I’ve now played and completed my first two games of 2021, with Ultimate Doom, started on the 2nd and finished on the 28th, and Scrap Garden, which I played in full yesterday (will cover in a separate post). First off, Ultimate Doom. After having played Doom 64 last year on PS4, I enjoyed it enough that I have been picking up more Doom games, including 64 again, on PC. With the start of the new year, I decided to get started on playing through the series, in order. Wee!
Ultimate Doom is basically an updated version of the first game, with a fourth episode added. Graphically, it looks pretty much the same as Doom 64 and as most of the rest of it was similar, it was easy to hop right in and get going. Me being me, I tried to 100% every level, and I did manage to get all the secret levels. I did fail to 100% secret a few levels, some from 3 or 4 from not being able to find a secret, and at least two where it’s impossible because of bugs they never fixed LOL.
I enjoyed Ultimate Doom overall, with the first episode being almost easy enough that I was tempted to redo it at a harder difficulty (I played them on the middle difficulty). As it got further along, there were a few challenging bits, but nothing too bad… until Episode 4, the one added to make it Ultimate Doom. Episode 4 flips the script and starts off at a batshit crazy difficulty, enough that I finally had to restart at a LOWER difficulty! The big thing that makes it so hard is they have a ridiculous number of enemies with an equally ridiculous shortage of ammo and health kits. It was the latter, in particular, that forced me to lower the difficulty because I kept running out of ammo and I wanted my 100% darnit LOL
I was also told by another Doom player that episode 4 was totally skippable, but I’m nothing if not stubborn. Took a lot of effort and plenty of profanity, but I got through the first two maps, at which point it got back down to a relatively saner level of difficulty. I did manage to 100% every map in this episode, except for the aforementioned ones where you literally can’t without hacking the game. I am glad I played though and finishing it was very satisfying. 🙂
Total Play Time: 22h, 48 m
Streamed
Screenies