Supplice (demo)

DOOM as veteran DOOM modders would have it isn't necessarily a good thing, especially as in this case they're cribbing so heavily from the DOOM II tradition in particular. The levels are enormous, confusing, and monotonous—a bad combo made much worse with the old-school FPS non-linearity (which I normally like). They use so much vision-fog darkness even American McGee would strike a light. Many enemies are fast, aggressive, and erratic, and many others are too visually similar given how different their threats are.

In a weird turn given the designers' experience with DOOM, few of the encounters really stand out; just same-y sardine-tin monster closets and silent teleport ambushes and swarms of goons. It somehow feels more repetitive than Outlaws, a game with two, maybe three enemy types.

The arsenal's fine, but mostly nothing special outside the outsize shotgun SFX. The sprites and textures are impressive, but the environment's so detailed it both lacks a sense of pace and turns into so much visual noise. The story is… I honestly don't know, this is such a fast-paced game with speedy movement and blitzkrieg foes that it felt weird sitting around reading a dozen pages of text at a dozen monitors in each level.

Obviously I can't speak to the whole game, but this demo really made me feel the weaknesses of the Doom engine.