I pre-loaded Doom. I wasn’t going to do it, but I am in an endless quest for graphics and gameplay evaluation. I know I sound old when I say this… am I saying this? Yeah — it’s a gore fest. It feels like it’s trying a little too hard with the face smashing and the head ripping and the biting and… well, everyone’s in full armor suits and it just doesn’t feel right for Doom.
Of course I have formed this opinion by the opening trailer alone. Despite having pre-loaded it, it will not launch. It did launch, but when I opened it for the first time and saw a warning screen against flickering on NVidia cards I was reminded of a tweet I had seen from NVidia about an updated driver specifically for the Doom beta. I quickly hit ALT+F4 and opened up GeForce Experience to check the latest driver.
I was surprised that nothing came up, went back to that tweet and installed it directly. It was labled as Doom hotfix 364.96 — It no longer started after that. I only just now got to downloading the previous driver to see what it looks like with the original one.
*update* After backing off to the previous version of the display driver, it works! It flickers and is pretty hard to play but it’s playable within a window. If I go borderless windowed, it does the same flickery bits, almost appearing interlaced. I’m not sure what the issue is but it was enough to give me an idea.
I’m about as good at Doom as I was at Unreal Tournament / 2003. I managed a couple kills, spawned as a demon a few times… the first of which I absolutely slaughtered about 10 different guys and unlocked quite a few achievements with just that first run. It was all downhill from there. The levels are very doom like, graphics are detailed, but levels lack the detail. You have a few stone floors with blood running through them but it’s nothing super impressive.
I stand my ground on my first impressions. It plays like it looks, and I can’t see this flying off the shelves at full price. I would put it at about $20 and it will have to hit that price point before I bother. I have many other games with stories to play through, and I don’t relish fighting demon spawn bosses while strafing around them launching rocket after rocket into them.