This was one of my “white whale” games. At first when the N64 was new, it was simply as an FPS game I could see working on a controller (I HATED looking up and down on a stick or buttons, even then), and having played Doom and Doom II when I finally had the hardware to in high school, this game definitely grabbed my attention. But it wasn’t enough to get the console for, so I unfortunately missed this one in it’s heyday. By the time I got the system after-market, the cart was getting hard to find in stores, so I just never got the chance… until today. You see, there are gamers who hate the idea of a game falling back into obscurity when it really deserves better, and there are few mod-communities as active as those for the Doom franchise. Even today people actively create new mods pretty regularly for the original DOS-based games, albeit now relying on extra features of user-made engine upgrades. I became aware of 3 such mods designed to port this game to the PC and looking them over, I decided to download and install this one. So COMPLETELY worth it.
Story: The invasion is over. You have ripped your way through Hell and back, destroying the demonic invasion forces from Mars to Earth. You even prevented the re-invasion using stolen tech designed to actively close the portals of Hell after they were opened from the other side! You have earned your downtime and more… but it was simply not meant to be.
While you were successful in destroying the invasion force on Mars’ moons, you didn’t kill everything: a few demons remained, a final threat to mankind. As a last ditch effort, a military operation was made to douse these moon bases with radiation to kill all remaining life. It was believed to be a success… for a time. But something survived, unseen through the radiation, and it was capable of reanimating the flesh of the demonic hoard you had killed so long ago. You now have a new mission… go back and finish what you started!
And with that note, you will be thrust into the game. There is little additional plot to this, but it’s old-school Doom. The plot is basically there as an excuse to go murder demons and you are likely to forget this starting point by the time you reach the portal to Hell about 1/3rd through the game to follow and eradicate this creature.
Still, what is here follows well, and as it’s in the same style as the original Doom trilogy it is a direct sequel to, (Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom), it is a satisfying send-off to our original Doom Marine.
6/10
Graphics: Like the games it is a sequel to, Doom 64 is a sprite based FPS, but at the same time, it is objectively the best looking such game in the franchise. Everything from the lighting to the world maps, to sprites themselves were vastly improved from the original trilogy. And while I was unable to see the full effect of this according to the developer of this Total Conversion port (he joined me for a few of the 100 Days of Gaming streams and is hoping to fix up the lighting to match the console release more exactly in the next version, for example… I played version 1.4a), I can still say even what I saw was absolutely true to these statements.
In fact, taking advantage of the GZDoom version of the Doom engine, this game quickly reaches the “retro/modern” look a lot of recent games seem to want to emulate in their wish to appeal to the 90s shooter nostalgia that seems to be all the rage today. The world goes beyond what the original version of Doom could do between the geometry’s complexity and even in a few places actually managing to get multiple floors over each other (and no I do NOT know how they managed to do this where the engine is still at it’s core, a Doom engine). But at the same time, that same geometry is very simple by today’s standards, keeping mainly to squared off and chunky shapes like you would expect from the early games. On top of that the lighting serves the game very well and the detail it shows works magnificently. No it doesn’t look as good as modern games, and it never could. But the artists who assembled the world you are about to play in knew how to make it look good within the limits of the hardware they had to work with.
But the biggest stand out for this game are the sprites, all of which besides the final boss are upgraded enemies from the previous Doom titles. And upgrade is definitely the word for it. All of them have a higher resolution to allow for much more detail then the original PC games could ever dream of having. And while some of those enemies like the zombified soldiers or the pinky demons stopped at this point, other monstrosities were completely remade into a far more horrifying design. Of particular note here is the Pain Elemental who is now a purple ball of terror with multiple mouths to throw lost souls (also heavily upgraded in the look department) and be a genuinely creepy looking mother fucker.
It’s easy to imagine this game was one of the scarier games many kids growing up with the N64 console got the chance to play. And now you are getting to play it with the smoothed out effects and higher resolution your gaming PC can give you.
8/10
Sound: And all that BEFORE we get to the sound of the game. Now do not get me wrong, this is a Doom game, and as such you can expect to hear many familiar roars, hisses, groans, and screeches you have heard from the franchise since the beginning. But there are a few exceptions that seem to have improved. Again, the Pain Elementals join the top of this list with creepy laughter as they float about spawning lost souls you will have to deal with, but there are other less obvious but equally improved sounds like the mechanical thudding of the Cyberdeamons marching around.
