Be Excellent To Each Other

I've completed this and it was brilliant! I've got far too many other games to play to go back and do all of the challenges but... Yeah, I might just do a couple.

Yeah, that's ok then.

Gave ultranightmare a look after I completed it. Was quite hard, but didn't seem unreasonably so. Got to the last fight of the first level saved and quit because I had to do something else. Then found it doesn't save or something. (It did put some text in my face, but I didn't read it. I presume the text was saying "you can't save, you fool")

Jesus, the multiplayer is dreadful!

I'm enjoying reading about this game, even though I don't have a console or a computer capable of actually playing it on.

It's a very very good computer game.

The Chaingun is quite disappointing, I've maxed out one tree + mastery and have half of the other one, but I don't much care for either.

It just seems to be far too many bullets to kill/weaken anything, so it feels underpowered even though its overall damage is probably balanced well enough. Absolutely piles through its ammo stupidly quickly too.

My overall favourite weapon is the Super Shotgun, which when maxed out + mastery does phenomenal amounts of damage very quickly, and you can carry enough ammo for the thing to get through a pretty big fight. (I've put maximum points into the AMMO bonuses from the Argent Energy thingies.)

The Gauss Cannon is devastating too, especially when maxed out on the 'scope' tree + mastery.

Finally, don't underestimate the frag grenades, even though they look little fart bombs, with the all the points in the equipment tree on the Praetor upgrades plus rune + rune upgrade they can do a very useful amount of damage, you can throw two of them at a time, and they become available again quickly too. Really helps during a big fight.

I'm finding that Super Shotgun + Gauss Cannon + Frag Grenades are enough to get me through any fight, if I switch to any other weapons it's mostly just for a bit of a variety. The Assault Rifle with the maxed out Micro Missiles is very good too though.

I'm halfway through Level 9 so still a decent amount of time to get everything modded and maxed out I suppose, albeit I'll probably have damn near finished the game by then, so I think that whilst technically there are enough weapon mods and upgrade points to max out everything, for the ones you choose last there won't be much of the game left to give them any sort of proper workout.

I also rarely went near the chaingun. Or the plasma rifle, really.

I didn't use the chain gun much until I got mastery for the turret mod; but with it, it's a beast.

Those couple of instances you get a haste powerup after you've collected the chaingun turns it into a complete meat grinder.

DOOM is 40% off in the Steam summer sale. Get it for £23.99!

Or pay £39.99 for it less than a week ago, like I did.

I knew the summer sale was imminent, but I really didn't think DOOM would feature in it so soon after its release.

That said, if you don't already have it then £24 is silly cheap money.

I got it for £27 on release from CD Keys. Why anyone would pay £40 for a typewriter game is beyond me

I don't like those CD key websites, they're shady.

I have no complaints really, I paid £39.99 as I was happy to pay that price for the game, already had 26 hours out of it and a fair chunk of it still to go.

In fact I'll play some more of it now.

Got up to Saving Throw a little earlier on, didn't find it too bad really.

Similar tactics to Rich Get Richer seemed to work, plenty of movement, use the arena space, don't worry about the timer, and identify which baddies are really dangerous and which aren't. (Charged shots for the toughest ones, having found a spot you can afford to get rooted to the ground for in order to fire it.)

So that's all the Rune Trials done, I'd say Rich Get Richer was definitely the toughest. A lot of them took a few attempts, but none of them felt unfair or stupidly daft.

Getting pretty close to having everything maxed out now as I go into Level 10, and I'm using earlier levels of the game to quickly get the masteries for the weapons unlocked.

Plasma Gun with the fully upgraded Heat Blast turns out to be pretty decent, and the Chaingun with Mobile Turret + mastery has definitely grown on me, but without the mastery it's pretty crap.

I'm wondering if with the Rich Get Richer rune combined with the one that causes glory killed enemies to drop armour could basically give you infinite Mobile Turret Chaingun fire...... I'll need the last couple of points in armour off the Argent Energy though, as it currently caps out at 100.

Will probably finish the game off over the weekend I think - it's definitely been a hugely entertaining blast.

Rich Get Richer and mastered guns pretty much breaks the game.

Well you'd first have to get to Level 9 to even acquire the Rich Get Richer rune, so in that regard you'd only potentially 'break' the last four levels of the game.

