Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that the benchmark for any new gaming platform would be a First Person Shooter. Maybe it’s our human compulsion for creating environments regardless of the location’s suitability: ski resorts in Dubai, metropolis’s built on fault lines, beaches in the middle of Mexico City and a First Person Shooter on every platform under the sun, controls be dammed. We’ve seen FPS shooters on the PSP with its lack of secondary analogue controller, the DS with its touch screen and D-Pad, and now the iPhone with it’s lack of traditional hardware controls.
The App Store is now officially one year old. In that year FPS’s have tried a cluster fuck of different control mechanisms from tap-to-shoot to soft buttons to accelerometer controls for movement. This onslaught of games have varied from “okay” to “god that sucked”. This experimental design approach reminds me of how my sister tried to bake cookies last week. She took the eggs, flour, salt, butter, milk, chocolate chunks and tossed it all in a bowl then mixed. She got all the ingredients right, but the way she combined them was off. Similarly, giving a FPS on the iPhone six degrees of movement and a gun to aim and shoot doesn’t make it a good FPS. More often than not it makes it a decidedly mediocre one.
It was with a heavy heart that I decided to review Doom Resurrection for the iPhone and then do a subsequent interview with developers John Carmack and Tom Mustaine. In short, I expected the game to suck.
Too many iPhone shooters have managed to make fun secondary to cramming in all other elements of a FPS. It says a lot about the game that the first words out of John Carmack’s mouth were:
“Did you have fun?”
In short, I did. But I’d only played the game for a bit over an hour, and a few days later I realized that things weren’t quite as black and white.
Doom Resurrection does a few things really well. It looks gorgeous, it handles great, and it’s fun. To accomplish this, the game makes some trade-offs. I’m a man who can appreciate those trade-offs. I don’t mind knowing how laws and sausages are made. That little bit of messy pragmatism is often needed to distill things down to their crucial elements.
“It was not going to be possible to have [Doom 3] look like it does on the existing iPhone platform and have freeform motion. We are doing a lot of smoke-and-mirrors…”
Carmack
And so that’s the rub: Doom Resurrection lacks free movement. The devs would rather I stayed away from train references, but DR is essentially a rail shooter. (Oh, how our pampered gamer-hearts cringe at the word.) But the thing is, this is a really fucking good rail shooter that creates a sense of tempo and mood that’s clearly remiss in other iPhone shooters.
“Every time something cool happens the player is going to see it. In normal FPS development you could spend $100,000 doing some awesome scene in the game, and the player might never look at it.”
Carmack
To cram another analogy into this review, imagine watching a good sci-fi horror flick but at the scariest, pee-in-your-pants moment having full control of the character’s Big Fucking Gun (yes, it’s in the game) and then blasting the crap out of all the monsters on screen. It’d be one hell of a satisfying moment, and I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t be bitching about the lack of free-range movement.
It’s because the game forgoes free movement that we get some wonderful features. DR’s graphics are nearly Doom 3 quality, the sound is simple but atmospheric (may I recommend the headphones?), and the shooting mechanics feel well-balanced. DR uses the accelerometer to control the aiming reticle, and it has just enough weight so that you almost feel like you might overshoot your target. After getting the hang of it and pumping a few rounds into a demon’s head, it felt fantastic. So much so that I was surprised to learn that this mechanic was only stumbled upon in a late developmental version of the game.
“At the start we thought it was just a touch screen so you’d tap to shoot the monsters, but it was never fun; It felt too clinical. It didn’t feel like you were swinging your heavy gun around to bring down the monster before he chews off your head.”
Carmack
There’s a demon charging at me with, I assume, an intent to chew my head off. He’s caught me off guard, and I’m currently carrying my sidearm, which is a poor match for the demon’s bulk. On cue my character moves backward down a long hallway, giving me enough time to switch to my shotgun, reload it, then blow the demon’s face sideways. The great thing: DR seems to match my instinctual movements under the in-game circumstances. Pairing that with my deft use of the accelerometer, and, well, you’ve got a good damned team between id and I.
