Doom Roguelike Review (Version 0.9.9.7)
Doom Roguelike is a different take on the hit PC classic, Doom, featuring a roguelike role-playing game experience of leveling up, randomly generated levels, multiple challenge modes, and lots of weapons and
gear to use! The normal mode for this game allows you to play the classic Doom levels, from episode 1 to 3, featuring Phobos, Deimos, and the Hell dimension. All of the classic monsters are here as well, including cacodemons, pinkie demons, the zombie grunts, imps, Cyber Demons, the Spider Mastermind, and includes the monsters from Doom 2 and even other ID games, such as Quake! The difficulty levels from the previous game are here as well, although changed a bit to represent the role-playing game experience, such as changing up the monsters that show up and including or taking away the special levels you can find. Doom Roguelike involves taking turns in combat, determined by time to fire, reload, instead of a simple turn by turn rate.
When you begin the game, you can choose between 3 classes, the Marine, Scout, and Technician, who come with their own starting stats and ability, such as the marine being beefier and getting longer stat durations, scouts getting a 10% faster movement speed and knowledge of the staircase locations, and technicians being able to use consumables near instantly, hacking the computer maps for tracking data, and being a master of tinkering with equipment. Speaking of which, you will find mods in your game, which have certain ability boosts for footwear, armor, and weapons. Modding these weapons with the right combination of mods will allow you to create a brand new item, called an "assembly", and finding schematics or using the Doom roguelike wiki will tell you how to create these items.
There is also a "Tactics" option, which allows you to change from a cautious standpoint, which is default, to a running tactic, which gives you a 30% move speed bonus, 20% extra dodge ability, and enemies take a -4 hit penalty, but makes you receive a -2 hit accuracy and makes melee damage halved for the duration. After the running tactic is over, you go tired, which you cannot change back to running until tired wears off or you use a health item. The tactic modes offer a deeper sense of strategy to this game as well, which will be needed for the tougher enemies.
Character Building
Doom Roguelike offers a pretty deep character building system, through the use of the aforementioned classes (scout, marine, technician), and the use of traits you can assign with each level up. The traits system works somewhat like Fallout in a way, but you get a trait each level, allowing you to further customize and create strong character classes. Examples of these traits include the Ironman trait, which gives you an addition 10 Hit Points per Ironman trait (character defaults at 50 hit points). Another example is the "Reloader Trait", which gives you a 20% reduction in reload times per rank. There is multiple traits to use, and some can only be used with using other traits, such as adding 1 rank into the Finesse trait to unlock the Juggler trait.
Music and Sound
Doom Roguelike offers classic sound clips from the hit game, Doom, including all the noises and screams you know and love, such as demon death screams, grunts dying, the horrible sounds of a cyberdemon's hoof hitting the ground, the sounds of your weapons firing, and much more! The music in this game includes modified versions of some of the classic music, such as Episode 1 mission 1′s stage music for example. The music and the sound effects mix very well with the role-playing game mechanics and immerses you into the different style of Doom this game offers.
Badges and challenges
Doom Roguelike also includes the Angel Challenges, which are different rules and stipulations you are forced to play by, such as a pistols only run, shotgun challenges, pacifism challenge, berserk challenges, and so much more, which range from easy to extremely difficult. These challenges also help increase your rank in the game, which will unlock more challenges and conditions to proceed to the next rank.
Badges are your standard achievements in the game, ranging from bronze, to silver, to gold, platinum, diamond, and angelic badges. These badges range from easy, to very difficult, and some are almost impossible to achieve. There is currently (at time of writing) 147 badges to achieve, and can be as simple as discovering an assembly, to winning a standard nightmare game without taking damage, entering into the absurd difficulty ranks. All these badges add to your skill rank, which will unlock more challenges to play.
Medals are the extra achievements of the game, which act like Steam or similar style achievements, and require you to accomplish certain conditions to unlock them, such as completing an Angel Challenge, killing a cyberdemon without taking damage, and also increases your skill rank.
Overall
Overall, I found this game to be very exciting, and keep close to the original Doom's sound, music, and game play, all the while adding new items from other game franchises. I also enjoy the sense of strategy needed for this game, using the tactics modes, character building, and assembling and collecting new and powerful weaponry. This game is a blast and its free to download and play, and I highly recommend this game to Role playing game fans and Doom fans!
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