DOOM (2016): The Push-Forward Shooter That Remembered Its Job

By the mid-2010s, the shooter genre had spent nearly a decade teaching players to hide. Call of Duty’s regenerating health and Gears of War’s cover system had become the default grammar of the entire genre — peek, shoot, duck back behind a waist-high wall, wait for your screen to stop flashing red — and the approach was so ubiquitous that an entire generation of players had never experienced a shooter built on the opposite premise. id Software’s 2016 DOOM, directed by Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin, is that opposite premise stated as forcefully as a studio has ever stated anything: standing still is the actual danger, and the health bar that used to punish aggression now rewards it. It’s the most complete rebuild a legacy shooter franchise has ever given its own founding genre, tracing its lineage directly back to id’s own 1993 original rather than to the cover-shooter decade that came between them.

The glory kill as the resource loop’s engine

Stagger an enemy — a visual cue, a limp, a stumbling animation — and you can close the distance for a glory kill: a brutal, brief melee execution that drops health pickups on the spot. Chainsaw fuel, found sparingly across levels, lets you cut an enemy in half for a guaranteed drop of ammunition across every weapon type. Between those two systems, DOOM builds the entire resource economy around a single principle: the safest way to survive is to keep attacking. A player who retreats to a corner to wait out a firefight is a player who’s cut themselves off from the health and ammo the level is designed around them actively harvesting, which inverts nearly a decade of shooter conditioning in one mechanical stroke. It’s a genuinely elegant piece of systems design, because it doesn’t need to tell the player “be aggressive” through a tutorial popup — it makes passivity mechanically punishing and aggression mechanically rewarding, and the lesson lands within the first arena regardless of what habits a player arrives with.

Arena design as a controlled chaos generator

DOOM’s combat encounters are built around large, vertically arranged arenas rather than corridors, seeded with jump pads, ledges and health/ammo stations positioned specifically to reward continuous movement across the whole space rather than holding one position. Enemy composition within each arena is deliberately mixed to force constant priority triage — an Imp’s fireball, a Revenant’s homing rockets, a Mancubus’s area-denial cannon fire all demand different responses, and standing in one spot to deal with any single threat leaves you exposed to the others. The genius of the arena format is that it turns every encounter into an improvised routing problem: which enemy do you glory-kill first to reset your health, which lane do you use to cross the arena without crossing a Revenant’s sightline, which ledge gets you a chainsaw-fuel pickup on the way past. No two playthroughs of the same arena look identical, because the space is built to generate decisions rather than to script a single correct path through it.

The weapon wheel as genuine build variety

Each weapon carries two mod variants unlocked through Praetor tokens found across the campaign — the combat shotgun’s Charged Burst versus its full-auto Mod, the plasma rifle’s stun-lock or wide-area burst — and the loadout choices meaningfully change how an arena plays, in a way Nioh 2’s weapon-skill trees do for a slower, more methodical combat system. The Super Shotgun with its meat-hook attachment, unlocked mid-campaign, is the standout: it doubles as a mobility tool, letting you close distance on a staggered enemy from across an arena, which folds weapon choice directly back into the glory-kill loop rather than treating guns and melee finishers as separate systems. It’s a small piece of design, but it exemplifies the whole game’s philosophy — every system reinforces the central thesis that stopping is the real mistake here.

The soundtrack as a combat-state indicator

Mick Gordon’s score is inseparable from the pacing argument the rest of the design is making, and it’s worth treating as a systems component rather than mood-setting. The music is dynamically layered to combat intensity: ambient tension underscores exploration, and the instant an arena’s encounter triggers, the industrial-metal score snaps in at full volume, functioning as an audio cue that the “stand still” phase of the level has ended and the “keep moving” phase has begun. Because the game so rarely mixes exploration and combat within the same physical space — arenas lock you in until cleared — the soundtrack becomes a reliable, almost Pavlovian signal of which ruleset currently governs the screen in front of you. It’s a smaller trick than the glory-kill loop, but it’s doing real functional work alongside the atmosphere, reinforcing the binary the whole game is built around: you are either exploring calmly or fighting aggressively, and the score always tells you which.