This is just one of several moments when the scripted movement of the game was beautifully spot on. It seemed to match what my instinctual movement would have been and, paired with the shooting mechanics, felt great.
“[The shooting mechanic] was definitely a trial-and-error thing. You said the word ‘distilled’, and that’s definitely a word we’ve been using. We really wanted to distil the visceral Doom experience into the iPhone.”
Mustaine
Unlike a traditional arcade rail shooter this game is definitely more dynamic, and the scripted movements are more than just (1) shoot everything in room, (2) move to the next. There’s a lot of motion shift going on here, especially with shooting guys that suddenly show up behind you. This keeps you guessing as to where id’s next attempt to separate your head from your body will come from.
“The shooting mechanic had to feel good. You had to have that millisecond of: Am I going to be able to get this guy in the head? Am I going to be able to aim and actually shoot?”
Mustaine
Given the polished shine of the gameplay mechanic I was surprised at how mediocre the story line was. The game takes place at the same time as Doom 3 but in a separate section of the base. You’re trying to fix and power on various systems to get off the base, and your sidekick is a little flying robot that seems to offer no more than the ability to open doors. Cutscenes were tedious and made worse by the fact that there’s no way to skip through them entirely.
The problem with anything scripted is that it must inevitably come to an end, and therein lies DR’s main problem. I finished DR in about three hours. Going back to my movie analogy, three hours is about right for a $10 admission fee, but this isn’t a sci-fi flick, and as a pampered gamer I feel that replay value is an almost constitutional right for all titles.
Doom Resurrection tries to do a few things to stay on your iPhone’s springboard. It grades how well you finish each level and it lets you replay levels to improve that score. Grading difficulties offer slightly more challenging enemies, but since this is a rail shooter there’s little surprise to where they’re coming from.
Carmack has a reputation for pushing the envelop, but I got the distinct impression that he’s being more pragmatic this time around. Yes, the game uses Doom 3 media - and that on the surface is impressive - but its use also represents a time saver for the game’s development.
When I asked about hardware variations between iPhones and what we could expect as far as the 3.0 software update:
“In Doom Ressurection we have P2P co-op play that’s not in the shipping version, but will come later. We didn’t expect the 3.0 OS out so quickly! Two players join together, they see each other’s cursors, and they either compete or co-op for score. We’re hoping to patch it down the road. We’re also looking at additional levels and potentially some stat-tracking stuff as well.”
Mustaine
As for the hardware variations:
“Okay, you will not be able to max out both platforms with the same title. You can extend across all of them and the 3GS just runs smoother and faster( you aim for higher frame rates). What I want to do is take our id Tech 5 megatexture pipeline and run it on a 3GS, and do unbelievably good-looking stuff. I’m not even sure what kind of game I want to do. But, we have such a full slate on the iPhone, that I’m not sure…”
Carmack
Doom Classic, a Doom II RPG, and a Wolfenstein RPG. Pretty much anything from id Mobile could be ported, too. I wouldn’t expect anything that pushes the iPhone 3GS hardware anytime soon.
In short I’d say rent DR, but you can’t. Fingers crossed id will release a lite version soon. Any game that charges $10 needs to have a lite version.
fuck this shit its doom classic I’m excited about
“DR’s graphics are nearly Doom 3 quality”
Come on its not even quake2 quality….
>> Any game that charges $10 needs to have a lite version. <<
I’d have said that $10 is pretty much a light version right there. 3 hours of gameplay for less than the cost of two meals at McDonalds.
Personally, Doom Resurrection was the first version of Doom I’ve played that I ever enjoyed. Like you, I thought the cutscenes could have been better, but the gameplay itself was great. Personally, I think it was well worth $10. I’ve probably wasted $10 already on crappy 99 cents games that weren’t worth the 99 cents!