Doom's best new feature: Hell demon pinatas
iD rolled out a good 10 minutes of Doom footage at Bethesda's press conference Sunday night, and damn does iD Tech 6 look amazing. It's detailed and gory in exactly the way we want Doom to be, especially when demons are being chainsawed in half or beaten to death with their own severed limbs. But the best thing about the new Doom is something a little sillier: the way demon guts explode power-ups like twisted hell pinatas.
Doom looks very much like a 2015 (or 2016) game, with amazing textures and fancy particles and intricate animations. But its fast, skatey player movement intentionally harkens back to 90s shooters, and so does its minimalism. This game is clearly about shootin' demons real good, and not much else. The way power-ups explode out of the demons when they die helps sell that same retro vibe. It's wonderfully cartoony and says: yes, we know this is a video game. It also says: wheeeeee!
It's also a great bit of visual feedback that yeah, that demon's super dead. And it's goofy. Do these demons have a spring-loaded bundle of medkits and ammo clips sitting in their stomach? Demons, you so silly. I love you.
Just look at them explode.
Those power-ups really, really want to get out.
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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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