Still, none of this can compare to the new soundtrack this game has. Little of it is actually music so much as background effects, but when you start hearing what sounds like enemies in the very background itself followed by very creepy moaning voices and the wails of the damned in a cacophony that still somehow sounds complete and intentioned instead of overriding itself, it is a very disturbing addition to the game.
8/10
Gameplay: Doom 64 calls directly to it’s roots in it’s gameplay. You will be tasked with gunning down hundreds and hundreds of demons across 25 levels (and maybe a few secret ones) in a fast paced first person shooter. There is no cover-mechanic. There is no dash. There is no jumping (unless you decide to add it, but since it wasn’t in the original, I did not). There is simply you, labyrinthine levels to make your way through, and the demons who clearly do not want you to succeed. Start shooting and more often then not, don’t stop moving.
However, here is one of the first real limitations of the mod takes hold… your speed. If you choose to keep a walking speed, you will find yourself moving insufferably slow for this kind of game. Thankfully this is also an issue that can be quickly resolved with the press of the caps-lock if you are using a keyboard and mouse… and likely whatever button is used to toggle run on the controller. GZDoom has the option to make running a toggle instead of having to hold down the button, and once you do this (now making the “push to” button for running be one for walking), you will simply never look back as you get to enjoy demolishing the hellish hoards before you!
However, while most of this game is an absolute blast to play, there are going to be moments where you will want to punch the developers in the gut as much as shake their hand, as the game definitely has moments where it doesn’t give a flying fuck about what is doable, much less fair. A great example of this is about halfway through the game when you will find a corridor with one side dropping into a room with an invulnerability sphere on a pedestal you can reach by running out the window to it and a room of monsters around. If you grab it for that fight, however, you basically became dead-man walking as the other side of the corridor has the blue key… but it only appears when the room is being showered in metal spikes that will drop you dead if you are not extremely lucky and/or has over 160 out of a possible 200 health score. Considering how Doom games are meant to be played, I imagine moments like this (even as they are thankfully rare) will become the unfortunate and early end of many Doom Marines.
7/10
Bugs: I only ran across one bug while playing this game, and it did not occur during my play.
- Where is everybody? I found this bug messing with the game on my living room machine. The game ran great, but at the time of writing this, AMD issued a rollback on their recommended drivers for that machine’s APU which this game needed as there is a conflict with some AMD graphic drivers and the OpenGL graphic mode GZDoom defaults to, causing the game to simply not render the sprites! If this happens to you, your choices are to either try another version of the AMD radeon software and it’s accompanying drivers, or to use one of the software rendering options available in the GZDoom configurations which while it works well is missing some of the extra graphical features the system is capable of.
Overall: Doom 64 is perhaps the absolute last pure old-school Doom game we will ever see. It has almost no attempt at story-telling, and absolutely no frills in it’s combat system. It is a straight up run-and-gunner that lives and dies exclusively by the feel and design of it’s maps, weapons, and monsters. It also does this old-school tradition proud as it is generally a joy to play.
It was almost a lost classic as well. After all, the game was seen as “more of the same, so play something new” when it came out for the N64, the system that started Nintendo’s reputation of terrible 3rd party support. That was also 4 Nintendo machines back, making even the hardware to run this game harder then ever to come by, and with Midway Games (their developer) going under back in 2010, there is slim to no chance of an official rerelease, even as part of a collection. As such, I must personally say “Thank you” to the developer of this mod. It may not be a perfect port, but it’s a damn good one, and it also means more people will get to play a game that actually does stand the test of time with it’s predecessors very well.
Score:
8/10
System Requirements:
Unfortunately, I was unable to find minimum requirements for GZDoom. However, if you’re system is able to run under any currently supported version of Windows (7, 8, or 10) reasonably well, you should have no issues.
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 960 with 4GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Since this is actually a Total Conversion mod, there is more then one part required to play it:
Doom II: Steam (original WAD file)
GZDoom: Official Site (free upgraded Doom engine)
Doom 64: Retribution: MODDB (mod with instructions on how to set it up)
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