And that’s another Love/Hate series wrapped here on on IC2S! I genuinely never thought I would play through the entire Doom franchise. I probably would have played Doom 3 eventually, because I always thought that it looked really cool. And I played Doom (2016), because I had heard so much good about it that it felt like a mandatory must-play. And then I just kind of stumbled into the rest of the franchise. What surprised me the most was just how much I enjoyed the gameplay of classic Doom, to the point where I’m now actively seeking out other boomer shooters to explore this new itch of mine. Hell, I’m so into these games right now that I had a genuinely good time playing Super Noah’s Ark 3D! I’ve started playing Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, but I’m interested in checking out Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Hexen, and Wolfenstein 3D (amongst others), and seeing how the genre evolved.
So I bought all the games for this Love/Hate series on Steam, and I don’t own any of the Doom movies, so I don’t really have any physical media to show off. That said, my birthday happened to land when I was playing through these games, and to commemorate my good time with this franchise, I bought myself a swanky Cacodemon deck box for my Angels/Humans Magic: The Gathering deck!
Doom Games Ranked
Here is how I would rank all of the games that I played for this series:
- S-tier: Doom Eternal
- Doom Eternal is just the best. I love how intense its combat gets and how it feels to play. It tests you as a player, so overcoming its challenges feels genuinely earned. It helps that the weapons here are just perfect and feel incredible to fire.
- A-tier: Doom (1993), Doom (2016)
- I really was not expecting Doom (1993) to hold up so well in 2026, but it absolutely does. The core gameplay is rock-solid and fast-paced. I love these bite-sized levels that feel appropriately challenging for the player. The levels are also fairly straight-forward to navigate without getting lost in. I also cannot understate how iconic the enemies in this game are, it’s incredible how well they nailed this in 1993!
- I really like Doom (2016)… it just doesn’t have that extra oomph for me to put it ahead of Eternal or the original game. It’s definitely my favourite in terms of storytelling, and its art style might just be my favourite in the entire franchise.
- B-tier: Doom II: Hell on Earth, Doom: The Dark Ages, Doom 64
- I like Doom II, but I kind of hate it at the same time. It’s designed to be so much more challenging than its predecessor, to the point of frustration. If that was the end of its problems, I’d probably put it into A-tier, but unfortunately this game’s levels are enormous and more difficult to navigate than ever. Compared to the first game, Doom II also has more annoying enemies. I just can’t help but feel that the first Doom is the tighter, more enjoyable experience than this “bigger-is-better!” sequel.
- Doom: The Dark Ages is definitely a step down compared to its predecessors, but I have to respect that it tried to do something different. By the time you get to the game’s second half, you’ll get into the flow of the combat system and then it really starts getting enjoyable. It’s also just the most creative Doom game by a long shot, which helps.
- I enjoyed Doom 64 a good bit more than I was expecting to. Getting a glimpse into “next-gen Doom” is so fascinating, and it’s got this uniquely eerie and moody feel to everything. If it wasn’t designed to piss you off, it might have scored higher.
- C-tier: Doom 3
- Doom 3 was really disappointing. It’s so slow-paced. The guns suck. The screen-shake is ridiculous. And, to top it all off, it’s not even particularly scary. The game felt like a chore and it took a long time for me to start having fun with it.
- D-tier: Super Noah’s Ark 3D
- Yeah, I know, it’s not a Doom game, but I would feel pretty bad if Doom 3 was bringing up the rear in this tier list, because it’s not that bad. Likewise, Super Noah’s Ark 3D was not that bad either, so that should just show you how much I still respect Doom 3, despite being my least-favourite game in the franchise.
- Oh, also, if you want to know where the two Doom movies would have ranked, they’d also be in D-tier as follows: Doom (2005), Doom: Annihilation, Super Noah’s Ark 3D.
Ranking The Enemies of Classic Doom
Classic Doom has an incredibly iconic enemy roster. I’m indifferent to the enemies of the other Doom games, but classic Doom? I have some goddamn thoughts. Let’s get into them!
