DOOM + DOOM II

I have a Saturday-night co-op tournament coming up and I've been stress-testing this package all week, so let me cut straight to it: DOOM + DOOM II is the single biggest haul of classic id Software content ever bundled into one product, and the multiplayer infrastructure finally does it justice. Nightdive Studios rebuilt both games on their KEX engine - the same foundation behind the well-received Quake and Quake II remasters - which means the whole thing runs at up to 4K and 120 FPS on current hardware, with multithreaded rendering keeping things silky even when the screen fills with imps and cacodemons. The core loop is exactly what you remember or have heard about: fast-twitch movement through maze-like levels, colour-coded keycards, and an arsenal that climbs from pistol to rocket launcher to the BFG 9000. No aim-down-sights, no regenerating health, no hand-holding. DOOM II adds the Super Shotgun and a wider enemy roster, including bosses from the first game now used as standard-level fodder. Both games hold up in a way that still surprises people who come in expecting a museum piece. The content list is genuinely staggering. Alongside the two base games you get TNT: Evilution, The Plutonia Experiment, Master Levels for DOOM II, No Rest for the Living, and John Romero's Sigil - with Sigil II officially folded in as well. The headline new addition is Legacy of Rust, a 16-map campaign split across two chapters (The Vulcan Abyss and Counterfeit Eden), built by people from id, Nightdive, and MachineGames. It brings two new weapons - the Calamity Blade, a chargeable melee-range monster that outclasses the BFG in close quarters, and the Incinerator, a flamethrower that punishes you for standing too close to your own fire. New enemy types slot in cleanly alongside the classic bestiary. In total you are looking at 187 mission maps and 43 deathmatch maps. That is not a typo. For the couch crowd: four-player split-screen is available on all platforms, and on PC you can push that to eight-player split-screen, which is absolute carnage in the best possible way. Online co-op and deathmatch support up to 16 players with full cross-platform matchmaking, so your Switch-owning friend can finally get fragged by your PC setup. The in-game mod browser, now with BOOM source compatibility, opens up decades of community content without any file-wrangling. Accessibility has also been taken seriously - high-contrast mode, text-to-speech and speech-to-text multiplayer chat, adjustable difficulty, and full controller remapping make this the most welcoming version of classic Doom yet. The soundtrack dual-option is a nice touch too: stick with the original MIDI score or swap to Andrew Hulshult's metal-forward IDKFA recordings, which genuinely slap. The caveats are real but small. Hardcore source-port veterans who live in GZDoom will find the mod compatibility narrower than what they are used to, and some of the new lighting in darker levels has drawn criticism for making navigation feel like a guessing game. The weapon-switching carousel can feel clunky compared to the number-key muscle memory you have probably built up over decades. These are irritants, not dealbreakers.

Riley · Scout Team

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