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A few months ago when I talked with John Carmack about Doom he joked that it had pretty much been ported to every platform out there. My witty retort was that I expected it to show up on a fancy toaster. Much of the love that Doom receives is due to nostalgia and the sheer number of hours we gamers invested in the game over the years. Time invested trying to get Doom to run on a Palm, a jailbroken iPhone, a hacked iPod – the list goes on. At long last we have Doom Classic on our iPhones. This is Doom, the original. The one we spent hours chewing over, marvelling at the gore and the weaponry with which you could create such carnage. Doom Classic is so much Doom that I’m going to spend very little time talking about the game. This is Doom, all 36 levels across 4 episodes. Same bad guys, same weapons, and the added bonus of local wifi multiplayer mode. In short it all pretty much 100% kicks ass as expected. Except for…
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The controls. Oh man the controls! Let me go ahead and say that they don’t suck, which in my eyes makes Carmack very nearly a super genius. But they’re not amazing either, and quite frankly they couldn’t possibly be since even Carmack’s legendary boundary pushing prowess couldn’t cause the iPhone’s touch screen to sprout a pair of analogue nubs [Ed: why did this make me think of The Thing?]. I impatiently wait for a hardware developer to come out with a proper controller for the iPhone and cross my fingers that a slew of developers will jump on board and support it. Until that magical day I have to give props to Doom Classic for realizing that with something as fiddly as touch controls the more options the better. So Doom Classic has:
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Fans of Doom and those gamers that really, really, really, need to play a FPS shooter on their iPhone should spend the $6.99 and buy this game. It’s when judged against the slew of other iPhone games that are infinitely better suited to the platforms that I’d hesitate to fully recommend any iPhone FPS. That said Wolfenstein 3D recently received a massive update which made it a very good investment and shows that id is paying attention to its customers. Carmack stated that he hopes to add DLC to Doom Classic, and while it may not be free I imagine Doom Classic will have a long shelf life for gamers who can look past the passable controls.