Difficulty tuning as an argument about who the game is for

DOOM’s difficulty settings scale enemy aggression and damage output substantially, and the higher tiers — Nightmare in particular — remove much of the ammo and health generosity the lower difficulties extend, forcing genuinely precise glory-kill chaining rather than allowing a player to coast on raw firepower. That tuning choice matters because it protects the core thesis from being diluted for players who’d rather treat the game as a conventional corridor shooter: on the hardest settings, passivity becomes a fast route to death rather than a merely suboptimal habit, because the ammo economy simply doesn’t support hanging back and trading shots from range. Lower difficulties are generous enough to let a newcomer learn the aggression-rewards-health loop without punishing early mistakes too severely, which makes the difficulty ladder itself a teaching tool: each step up asks for more complete buy-in to the philosophy the base game only gently suggests.

Argent D’Nur, delivered without demanding your attention

The lore — Hell’s invasion of the UAC’s Mars facility, the Doom Slayer’s ancient history as a Night Sentinel in the demon-realm of Argent D’Nur — is delivered almost entirely through optional codex entries and environmental storytelling rather than forced cutscenes, and the Slayer himself is famously near-silent, at one point physically smashing a computer terminal mid-exposition dump rather than sit through more dialogue. That’s a genuinely funny piece of character writing disguised as a loading joke, and it signals the correct priority for a game like this: the lore exists for players who want it, and the game never makes a player who doesn’t care stop moving to receive it. Compare this to a game like Metal Gear Solid V, which invests heavily in cutscene-delivered plot; DOOM’s answer to the same question of how much story a systems-first game should carry is to make the story entirely optional cargo riding on top of the mechanics, never load-bearing.

Traversal as a hidden skill layer

Beyond combat, DOOM’s platforming — double jumps, ledge grabs, hidden collectible rooms tucked behind secret walls — asks for a different kind of mastery running parallel to the arena fights, and it rewards players who explore thoroughly with Praetor tokens, weapon mods and classic-Doom-level secret rooms that unlock the original 1993 maps for play inside the new engine. That last touch is a genuinely thoughtful piece of design: rather than simply referencing the original in flavour text, the game hands you the actual thing, playable, as a reward for engaging with the traversal systems it built. It’s a rare case of a reboot treating its own history as a mechanical unlock rather than a marketing footnote, and it gives the exploration layer a purpose beyond simple completionism.

Where the momentum flags

The mid-game Hell levels, structurally, ask for more traditional platforming and exploration than the UAC facility sections that precede them, and the arena density drops noticeably across a handful of levels that feel more like connective tissue between the game’s best set-pieces than fully realised encounters in their own right. SnapMap, the level-editor and sharing tool bundled at launch, never found the audience id clearly hoped for, and in hindsight reads as a resource investment the base campaign’s quality didn’t strictly need. Neither issue undermines the core loop, but they’re the visible seams in an otherwise remarkably disciplined design, and they’re the parts of the package the sequel, DOOM Eternal, would notably tighten by adding even more systemic depth to the traversal itself.

The verdict

DOOM 2016 diagnosed exactly what a decade of cover-shooter dominance had cost the genre — the thrill of forward motion, the tension of a health bar you have to actively go earn rather than passively wait out — and rebuilt an entire combat system around restoring it. Every mechanic, from the glory kill to the chainsaw to the arena layouts themselves, points at the same central argument: stopping is the actual danger. It’s a rare case of a franchise reboot understanding its own foundational text well enough to translate a thirty-year-old design philosophy into a system built for a completely different technical era, tracing back through Quake’s engine lineage to a genre id effectively invented. Available on every current platform and PC; the follow-up sharpens the systems further, but this is where the modern push-forward shooter actually starts.

Spoilers below

The mid-campaign reveal that the Doom Slayer is an ancient warrior imprisoned and repurposed by the facility’s leadership, rather than a UAC creation, recontextualises the corporate-conspiracy plotline running underneath the demon invasion — Samuel Hayden’s manipulations throughout the campaign land with more weight once you understand he’s been managing a weapon considerably older and less controllable than his own company realised.

The final confrontation with Hayden, who reveals he’s transferred his consciousness into a synthetic body and betrays the Slayer at the story’s close, sets up the framing device for the sequel without needing an elaborate cliffhanger sequence — a rare instance of a bombastic action game ending on a quiet, almost administrative betrayal rather than a final boss spectacle, and it’s a tonal choice that works precisely because the rest of the game has been so relentlessly loud.