Final Doom Review

6.2

Format PC

Developer id Software

Publisher GT Interactive

Genre Unknown

What? It can't be! Nooooooooooooooooo! Not... not... the end of Doom? Ohmygod, no. No. NO. NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! (Cue sounds of wrists being slit with chunks of glass.) Aaaaaaaaagggggh. NO! NO! (This is a small excerpt from the reaction of David McCandless to the release of Final Doom, iD's last Doom product.)

Girlfriends around the world can rejoice. Hang out the bunting. Decorate your streets with flowers and other girly things. Sing Alleluyah, and join the seraphim and cherubim along with Sir Cliff Richard in a rousing chorus of 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing, Doom Is Finally Going In The Bin'. Witness the re-initiation of countless pale partners into society. See them blinking and scowling as they are dragged into the sunlight. Their hair may be greasy, their fingernails yellow, and their teeth sorta furry, sorta green - but they're back.

It's the Doomstones

Doom is dead. Final Doom is the tomb-stone, a chance for all of us (except girls, of course) to remember what is was that gripped us so. What you get for your money is the spanking new Doom 95 code, plus two new 32-level episodes. One wad - The Plutonia Experiment - was designed by a couple of Brit brothers, Dario and Milo Casali (huzah! Glory days, stiff upper lips, We Are The Champions, Queen Mum, cockles and mussels alive alive-o etc). The other - Evilution - was hamfistedly put together by a bunch of Yanks (boo, boo, maple syrup, Vietnam, crack cocaine, Hilary Clinton, cinnamon chewing gum etc).

Look and squeal?

They're both actually quite good. Plutonia is very aesthetically pleasing, with garishly clashing textures of amateur wad building replaced by a more even and stylish use of textures. Some levels are exceptionally hard, but the Brit boys like to throw their tidal waves of monsters into interestingly laid-out arenas, so you can't always depend on the old strafe-in-circles-until-the-monsties-kill-each-other ploy. TNT has less of a look to it (why is it Yanks have no style?) but relies on cunning alongside layers and layers and layers of traps and those bloody annoying chaingun sergeants to do its work.

The DirectX-files

The major innovation is that it runs under Windows 95 in hi-res (woo-yeah) using some new-fangled graphics tech-nology called DirectX (which apparently makes games way dos fast in Windows). Unfortunately, this means Final Doom needs to replace your current display drivers with DirectX-compatible ones. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't like to disturb my system or have to install new drivers when mine work fine. I don't care if they've been plucked from Bill Gates' backside by the gnarled hands of a magical old crony and then washed pure in a bucket of virgin's saliva - I don't want to install new display drivers. Got it? Saying that, svga Doom looks swish, but not as swish as certain other Doom clones.

Spurts of nostalgia

Basically Final Doom is really a minority interest now that both Quake and Nukem have arrived. Those people who still play Doom either do so (a) in a vacuous attempt to cling on to a utopian bygone era of gameplayer which never really existed, or (b) to play deathmatch.

Single-player Doom has been off my menu for a good year or so now. Although these levels are well-designed, good-looking and challenging, I seemed to spend my entire time trying to look, or duck, or jump over the Legoland scenery. In iD's very own words: 'Technology moves on.'

If it had sported the promised eight-player deathmatch option (as Hexen now does - hooray), Final Doom would be a must-buy, but sporting only hi-res and Internet play as new features, it's only really good for a spurt of nostalgia, or perhaps as a means to teach your grandchildren something of our heritage, or if you haven't upgraded your 486sx25 and are sick of your neighbour crowing about how their Quake workstation 'rocks'. Er, fancy a game of Quake, anyone? Z