First Impressions: Mighty DOOM (AND)

 

Mighty DOOM

Systems: Android, iOS

Release Date: March 21, 2023

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Developer: Bethesda Softworks

I had actually meant to write and publish this as a First Impressions a while back, and I think that says something about the staying power of Mighty DOOM as a mobile game.  Either that or I am just bad at mobile games.  Or I am just not the target audience for forever games like this when I already have a 3DS, and a Switch, and a Steam Deck.  And a smartphone.  The point is, I have no lack of options when it comes to portable gaming platforms, and when I was playing it, Mighty DOOM was pretty fun.  There was a progression system that made me feel like I was making progress each time I re-entered a "dungeon" and made it a little bit further than the last time.  But like Diablo Immortal and Fallout Shelter (both times), once I stopped playing for a while, it became easier and easier to kind of forget about the game.

That is not to say that Mighty DOOM is a bad game, that it is unplayable, or that it is not fun.  Well, actually, there were a couple of times that the game became unplayable due to the "watch this video to unlock [insert thing here to tempt a person to watch a 30-second advertisement].  I would click on the option to watch the ad, or at least have the ad play while I did something else, because how many times do I need to see/watch/live through another ad for Summoner War or State of Survival?  So I watched the ad and one of a handful of things would happen.  The most common was that no X would appear or any obvious way of closing the ad to get back to the game.  This meant I had to close the Mighty DOOM app and hope that whatever item/buff I was hoping for actually happened.  This was all the more frustrating when I would use the ad option when it meant that my killed Doom Slayer was supposed to be resurrected to continue my slaughter of Hell's legions, and my progress (and time spent) was lost to the sands of time.  As of this writing (April 20th, 2023), this is still the case in some instances.

The game itself feels very much like a mobile game.  You have levels that you move the Doom Slayer through, automatically attacking enemies and collecting resources.  Back on the home screen, you have a plethora of different screens and menus to work your way through as you upgrade gear, destroy unwanted gear, level up your abilities, learn new buffs, browse store options to use in-game or real-world currency to buy nearly everything under the sun that makes free-to-play mobile games as predatory as payday loan company.  If you have played any mobile game in the last 10 years, you will likely have come across some variation on "give us money to keep playing," "give us money to lessen the amount of time to do this thing," or "give us money to buy more in-game currency to buy yourself a 15 minute 5x XP boost!"  Mighty DOOM is no different and it sucks that this comes with the territory of free-to-play and free-to-start mobile games and probably one of the reasons why I do not play them a lot, or at least a lot past the initial month.

The gameplay itself is satisfying enough.  The touchscreen controls are simplistic and I was able to move the buttons that fire the rocket launcher and alt gun (the BFG in my case) to the right side of the screen because I felt that using my left thumb for the primary controls was more comfortable and intuitive.  I have not played DOOM Eternal, but the music seems to be in line with Mick Gordon's score from DOOM (2016); I am not as up on my DOOM soundtrack to be able to tell a lot of the tracks apart and so I cannot say if the music used in the game is taken from either game or an original creation.  The general sound effects are also very DOOM-esque and the on-screen violence is over-the-top DOOM and appropriately campy.

I like to think that Bethesda knows that what they have made is not a serious attempt at creating a mobile DOOM game and knowing that going into the game is probably why I enjoyed myself as much as I did when I was playing almost every day. I was not expecting a first-person DOOM or a mobile top-down attempt at recreating either of the modern adaptations of DOOM.  I mean, the title screen itself is self-aware in that there has always been a bunny rabbit perched on the Doom Slayer's shoulder like a parrot.  The gore kill animations for the bosses look like they were created by Rare circa Conker's Bad Fur Day.  There is humor and slapstick here and I appreciate that.  My head cannon is that the little Doom Slayer dolls that you can find scattered throughout Mars (for whatever reason) were based on this game, which is why the Doom Slayer in Mighty DOOM looks like a chibi doll covered in demonic gore.  It's a bit of a cyclical paradoxical fallacy I realize, but whatever.

I generally do not know what the endgame is for Mighty DOOM as far as the surface-level story goes.  I assume that eventually, you will go up against the Cyberdemon, the Spider Mastermind, the Icon of Sin, or Hitler, and that might be the final boss?  Until you reach the post-game-game of course.  The game is designed though so that you could hypothetically play it forever since each game is made up of a series of nine enemy-filled rooms followed by a bullet sponge boss fight multiplied by four.  Once you reach the fourth boss, you essentially clear an area and you then go to another area with a different or slightly different look with enemies that are increasingly difficult which makes upgrading gear and permanent buffs absolutely necessary to progress.  And Bethesda controls that speed of progression through the game by the drop rate of gear and components to upgrade your gear, which hypothetically means that they could "code" the game in a way that makes it just slightly unbeatable, but since the game was released exactly one month ago, I would be surprised if someone had not already reached the end of the game by March 28th.

I do not know if I will keep Mighty DOOM installed on my phone much longer, although I might because I have not uninstalled Pokemon GO and I am sure it has been well over a year since I last played that. . . or three years?  Point being that I last played it three weeks ago before finishing this article and between that time and today, a new Battle Pass system has been created to further find monetization options and another way to drip feed items, gear, and cosmetics to the player.  Then again, Bethesda still has not fixed whatever the issue is with being able to close an ad after watching it; they should probably contract out to Duolingo's IT person.

 

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Our Shows Are Formidable

 

P.S.  And just for you, dear reader for reaching the end of this article, is a playthrough of Mighty DOOM that I recorded yesterday (2023-04-20) to help illustrate the gameplay and was fortunate enough to capture the bug that prevents the closing of a "watch to continue" ad and the consequences of it not working.