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Doom (2016)

Gryphos

Auror
Space marine on Mars fighting demons from Hell... Not much else needs saying, does it?

You wake up chained to a stone alter in a facility on Mars. There's blood everywhere, and a zombie-like entity is staggering towards you. Naturally, you break free of your chains and smash the zombie's head with your bare hands, before finding a gun and your trusty suit of power-armour.

You learn from a monitor that the facility has been overrun by a demon invasion, because this corporation has been harnessing energy from Hell itself, and that doesn't tend to go well. Your job? Find out wtf is going on and kill some motherf*cking demons.

And what follows is probably one of the finest examples of a single-player FPS ever created (certainly the best in the last few years that I know of).

There's just a kind of hectic fluidity, as it were, to the combat scenarios. You'll be locked in a massive, multi-levelled room fighting off a horde of demons of all shapes and sizes. You never stop moving, you're always shooting something, switching between weapons. When an enemy is weakened, you can choose to move in close and initiate a 'glory kill', a brilliantly brutal kill animation which may include (but is not limited to): punching a demon's face off, ripping their arm off and hitting them with it, twisting their head clean off, ripping their heart out and shoving it down their throat — all that kind of stuff.

Additionally, from a narratively focused perspective, the characterisation given to the protagonist, the so-called 'Doom Slayer', is actually incredible. Despite him never uttering a word, you know exactly how he feels about certain things just from how he reacts to things in certain scripted animations. When someone shows up on the monitor and begins trying to explain the convoluted situation, the Doom Slayer shoves the screen away, because he doesn't care. All he cares about is how many goddamn demons he gets to brutalise.

And I gotta give props to the soundtrack. The relentless metal which kicks in in fights will get your heart racing just the way it should. It helps put you in the right mind-state for the hectic fights, shutting out everything else and going into a flow of instant reactions.

So yeah, Doom is pretty sick.
 
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