Mile
Zero

If you'd told me a few years ago that my favorite shooters in 2016 would be reboots of Doom and Wolf3D, I'd probably have been surprised, or depressed, or both. Surprised, because both of them were very much games of their time, and it would seem impossible to recreate their peculiar arcade-oriented chemistry now. Depressed, because I probably would have seen it as a part of the stagnation of the shooter genre, with which I have a love-hate relationship.

But it's true: after I upgraded my graphics card as a birthday gift to myself, I've been going back and replaying a bunch of FPS games (for better or worse, they're the graphical showcases in my Steam library), and the two standouts have been DOOM and Wolfenstein: The New Order. I'm as shocked as anyone! They're both excellent revivals of old id Software franchises, and part of what's so interesting about them is that they're excellent in such completely different ways.

Of the two, The New Order (and its prequel mini-expansion, The Old Blood), have a heavier lift: although it's vaguely connected to the 2001/2009 games, most people are only aware of the original, which was (despite mind-blowing graphics for its time) two-dimensional in both gameplay and character. They weren't great games even back then, and they haven't aged particularly well (TNO includes "nightmare" remakes of the 286 levels, in case you forgot how tedious and confusing Wolf3D could be).

The team behind TNO is the same group that made Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness at Starbreeze, both of which took ridiculous licensed properties and stretched them past both the source material and the Steam category: Riddick asks players to engineer multiple prison-breaks with not much more than a knife, a black-market night-vision mode, and a lot of Vin Diesel dialog. Half of The Darkness is shooting light bulbs! The shape and flow of a Starbreeze game could be odd — linear chunks connecting free-form adventure hubs — but they were almost always as interesting in the downtime as they were in the action sequences.

By virtue (such as it is) of this being a Wolfenstein game, going too far outside of "open door, shoot Nazis, repeat" was probably too much to ask. But The New Order does pack a surprising amount of pathos into what is otherwise a totally bonkers 1960's alternate history in which the Fourth Reich won the war via mad science. It tilts on the action side of things, but there's still definitely a Starbreeze flavor, if you liked their other titles. Parts of it are brilliantly cinematic, including a ten-year flash-forward sequence that separates the first and second acts.

And while the gameplay doesn't go full retro, it has elements of old-school flavor. There's no regenerating health system or trendy cover-hugging mechanics here, and the use button gets a workout. My favorite refinement is the commander system, where many of the battle setpieces will introduce one or two radio-equipped officers. If you're spotted, they'll call in reinforcements, so a good approach is to stealth-kill them before mopping up the troops. Or you can play the way I do: take out one officer and then charge the other with guns blazing, before they can stack the odds too far. That this is still a viable (and fun) strategy strikes a nice balance between players who want the stealth experience, and those (like me) who are mostly in it for the instant gratification.

DOOM has no such such balance, and does not suffer for it in the slightest. There is no clip reloading for any of the weapons, and the run speed is entirely unrealistic. Unlike most shooters since Halo, everything in DOOM is designed to encourage non-stop movement toward (and through) enemies. Which is a big part of the reason why, even though it changes from its predecessor in significant ways (mouselook, a jump key, lots of upgrades and collectibles), it still manages to feel like playing deathmatch in 1996.

The two primary mechanics for maintaining player momentum in the game are a fast mantle, which gives players the ability to very quickly ascend vertically, and the "glory kills," which reward players with a half second of invulnerability (during the animation) and a quick piñata pop of health and ammo. There's no reward for staying still — in fact, like a bullet-hell shooter, players are immediately punished for remaining stationary. The goal is not to block or absorb damage, it's to avoid getting hit at all.

DOOM levels are primarily structured as a series of loosely-connected arenas, which also keeps the deathmatch feel: while hallways and platforms are used to set the mood and create checkpoints, the most intense gameplay is set in wide, 3-D spaces with multiple "circuits," just like the best Quake DM levels. Gears of War is also famous for "combat bowls" as a gameplay tool, but it strongly emphasized cover over movement, whereas DOOM almost never places waist-high walls to serve as partial cover (and they'd be useless in a game with lots of high vantage points anyway).

There's a moment at the very beginning of the game where your character, having ripped out of a set of shackles and punched through the initial set of undead, pulls up a video screen reading "DEMONIC INVASION IN PROGRESS." As mission statements go, this is pretty much DOOM in a nutshell: crank everything up to 11 and embrace the inherent, b-movie absurdity of the thing (a similar process took place music direction, which started with no guitars at all and ended up a metal shredfest).

All combined, the end result is about as pure a video game as you can get with a high-budget, AAA studio product in 2016. It's the interactive equivalent of a Fast and Furious movie: mixing comforting aesthetics (as far as the intended audience is concerned, at least) with the maximum amount of intense parallax motion. Nobody's going to mistake it for fine art — it has none of the thoughtful playfulness of, say, Dishonored — but not everything should be fine art. It's a great game.