- S-tier: Hellknight, Baron of Hell
- Hellknights are just so much fun to fight. They have all the qualities of a Baron of Hell (tanky enemies with high-damage projectiles that are fairly easy to predict and dodge), but they are less-tanky in comparison and therefore can show up more frequently and in groups without feeling overwhelming. My only real complaint is that I wish they were a bit more visually-distinct, but otherwise they’re always an enjoyable little challenge.
- The Baron of Hell is… well, it’s a Hellknight, but stronger and rarer, which makes it a bit more of a treat when you do encounter one. That said, their tankier defenses can get annoying at times, so I give the Hellknight the slightest of edges.
- A-tier: Cyberdemon, Mancubus
- Cyberdemons are saved for special occasions, and they make for a pretty fun opponent when they do. Their rockets can feel a bit impossible to dodge on occasion, but you really respect a Cyberdemon when you encounter one, because you won’t get a second chance to screw up.
- Mancubus share a similar sort of philosophy to the most enjoyable Doom enemies: they fire a projectile that you have to learn to skillfully dodge. What makes Mancubus stick out though is how dangerous their projectile attack is. You have to really learn how to approach them, because their projectile will melt your health bar. They are utilized sparingly, which makes them a very fun challenge whenever they show up.
- B-tier: Cacodemon, Imp, Shotgun Guy, Zombieman
- Of all the common enemy times, Cacodemons are definitely my favourite. Their projectile is fast, but still fairly straight-forward to dodge, and they take a fair amount of ammo to down. Most importantly of all though: they look so goofy! Who couldn’t love these guys?
- The humble Imp deserves its place in the middle of this list, an enemy that you never get tired of encountering.
- Shotgun Guy is the sort of enemy that’s very easy to dispatch, but who can still punish you if you’re not on your game. Another one of those enemies that you spend the entire game mowing down, but who you never tire of encountering.
- Zombieman is basically the same as the Shotgun Guy, just a bit less-dangerous to face-off against… and that’s about all I have to say about that.
- C-tier: Pinky Demon, Spectre, Chaingunner, Arachnotron
- The Pinky Demon is another enemy that looks fucking goofy. That’s fine, but what knocks them into C-tier for me is their gameplay, which is just walking up to you… you rarely ever take damage from a Pinky Demon, because you always have ammunition to kill them with before they ever become a danger. Hell, even if they do make it into melee, you can just chainsaw them to death. They’re just too one-dimensional to be a threat.
- Spectres are just Pinkies… but invisible. That’s literally it. Unfortunately, even while invisible, Spectres still aren’t that difficult to spot and kill before they become a threat. If anything, the fact that they have to literally cheat in order to put up any fight also makes me dislike them even more.
- The Chaingunner is just a dickhead enemy, pure and simple. An enemy which melts your health bar as long as you’re in its line of sight is annoying. Having multiples of them in a room is basically a death-sentence, making them the priority number one enemy in nearly every circumstance.
- Arachnotrons suffer for a couple reasons. First of all, their projectiles come out in waves, which make them difficult to predict and dodge. Secondly, the sound of their shots is grating. Every time I saw these things, I just got annoyed, so thank God they are used sparingly.
- D-tier: Revenant, Spider Mastermind, Lost Soul, Pain Elemental, Icon of Sin
- Fuck the Revenant, this guy has been the bane of my existence in nearly every Doom game. Shockingly, they may be at their absolute worst here in classic Doom, thanks to their infinite homing missiles which annihilate your health bar. They’re an utter crapshoot to fight, I hate ’em.
- The Spider Mastermind is basically the Chaingunner, but with orders of magnitude more HP. As a result, they are an utter bitch to fight, forcing you to duck in and out of cover. Hey, I sure hope you don’t accidentally shoot the wall in front of you with the rocket launcher while weaving in and out, that sure would fuckin’ suck, eh buddy?!
