Final DOOM

Final Doom is two things: TNT: Evilution, a techbase-heavy campaign set on a UAC moon base overrun by hell-spawn, and The Plutonia Experiment, a hellish jungle-compound slaughterfest deliberately designed to break people who had already finished Doom II on Ultra-Violence. Both are 32-level megawads running on the Doom II engine, which means the full weapon roster is present - pistol, shotgun, super shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, plasma rifle, BFG9000 - with the same enemy lineup including revenants, arch-viles, pain elementals, and cyberdemons crammed into increasingly punishing configurations. No new weapons, no new monsters. Just 64 maps built to kill you. From a raw gameplay standpoint this is the same sub-millisecond, hitscan-heavy engine feel that made Doom a landmark. The movement is weightless and fast, the weapon feedback is punchy, and the BFG is still one of the most satisfying buttons you can press in any shooter ever shipped. The difference here is the map design philosophy. Plutonia, built by brothers Dario and Milo Casali in four months, was always meant for players who found Doom II too easy. It delivers on that. Ambushes trigger the moment you pick up a key, cyberdemons gate-keep exits, and the secret maps - Cyberden and Go 2 It - are genuinely brutal even by modern challenge-wad standards. Evilution is less consistent: the techbase levels are solid with a mostly original soundtrack composed by Jonathan El-Bizri, Josh Martel and others, but the episode drags in places and some maps are just filler. The quality gap between the two halves is real and worth knowing before you commit the time. The honest conversation about Final Doom is that it shipped without adding anything to the arsenal or the bestiary. There are no new guns to learn, no new enemy behavior to adapt to. What you get is raw level design - and on that front it is wildly uneven depending on which episode you are in. For Plutonia the design is tight, aggressive, and rewards people who treat map routing like a tactical problem. Evilution has moments of genuine creativity (Map 4's dual-world Wormhole gimmick, the claustrophobic Storage Facility) but also some flat corridors that remind you this was a community WAD. Worth knowing: TNT Map 31 has a notorious yellow key bug that soft-locks the level in most release versions, so check whether your build includes the patch. If you care about online play, the original engine supports deathmatch and co-op over LAN. By today's standards that infrastructure is a DIY project - expect to run a source port like GZDoom or Zandronum if you want any kind of stable multiplayer session. The netcode from 1996 is not the reason to be here. The reason to be here is 64 maps of old-school FPS at its most demanding, zero hand-holding, and a skill ceiling that speedrunners are still optimising decades later. If you have not finished Doom II, start there. If you have and you want something that will punish sloppy play, Plutonia will find every gap in your movement.

Fred · Scout Team

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