And even then, you'd need to keep your armour at 100 or above (or 75 with the upgrade) to keep the infinite ammo thing running.

TBH I think it'd be more of a fun thing to try than anything else, I'll definitely have a go at storming through some of the early levels with Rich Get Richer, and the other obvious rune to accompany that is Armoured Offensive.

It's nice that the game has stuff like this in there that you can play around with.

Finished!

The end credits are great -- especially the final shot.

The level where you get the thrust boots and have to jump along the pipes is really pissing me off.

/\()()ß

I... don't remember that.

You're clearly rubbish.

It's level 5 or something. The first half is jumping pipes and catwalks, the second half is jumping up the tower. Dull.

Aoob?

Check your l33t, son.

2.0

Dad

Whatever, junior.

All weapon masteries done (IDKFA trophy.)

(;6#^^?¥ ßæ£" @%*4 )9111111!!!!!

I just realised how perfectly named that trophy is. Good work, id.

I had a proper play around with this on Levels 11 and 12 yesterday.

Rich Get Richer (upgraded), Armoured Offensive (upgraded), Seek and Destroy (upgraded) were my runes, and I played around with several different weapons, all fully upgraded with the mastery.

With the upgrade on RGR you only need 75 armour or above to get infinite ammo, the upgrade on AO means glory killing demons drops more armour, and the upgrade on SAD means you can glory kill from a serious distance away.

Aaaaand...... It's still not that great. Yes there are some areas where you can lay down an endless wall of death with your weapon of choice, but the nature of the game's arenas, which are often very tight and compact, demanding plenty of fast movement on both the horizontal and vertical planes, with enemies aggressively seeking you out wherever you are, and nothing in the way of real hiding places - ultimately means that keeping your armour above the required mark to retain unlimited ammo is surprisingly difficult, and maintaining a wall of fire with the chaingun for example (in either mod mode), restricts your movement too much (and this was with the mastery that allowed me to move in mobile turret mode on the chaingun).

It's really only useful (and admittedly fun!) for clearing out the 'trash' areas of baddies, which generally speaking won't give you any real trouble anyway. Once you get into one of the game's (very many) closed arena pitched battles, good luck on keeping RGR activated for any substantial amount of time.

For the final battle on Level 12 I made a pretty concerted attempt to do the fight with RGR activated, even working out an optimum route around the arena to take in armour pickups to try and recover armour for RGR from the inevitable hits I was taking, but after many deaths I decided it just wasn't feasible - and I decided to revert to normal play, forgot about RGR completely, re-equipped my preferred runes, and was then able to complete the fight.

So my verdict on RGR and complimentary runes is that it's definitely good fun and yet another different flavour for the game, but it doesn't in any way break it, or immediately make any other approach redundant. There's nothing stopping you keeping RGR up for as long as you can in any given situation, and then reverting to a normal style of play once the infinite ammo is lost (which is what I did for much of Levels 11 and 12), and there is an odd occasion where you can do some line-of-sight trickery to keep up infinite micro missiles for example - but overall I'm saying not overpowered or game-breaking.

Only Level 13 left for me now, and then the game will be complete.

Have you got the "I've tried multiplayer" trophy?

No, but I am aware of its name.

Is it "G.A.S.H"?

Well, really it should be IDFA, since you don't get automatic key unlocking, but well... noone ever really seemed to know that code existed.

That's the one I knew. I didn't use the other one.

Where did 51GB go, then?

I appreciate modern games are 'big', but as splendid as DOOM is I'm not really understanding how it chews through this much storage space.

The end credits movie could take up a decent chunk depending on how they've encoded/compressed it I suppose, but beyond that there are only three main environments in the game, and a fairly limited selection of monsters and weapons - this isn't another GTAV in terms of its size and scope.

I bought a 500GB SSD just for game installs, this game takes up 51GB of 465GB usable space on the drive!

The entire of World of Warcraft (base game plus all expansions) is only 32GB.

Didn't Bethesda brag that the game was 4k "ready"? if that's the case and it is a true 4k game that doesn't upscale or cheat then that could explain it tbh. The textures will be massive.

Game complete! Which is good except now there is no more DOOM to play.

