Home Page / Zodiac / D / Doom II / Review Listing / Review

The Zodiac inherently seems to be running its marketing by pushing games that boast nostalgia. When you consider the key titles in the systems lineup right now, it’s true: Duke Nukem, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Doom II. Let’s focus on that last title for a minute now. Doom II, at it’s time, was the prime shooter on the market. It took everything that was fun from Doom and gave us more. Now that classic title has hit the Zodiac, but the fun got lost in the translation.

For those of you unfamiliar with Doom: shame on you. The game puts you in the role of a space marine on a nameless mission to banish the hordes of hell. The gameplay is far from complex. Kill hellspawn, find colored key for colored door, continue, repeat as needed. A very simple premise that has held up even in today’s games. The original game on PC was a blast to play, it offered numerous levels of demon slaughtering and chainsaw swinging that would keep you entertained until the cows came home. The Zodiac seems to have had some problems maintaining that fun, because it’s gone now.

The only significant problem in the game actually makes the game all but unplayable. The slightest turns on the analog stick will spin you around in a 180 degree turn. This is not a sensitivity issue, because I tried turning the sensitivity down, and still, I was swinging around in circles. Even trying to maneuver around a bend in a hallway will leave you disoriented because of the 180 turn. There is no excuse for such sloppy controls, and could have easily been avoided had the developer taken some form of interest in the game before releasing it. The only way to describe the problem is this: imagine you are playing a shooter, and you go to turn at a 90 degree angle to shoot something that is directly to your left, but an unseen force pushes your turn further, even if you try to force yourself to turn in the other direction. If you can think up the level of frustration that something like this causes, then you have a good idea of how un-fun it is to play this rendition of Doom 2.

Other than this huge flaw, the rest of the gameplay remains untouched. You will traverse the same levels, fight the same enemies, and use the same weapons we have all come to love from the original PC title.

Graphically, the game is an exact duplicate of the original. Polygonal demons are big and bold, with the same choppy animations as usual. The games environments are usually moderately sized, and full of the same decent details found in the original. The guns aren’t full of tons of detail, but they’re just as identifiable as they were years ago. The games audio has also made it to the Zodiac unscathed. The same digital howling and noises come from the games numerous demons, The haunting soundtrack is still present in all it’s grandeur, even if it’s not all that interesting.

When it comes down to the battle for the buck, Doom II just isn’t worth it. The visuals and audio may have made it in perfectly, but the gameplay has become so frustratingly unplayable that this classic has been shamed in a big way. I suggest even the biggest of Doom fans stay away. Far, far away.