns in three of them, which instantly rush you. Despite this, I always tried to rush to kill Pain Elementals, because they were such a pain in my ass.
  • Absolute worst of all though is the goddamn Arch-vile. Fuck this guy every which way. It’s the fastest demon in the game. It creates a fiery blast with significant knock-back which can only be avoided by breaking line of sight. It takes a TON of ammunition to kill, only being out-tanked by boss-tier enemies. Oh, and to top it all off, it can resurrect dead enemies as an extra fuck you. Yeah… every time I encountered an Arch-vile, it was genuinely stressful. Thank God that they are one of the rarest enemy types in the game.
  • Special shout-out to the Arachnotrons and the Spider Mastermind. They aren’t nearly as infuriating as the others, and show up very infrequently which mitigates their issues, but they still are not very fun to fight.
• See: Doom (1993) – Like I said, Doom II is a very iterative sequel, and as a result, none of the “Hates” I had from its predecessor have been addressed… in fact, they’re even worse now. This is especially true for the maze-like levels, which were leaving me frustrated far more often than in Doom.
  • The more complex levels also exacerbate the issues of the lack of Y-axis control. This wasn’t really much of an issue in Doom due to the simpler level designs, but you’ll often have enemies above you, below you, or even somewhere off-screen in Doom II, which really make you wish you could just look at them to line up your shot. This can be straight-up lethal if you’re trying to deal with a particularly deadly enemy (such as an Arch-vile or Chaingunner, who can shoot at you freely while you struggle to fight back).
• Hazard Floors – Hazard floors (lava, blood, toxic waste, etc that damage you when walked on) were present in the original Doom, but they only really showed up in the latter-levels, so they felt like an acceptable late-game challenge. However, Doom II is designed for people who played the shit out of Doom, so you get way more maps where a majority of the level is covered in hazard floors. This is bad enough when it’s just a danger area (some of which are inescapable and result in guaranteed death), but when you have to cross hazard floors in order to reach your next objective, it just sucks. Taking mandatory damage always stresses you out and is just no fun to deal with. They don’t even do all that much damage at the end of the day, but they way they make you feel suuuuuucks.

I liked Doom II: Hell on Earth, but I can’t help but feel like it’s a bit of a step down from its predecessor in some key ways. I do like a lot of the new features, but too many of them just leave you feeling stressed and annoyed. I greedily fought through Doom‘s levels one after another every time I played, but with Doom II I was often struggling to do more than a level or two before I wanted to take a break. Again, I liked Doom II overall, but I think that this exhaustion demonstrated my preference for the original Doom.

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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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