I'll go back and mop up the masteries for each weapon to get the IDKFA cheevo, and there are a couple more I might go for as well, but basically done and dusted, as I cleaned up all data logs, all weapon mods, all collectibles and a couple more on my first run through.

Playtime has come in at just shy of 30 hours so even if that's pretty much all I get out of the game it's delivered fine value for money, but more importantly, it's been an absolute riot and hugely entertaining every step of the way.

This game has been a surprising hit with me, wasn't expecting a massive amount from it (not least because I never liked DOOM and DOOM 2 back in the day even when they were shiny and new, and thought DOOM 3 was crap as well), but it's been a truly fantastic gaming experience.

Roll on some decent DLC or a sequel!

I'm afraid the DLC is for the multiplayer...

Finished the bloody Argent Tower. That was a bit irritating.

I haven't even looked at the multiplayer and doubt I ever will.

Hopefully there'll be some single player DLC at some point, or a proper sequel.

I feel a bit bereft without my daily DOOM fix, I'm pondering just doing the whole thing again but on ULTRA VIOLENCE skill level or whatever it's called.

Starting to make progress on my ULTRA-VIOLENCE playthrough now and I think it's a better game on this difficulty setting.

The enemies themselves don't seem to be much tougher (if at all) in terms of how much damage it requires to put them into glory kill range or flat out kill them, but they do a LOT more damage to you in every regard.

This is a good place for the game to be IMO on stepping up the difficulty level, as there's nothing more depressing than bullet-sponge enemies that make you feel like you're wielding a water pistol instead of powerful sci-fi weaponry (I'm looking at your TVHM, Borderlands 2).

Even fairly early on it's much more tactical, more use of the environment, far more unforgiving of mistakes, but the fights still feel fair and entirely doable as long as you keep your wits about you. (But do expect to have massive chunks of your health sliced away on a regular basis.)

Wasn't sure I'd get a second playthrough out of the game, but ULTRA-VIOLENCE is, if anything, making me relish the prospect of piling through the forces of hell one more time - really helps that I've got a great feel for it all from the first playthrough as well, so I'll be doing all the secrets and collectibles again as well, much quicker to do on the second run.

In-flight Mobility & Armored Offensive done while playing through the level.

The In-flight Mobility one was a toughy.

Guess I must be near the end now.

The end is just the beginning. *

* Assuming you're going to play it again on ULTRA VIOLENCE. And, erm, aren't on ULTRA VIOLENCE already.

You're just past halfway in Z.

You'll have heard that before...

Yes.

This game is glorious, and I think it's better second time around on the proper difficulty level, which is clearly ULTRA VIOLENCE.

It's a total reset when you start again on a harder difficulty level, it's not like Borderlands 2 where you take over some of your stats, or can have weapons stashed away or anything like that - you start from scratch all over again.

I wasn't sure this model would work for me, but very quickly got into the groove with it. Everything is familiar, the pulse and feel of the game, you know what weapons you like, you know what mods you want, you know what Praetor upgrades you want to prioritise, and so on. Also, of course, you know the levels and you know your way around them, so there's an awful lot that's familiar, but it's a much tougher path to walk.

The pitched arena-style battles are ruthless, and very unforgiving of mistakes, there are more enemies, they're more aggressive, and they hit much, much harder. Remember a fight on HURT ME PLENTY where it chucked a Hell Knight into the mix? Add a second Hell Knight into that fight, along with more of everything else, and where a straight hit from an Imp will take away half your health.

I made a single mistake in a big fight, shimmied left when I should have shimmied right, Hell Knight got me backed into a corner, BOOM, one solid melee hit to the face and I'm dead. Try again.

There have been a few fights now where after a death I've thought about tactics before doing a Load From Checkpoint, what did I do wrong, how can I prioritise my targets in this battle, what weapons are going to work well, all that sort of stuff which if truth be told just wasn't necessary on HURT ME PLENTY.

DOOM will definitely get two back-to-back playthroughs from me, last games that managed this were Dishonored (High and Low Chaos) and Borderlands 2 (normal and then Vault Hunter Mode).

I'm genuinely hard pushed to think of a single criticism I have of this game.

That's because you ent tried the Multiplayer.

I apply the same philosophy to the DOOM multiplayer as I do to the Matrix sequels, by never having so much as looked as them, they basically don't exist.

