Tony_Tarantula on 21/5/2020 at 19:40

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In his defense, can you blame the dude? He's as ugly as Danny Devito is with none of the charisma.

Nameless Voice on 11/6/2020 at 17:53

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So, anyway, I played through this after they took the anti-cheat back out.

I have mixed feelings on it.

It seems like they were annoyed that the chainsaw wasn't used that much in the first game, and so decided to base the entire gameplay loop of the second game around forcing you to use it.

This affects almost every aspect of the game. The infinite-ammo pistol is removed. The ammo caps are ludicrously low - even when fully upgraded, you can only carry a maximum of 24 shells for your shotgun - which is 12 shots from the super shotgun. To further promote the use of the chainsaw (and glory kills and the flame belch), pickups in the world are relatively rare, so you often go into a fight arena with low supplies and have to "farm up" before you can start fighting - often repeatedly, if it's a difficult fight and you have to repeat it a few times.

The whole thing is exacerbated by the contradictory "chainsaw fuel" mechanic. You can only carry three tanks of chainsaw fuel, and killing any significant demon uses all three tanks, otherwise it just does nothing. Meanwhile, you can use it on a "fodder" demon with only one fuel tank, and your last fuel tank regenerates over time.
So on the one hand, it's encouraging you to save your fuel and not use the chainsaw very often, so you can build up a supply, but on the other hand the ammo cap is so low that the actual ideal usage is probably to use it whenever it's off cooldown.
Conversely, I had no real issue with using the flame belch for armour, because it was only a cooldown and so it never felt wrong to use it when it was available (though, also, because you can still continue to play the game if you have no armour, but not if you have no ammo.)

This all gets even more extreme in the boss fights and tougher / mini-boss encounters, because the game constantly spawns fodder demons into the arena so you'll have something to use your replenishment moves on. It's like every single fight is the Capra Demon from Dark Souls with his two annoying hounds. I felt like I spent more of my time worrying about small demons stabbing me in the back and keeping up my health/armour/ammo supplies than actually fighting the bosses.

This is taken to the max with a boss really late into the game, who is accompanied by a new enemy type that explodes into supplies when shot in the head, but dodges around like crazy. I spent most of the fight struggling to headshot small enemies who kept juddering violently to the side than I actually spent paying attention to the boss.

I think they were trying to make the game more strategic and to force you to switch weapons more often, but it really backfired and just made a lot of the game feel like busywork instead of DOOM.

There are some other strategic elements as well, such as some enemies being vulnerable to certain weapons or having weak points - which was a much better, softer way of getting you to switch weapon use based on the situation, so I generally didn't have a problem with that.


The level design also seemed a little worse, and there was way too much incoherent plot going on as well.


On the plus side, I did generally like the platforming with the double-dash mechanic, some of the levels looked really nice, being able to teleport back to look for secrets you missed was neat, and I couldn't help but like how they used a remix of Opening to Hell (the music from the last level of Doom 2) as the title screen music.


Overall, I felt like Doom 2016 was a much better game. It did everything in a better balance.

Sulphur on 28/6/2020 at 11:58

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5 levels in, on Ultraviolence, and I miscalculated early on by prioritising ammo upgrades instead of armour. Increasing armour immediately makes you less of a glass cannon (when you have armour, anyway). I lowered it to Hurt Me Plenty for one sequence and can confirm the game is a very enjoyable resource management sim if you plan to play it that way.

I'm not a baby's-first-management-sim kind of guy, though. I ramped it back to Ultraviolence because I'm supercali-frag-a-fuckinglicious, you hear me!? :mad::mad:

Anyway, every time I close my eyes I now see flashing yellow and blue glory kill silhouettes. They dog my sleep. They're on the edges of my vision when I'm chopping onions for dinner prep. I heard a pinkie last night, a sort of muffled shriek-growl sounding from the ceiling accompanied by muffled thumping, like it was tracking my position from one floor up.

I think I might have a problem.

Sulphur on 29/6/2020 at 11:15

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I wouldn't want to make the game even harder on me by disabling the glory kill flashing - they did make the normal punch mostly ineffective now, after all.

As for Tetris Effect, thankfully the only part of the game that does that to me is the soundtrack, which is not an unpleasant thing to have in your head.