>>14357643
>>14357442
I can't speak for that other anon, but I played nuDoom all the way through. Actually, to 100% completion on Ultra-Violence. Here's my take
It was good. Pretty much the best single-player FPS that's come out of the AAA industry in almost a decade. It was fast, the combat was fluid and enjoyable, the weapons were fun to use, the enemy design was simple but varied enough to keep you on your toes.
BUT.
Now that I've completed the game, I don't really have any desire to try to beat it on Nightmare or try to beat the Arcade mode. The combat got very repetitive after a while, and what wasn't helping was that, even on UV mode, it was too damn easy, and I could only see Nightmare making it harder in boring, predictable ways that don't enhance the challenge so much as they enhance the tedium as you are forced to play cautiously and methodically without any of the fun improvisational flairs that made UV fun.
I'm going to be frank here: I think that enemies turning into health pinatas when you're on death's door was NOT a bad idea on its surface. It allows you to get back into the fight quickly and keep the pace up, which is good. Way better than standard regen health, at any rate. The problem is that it made the game far too exploitable. You run faster than most enemies do, and you're invincible while doing a glory kill. These two factors make it far too easy to never, ever die, and the only times I did die in nudoom were when I fell off a cliff or when I did something I knew was stupid but wanted to do anyway because I was in the game's RIP AND TEAR mindset. There's basically no reason to worry about conserving your health because you can just get your health back off the next enemy you see. Also, once you get the Ammo rune, there's also basically no reason to worry about conserving your ammo since you get it back so quickly, and that includes BFG ammo. All of this serves to make a game that is great to play in the moment, but very shallow. Fun, but not engaging or challenging.
What this game really, really desperately needed was three things:
1. Glory Kills should not make you invincible. These should be rewards for singling out an enemy, not something you get to do constantly. This would also mean that the "make Glory Kills fast" rune would not be completely useless, because then if you really like them, you CAN do them mid combat at decreased, but still existent, risk.
2. More moments like the bridge with more challenge. This is one of the few moments in nudoom that sticks out in my memory, right after you get the double jump boots. You're on a large network of pipes bridging a gap, and have to fight demons while jumping between them. Now, this area was a lot of fun because it involved tons of run-and-gunning while jumping in between platforms to get optimal positioning and dodge enemy fire, but I realize in retrospect that I probably could have just sniped with the HMG. The addition of some fast-flying or long-range demons would have made this a lot more challenging. Unique, challenging combat situations were what the single player was really lacking; most of the big fights in this game took place in bog-standard, Serious Sam-esque combat arenas without much interesting about them.
3. A horde mode. Of all the games that should have had a horde mode, this is the one that most confuses me that it DOESN'T have one. Start with nothing but the pistol and shotgun, upgrade both your arsenal and the weapons in it as you go along, and survive against an ever-more-relentless horde of demons. WHY DIDN'T THIS HAPPEN!? Fucking Titanfall 2 has a goddamn horde, why didn't this game have one?! They should have focused on that instead of the half-assed multiplayer.
Oh, and also a quick shout-out to the story. I was not expecting much out of it, but I ended up enjoying it immensely, both in the worldbuilding and the characterization of the two "human" characters you meet. I wish that it had more conclusions and less sequel hooks, but what can you do. I also wish there were more demon logbooks; I'd like to know a bit more about demon society. Is there any particular reason they're so hellbent (pun intended) on slaughtering all humans? Who was that betrayer who supposedly crafted the praetor armor? Stuff like that. But it was interesting, and the corporatized cult stuff was pure gold in my opinion.
tl;dr it was a very good, but flawed game, and it came out in a year where everything else the AAA industry produced was pure trash so it stood out.