- Lost Souls, flaming skulls which scream and dive-bomb at you, are a pain in the ass. They’re basically just there to rush and harass you, but most frustratingly, they impede your movement. This practically forces you to take out Lost Souls as soon as possible.
- The only thing worse than a Lost Soul is a big fuck-off demon that endlessly spawns more Lost Souls. The Pain Elemental earns its spot near the bottom of this list for being a fucking dick that needs to die immediately.
- The Icon of Sin is a pretty shitty final boss. It endlessly spawns demons into the arena, so you just need to activate some switches and then hope that you can precisely lob enough rockets into its brain to kill it… it’s not really a test of the game’s skills so much as it is a “do you know what to do to win already?” simulator.
- F-tier: Arch-vile
- Fuck the Arch-vile, gangly looking motherfucker. They do a stupid amount of damage considering how difficult to dodge their attacks are, and they take a ton of ammunition to take down. The only good thing about them is that they’re one of the rarest enemy types, but even one Arch-vile is two too many.
Ranking the Weapons of Doom
There are a lot of different Doom weapons and a lot of different renditions of them over the years. This is a composite tier list, taking into account each weapon’s various iterations to determine its rank. The version of the weapon that appears on the tier list represents its “ideal” form in my opinion. Got it? Let’s get to the rankings:
- S-tier: Super Shotgun
- The Super Shotgun is an S-tier weapon in nearly every game it appears in, being the most overpowered, mainstay weapon in your entire arsenal. Doom: The Dark Ages‘ Super Shotgun is probably the most broken version, but for my money, the Doom Eternal rendition is the absolute pinnacle thanks to its meathook attachment, which also turns it into a traversal tool. The uncontested king, every other Doom gun wishes it was this cool.
- A-tier: BFG9000, BFC, Crucible Sword, Soul Cube, Shield Saw
- I would have loved to throw the BFG9000 into S-tier, but there’s one big reason why it fell down to A-tier: it’s not all that great in classic Doom. Like, don’t get me wrong, it’ll do a lot of damage, but I find that it is inconsistent. It seems like every time I fire it, some enemy I thought would be killed ends up surviving, necessitating a quick and unexpected weapon swap, or a second shot, wasting its precious ammo reserves. That said, its screen-clearing effects in Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are legendary for a reason and cement the BFG9000 as a weapon to remember.
- The BFC is just the BFG, but in crossbow form. It’s got the same room-clearing effect, but I can’t really justify placing it higher than the original, since it’s literally just an imitation.
- It takes a long time to unlock the Crucible Sword in Doom Eternal, but man is it worth it. Being able to run up and one-shot even Barons of Hell is just epic, making this by far the best melee weapon in the series.
- Doom 3‘s Soul Cube is a curious power weapon which charges after killing a few enemies. Once charged, you can send it off to kill a chosen enemy, dealing massive damage and often one-shotting them. Much of Doom 3‘s horror atmosphere goes out of the window when you get it, but the late-game power fantasy is a welcome change.
- Doom: The Dark Ages‘ Shield Saw is easily the most impactful rendition of the Chainsaw. I’ve got my complaints about how the game gets warped around the existence of the Shield Saw, but a) that’s not really the Shield Saw’s fault, and b) it just demonstrates how goddamn powerful this thing is. Offensive power, the crux of your entire defense, mobility, a strong enemy debuff… this thing literally does it all.
- B-tier: Plasma Gun, Chaingun, Rocket Launcher, Gauss Cannon/Ballista, Flail
- The Plasma Gun takes the top of B-tier just due to sheer reliability. After the Super Shotgun, this is the weapon I always found myself falling back on in every Doom game I was playing. While I do find it a bit annoying that it sometimes uses the same ammo pool as the BFG9000, I’d rather have a solid, mainstay gun than an “oh shit” button in my back pocket. All of the Plasma Guns are good, but Doom 3 might be my favourite version… simply because it’s one of the few good guns in the game, so I was leaning on it heavily.
