
If you're anything like me, you probably spend roughly a third of the game engaging in this more contemplative design. Your first one or two go-rounds of Doom's campaign offer a lot of downtime where the game essentially stops being shooter and instead morphs into something of first-person Tomb Raider or Zelda wherein you scour the scenery for secrets. The other way Arcade Mode manages to keep things moving is by offering players all their power-ups at off, so there's no incentive to scavenge for hidden supplies. In Arcade Mode, it takes about three minutes. I recall the first stage taking upwards of an hour my first time through. By attaching score multiplayer to your enemy encounters, it encourages players to race through these stages at breakneck speed. My memory of such lengthy stages suggest they wouldn't gel well with bite-sized bursts of action Arcade Mode seeks to bring. I love Doom, but playing through its lovingly sadistic Nightmare difficulty results in most stages taking 90-plus minutes to complete. On paper, none of this sounds particularly game changing. Each stage has certain point-base criteria to snag bronze, silver and gold medals. Consecutive kills increase score multiplier and you receive bonus points for head shots and glory kills. From here, you get points for killing enemies and picking up, health, armour, and score-boosting items. Here's how it work: each stage can be played on any difficulty with all of your power-ups unlocked. Instead, id decided to tinker around with content it already had and remixed its wonderful single-player campaign into an astonishingly good score attack Arcade Mode. Doom's fourth free update from late October doesn't add any new levels, enemies, bosses, or weapons-you know, things people often look for in single-player DLC. It's not the single-player add-on you may have expect, however. But there's good news: id Software do craft new single-player content, and it's absolutely free. As such, many were crushed when Bethesda confirmed that all of Doom's DLC would be based around competent but unremarkable competitive multiplayer modes.

While multiplayer and SnapMap level editor had their followers, Doom's main draw was its solo Mode.


Meek marketing campaign and Bethesda's choice to not send out review copies early mire comeback with a dose of skepticism, but thankfully the final product prevail, mostly due to its astonishing single-player campaign. Id Software's Doom reboot was one of 2016's most pleasant surprises.