Oh yes a couple more things, if you blow an arm off a Possessed, they'll continue to lunge at you with the one arm they have remaining, even if it isn't their natural lunging arm. If you blow the other arm off, they'll still come at you and just try to bite, committed folk that they are.

And the way every enemy has a different kill animation, I particularly like the Imps who if they kill you, pin you to the ground and then rip one of your arms off, and then the other, including hitting you across the face with your second arm, before the camera fades to black.

The whole thing is divine, like every single aspect of the game's existence has been lovingly crafted by people who really adore videogames and know what makes them tick.

God almighty I completely missed the top two settings. My PC spod powers are growing weak with old age.

The best game just got better! The little bars move across in realtime and everything. (They're just solid colour here because not much is going on so no real stresses to report. In realtime scrolling bar form. So sexy. Much stats.)

This game is bloody great.

This an Overwatch kinda signal a cultural end to ADS and regenerating health, and it couldn't come soon enough.

One complaint, finally.

The checkpointing is very occasionally a bit irritating. I was in Argent Tower trying to mop up a couple of collectibles, but because I wasn't particularly doing anything to push the level forward, it didn't feel the need to checkpoint.

Now on HURT ME PLENTY this had never really been an issue as in the general run of things it was pretty difficult to find yourself in an 'unwanted death' scenario outside of one of the main arena style battles, but ULTRA VIOLENCE hits a lot harder and you don't need to let your guard down for long to find yourself very quickly moving from thinking 'Hmmm, I don't remember it checkpointing for a while' to 'Oh shit, I'm dead' to 'Ahh, it hadn't checkpointed for a while'.

I had the same problem a couple of times in Foundry as well. (Admittedly one of these was where I was trying to do a challenge as it seemed like the perfect location to get it done, but it ended up that the checkpoint before it was a reasonable distance away, I ended up doing the same (ultimately rather tedious) run + skirmishes to the location, and then the fight, about six times.)

All that said, I can understand them using checkpoints because of the way the game is constructed, and it's about three million times less intrusive and annoying and genuinely detrimental to the game than it was in, say, Bioshock Infinite. Still, I'd quite like there to be a traditional save/load quicksave/quickload system in there too, as an option for folks to use if they wanted to.

Oh yes, Argent Tower as a level is just about on the wrong side of too much platforming as well.

Finally, and this isn't a complaint, more an observation, but on my ULTRA VIOLENCE playthrough I'm making a full 100% run, unlike on HURT ME PLENTY where I went back to finish off a few challenges and suchlike. Thing is, everything like that in the game feeds into weapon upgrade tokens, so on this ULTRA VIOLENCE run I have every weapon upgrade token it's possible to have for the stage of the game I'm at. (Along with everything else, mods, Argent Energy, Praetor tokens, runes, getting the next weapon a level early by finding the secret where it's hidden etc.) Moreover, I've learned from my first playthrough what the wastes of times are (tactical scope on the assault rifle, I'm looking at you), so I'm zoned in on getting myself all the best mods, maxed out and with masteries, and complimentary Praetor upgrades and runes.

I was already a big fan of maxing out the equipment tree on the Praetor upgrades (double grenades, decreased recharge time and then further decrease recharge time, then get the Equipment Power rune equipped and upgraded), and if anything on ULTRA VIOLENCE it works out even better, just chuck a couple of grenades in the direction of anything, and the grenades will take care of it - one less Mancubus or whatever to deal with.

The end result of all this is that the two main pitched battles on the Argent Tower level I didn't really find that demanding. Yes they were incredibly fun and usual rules applied insofar as death was never that far away, but because the arenas themselves are generously sized, it was pretty much just a question of never standing still (running around in a large circle worked well) and super shotgunning (fully upgraded + mastery) anything that stood in my path, and chucking grenades around on cooldown.

Y'know, I might dip my toes into the waters of NIGHTMARE difficulty.... Then again, Argent Foundry is only Level 5, I'll keep it on ULTRA VIOLENCE for now.

Oh and one last thing, don't dismiss the shotgun's CHARGED SHOT mod, when fully upgraded with the mastery it packs an incredible single target punch. Although unfortunately it's competing with the super shotgun's even more incredible single target punch. Still, I was surprised at just how effective CHARGED SHOT actually was.