- The Chaingun is another gun which is pretty much always good, but I always found myself gravitating to the Plasma Gun instead of it given the chance. In classic Doom it even can stunlock enemies, preventing even the largest enemies from firing back at you. That said, I think that the fully-upgraded Chaingun in Doom Eternal is my favourite, just because you can put out an obscene amount of damage with a goddamn quad-chaingun!
- The Rocket Launcher is yet another weapon that’s hard to screw up. It’s worthwhile in every Doom game, but it doesn’t hit the top of B-tier for one good reason: it comes with caveats. The splash damage from a Rocket Launcher is heavily damaging and has a pretty wide blast radius, meaning that you have to be absolutely certain that you’re safe to fire it. This is half of the reason why Lost Souls are such a pain in the ass. I don’t know how many times I grabbed a rocket launcher to kill a Pain Elemental, only for some Lost Soul cunt to fly into my face and make me blow myself up. As for the best version, Doom Eternal‘s upgraded version that can fire three rockets sure is hard to beat (although The Dark Ages‘ vampiric version is pretty busted too).
- The Gauss Cannon and Ballista are technically different weapons, but they’re so similar that I genuinely didn’t realize the difference until just now. They’re basically the Doom equivalent of a sniper rifle: very accurate, long-ranged, high damage directed at a single target. While this sort of precision isn’t really conducive to Doom‘s regular combat flow, they are pretty useful against certain demons, so I did find myself enjoying this weapon when I was using it.
- The Flail was my mainstay melee option throughout Doom: The Dark Ages. With the ability to break armour, plus a fair trade-off between recharge and increased damage, the Flail was my melee option of choice for about 90% of my playthrough.
- C-tier: Combat Shotgun, Heavy Cannon, Plasma Cycler, Machine Gun, Grenade Launcher, Chainsaw
- The Combat Shotgun isn’t a bad gun… it’s just completely inferior to the Super Shotgun. Like, sure, it does more damage at range… but I’m not firing a shotgun at range. It uses less ammo, but I’d gladly use more ammo to kill enemies faster. I do appreciate that Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal differentiate it by giving it a grenade launcher upgrade, as this finally gave it some sort of unique benefit you couldn’t get elsewhere.
- The Heavy Cannon (aka Heavy Assault Rifle) is fine, but it doesn’t really do what I want to be doing in a Doom game. It’s basically a mid-range, mid-damage, rapid-fire weapon… when, most of the time, I’m looking for a short-range, high-damage weapon. I don’t dislike it, but it’s about the most vanilla weapon option at your disposal in Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal.
- The Plasma Cycler is one of the plasma gun variants in Doom: The Dark Ages. It’s definitely one of my favourite weapons in the game… which should be saying something considering how middle-of-the-pack it’s landed. Really, I like how quickly and accurately it shoots, my main problem is that the damage feels just a tad weak.
- Doom 3‘s Machine Gun is one of the best weapons in Doom 3 just by sheer virtue of doing reliable damage. It’s the most boring weapon in the entire game, but you can depend on it to do what you need.
- I genuinely don’t know why they bothered with the Grenade Launcher for Doom: The Dark Ages. It certainly gets the job done against crowds of enemies… but why would you ever use this when you could just use the Rocket Launcher? Sure, it’ll affect a slightly smaller area, but I’m not using Rocket Launcher ammo to kill basic enemies I could kill with the Pulverizer or Shield Saw!
- Oh the Chainsaw. This thing is the absolute coolest weapon in the Doom franchise, and yet it has always been kind of crap. In classic Doom and Doom 3, the Chainsaw is just too dangerous to use effectively most of the time, making it a real desperation play. You have plenty of ammo you can pick up, so you never feel like you need to conserve it (maybe that changes on higher difficulties though). What keeps it from the pits though is Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, which transform it into a recharging insta-kill power weapon, incentivizing you to use it more regularly. Even in those games though, you never really get to use it as much as you’d like.
- D-tier: Ravager, Pulverizer, Chainshot, Impaler, Dreadmace, Plasma Accelerator, Unmaykr, Fists
- As one of the Skullcrusher-class weapons, the Ravager is one of the coolest guns in the game. It’s kind of like a long-ranged, rapid-fire version of the Combat Shotgun, which increases its fire-rate the longer you hold down the shoot button. While it is pretty strong, those couple seconds it takes to charge feel awful when you could just be insta-killing them with a Super Shotgun blast…
- And here we have the Pulverizer, which is basically the same as the Ravager, but with a much more spread out weapon spread. The Pulverizer can hit a ridiculous number of enemies on-screen at once, and it’s even pretty powerful when used up close on larger demons (such as the Mancubus). However, that charge-up period really limits its usefulness. Plus, it’s in an awkward place in Doom: The Dark Ages: low damage, high spread crowd control isn’t particularly important, because you can just use the Shield Saw to mow down fodder enemies automatically. Instead, you typically want to be packing weapons that inflict high damage and can hit multiple foes at once.
- The Chainshot is very powerful, but the fact that you have to take a couple seconds to fully charge it ever time you fire really makes it feel slow at times. This also makes missing your shot feel awful.
- But hey, at least the Chainshot is powerful, so you can fall back onto it at times. The Impaler is… alright, I guess. It does decent damage against a single enemy with an okay rate of fire. The biggest thing it has going for it is that you can get an upgrade to make enemies drop more Impaler ammo… yay?
- I was not a fan of the Dreadmace in Doom: The Dark Ages. I’m sure that there’s people who swear by it, but I hated how long it took to charge up an attack. In a fast-paced game like Doom, that’s just too much to ask for an attack I’m usually throwing out as a last-resort.
- Doom: The Dark Ages‘ Plasma Accelerator is kind of like a Plasma Submachine Gun: extremely high rate of fire, but with a ton of recoil, making it difficult to stay on target. I genuinely do not know why you’d want to use this weapon. Once I unlocked the Plasma Cycler, I switched to that and never once looked back.
- The Unmaykr is a complete disappointment. Easily the worst of the “power weapons”, the Unmakyr’s two iterations have both sucked. In Doom 64, it’s weak and ineffective unless you complete all three secret levels, and then it just becomes ridiculously overpowered. Meanwhile, you need to complete a bunch of challenges to even unlock it in Doom Eternal, only to find out that it’s objectively weaker than the BFG9000 despite sharing the same ammo pool, rendering it utterly worthless.
- Ahh the humble fists. Honestly, for most of Doom‘s existence, these things have been utter trash and would have been at the very bottom of the list… if not for Doom Eternal. Your fist attack in that game powers up and can unleash a devastating shockwave every once in a while. It ended up becoming a mainstay ability for me, so it saved the fists from the bottom of the list.
- E-tier: Shredder, Grenades
- Doom: The Dark Ages has a lot of crappy guns, but none are worse than the Shredder. A low-damage, mid-range gun that takes forever to kill enemies? Who the hell would ever bother with this piece of shit gun when they could just be using the Super Shotgun???
- Doom 3 allows you to carry around and throw grenades. While they’re reasonably powerful, Doom 3‘s levels are cramped, limiting their usefulness. I could just never tell where my grenade was going to end up, making them a weapon that was never worth using.
- F-tier: Pistol
- God, the pistol has sucked in pretty much every Doom game. It’s a pea-shooter, a weapon you only use when literally all other avenues have been exhausted. If I had to pick a favourite rendition, it would probably have to be Doom (2016)… but that’s just because you can do a charged shot to do some damage.
What Would My Ideal Doom Sequel Look Like?
Despite my strong feelings about the games in this franchise, speculating about a Doom sequel is a difficult task for me. It’s tempting to just pick and choose the stuff I liked the most: Doom Eternal‘s gameplay and combat model is basically perfect, Doom 3‘s atmosphere is the most evocative and deserves a revisit, and I think that classic Doom still has fertile ground that could be explored.
That said: I appreciate that Doom, as a franchise, does not do iterative sequels. Sometimes this means that we’ll get a disappointing follow-up, but I’d much rather id Software stretch their creativity than to run the franchise into the ground with the same thing over and over again.
Is It Even Possible to Make a Good Doom Movie…?
As far as video game movies go, the two Doom adaptations we’ve gotten have been… alright. They both have their moments, but fall well short of being “good”, both as adaptations of Doom or in terms of general quality. Is Doom just unfilmable then…?
The answer is, obviously, no. Doom is not exactly a complicated property to adapt. The problem, as I see it, is twofold:
- Not sticking to the series’ fundamental structure/power fantasy. This is demonstrated most clearly by both of the Doom films basically just being an adaptation of Doom 3… but even then, they fuck it up in several regards. I think that Doom 3 could legitimately make for a good movie, but they keep ignoring the best parts of that game’s story structure. Instead of making act one a horrific outbreak scenario that we witness first-hand, they always make it happen off-screen and then spend the bulk of the movie turning “what happened at the base?” into a mystery, with only some zombies and low-level demons acting as obstacles until the end of the film. As I noted in the entry for Doom (2005): they’re not trying to make a Doom movie, they’re trying to make a Resident Evil knock-off.
- Money. Honestly, this is probably a big factor behind why these films are so underwhelming. The first Doom film was apparently budgeted around $60-70 million dollars, but it looks like it cost less than half that. Meanwhile, Doom: Annihilation looks like it can’t have cost more than $10 million dollars (and even that’s a pretty generous estimate). Without a large budget and proper allocation of those funds, you can’t realistically make a live-action Doom film that feels like “Doom“.
As I see it, there are two routes you could go to finally have a shot at making a good Doom movie:
- Adapt Doom 3 For Real. Let’s actually make a movie based on Doom 3 for once. We can have a main character at the start and some supporting characters with them, but the vast majority of the cast should be killed off within the first fifteen to twenty five minutes as the demonic incursion occurs and all hell breaks loose in the research base. Our hero barely escapes alive, but now he’s alone, isolated, and desperate. It should play out more like Die Hard than Resident Evil, with our Doomguy acquiring heavier and heavier ordinance to deal with the increasingly more dangerous demons he’s encountering as he tries to shut down the hellportal before it’s too late. You can even have him encountering survivors and supporting cast, but he should be solo for the vast majority of the film.
- Make a Doomslayer Movie. This option’s probably more appealing for fans of modern Doom, as there’s a lot of love for this ridiculously overpowered take on the character. This would play out kind of like a higher-budget version of John Wick, with everyone freaking out about this musclebound freak who tears through the armies of hell effortlessly. This would be significantly more expensive and difficult to pull off, and frankly it would probably be better-served in animated form rather than live-action… or, y’know, you could also just play the games to scratch that itch. But, if done right, a Doomslayer movie could be absolutely glorious.
What Does the Future Hold For Doom?
Aaand this is where things start to get a bit depressing. During the playing/writing process for this Love/Hate series, it was announced that Microsoft (which purchased id Software’s parent company, Bethesda, years ago) was laying off much of the staff at id. The studio has been largely gutted and, while there are assurances that they will be making more Doom games and continue to use the idtech engine, it’s an utter outrage that they’ve fucked over such a successful and storied studio like this. Fuck Microsoft, fuck Xbox, and fuck the AAA video game landscape.
So… yeah. We’re apparently getting more Doom eventually, but who knows what shape that will take, or whether it will measure up to the bar for quality of id’s last decade of hits.
And that’s it for another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! As always, I had a lot of fun playing and writing this one. I inagine the next Love/Hate series will be another Final Fantasy installment, but after that… who knows. I have some ideas, but haven’t committed to anything yet. Follow me on Bluesky @barloq.bsky.social for updates.
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