MOD SPOTLIGHT
A strange forgotten gem.
Brace yourself for a bizarre series of statements. There’s an official Doom game that’s a turn-based RPG yet still an FPS. It’s a game that was designed and developed for mobile phones by id Software co-founder John Carmack in the era before smartphones became available. It’s been essentially unavailable to buy or play for over a decade since the ancient phone hardware quickly became obsolete, so it’s largely been forgotten. Also, it’s… kinda awesome?
Doom RPG is one of those weird game concepts that sounds like it wouldn’t work at all, but instead works amazingly well, and so it’s doubly mystifying and tragic that it died so quickly and was never officially remade for other platforms. It’s a real Doom game! Why would absolutely no effort be made to put it for sale on PC, the original home of Doom? Well, where developers and publishers utterly dropped the ball on Doom RPG, fans once again stepped in to save the game from a fate worse than death. The dedicated, genius hobbyists at GEC.inc have reverse engineered the source code for Doom RPG and created a PC port. Finally, at long last, you can play the weird but wonderful turn-based shooter right on your desktop. And you should. Right now. It’s strange, but it’s excellent.
It does take time to adjust to playing Doom as a fast-paced bullet hell FPS to a turn-based game. Instead of zooming and strafing through the levels, you tap an arrow key to move one step in the direction you’re facing. You fire one shot, or one burst of bullets, at a time. When monsters appear it’s hard to fight the deeply ingrained instinct to immediately move and shoot, but… they’ll wait their turn so there’s really nothing to panic about. It’s an odd feeling after so many years of Doom as a constant life-or-death struggle where a small miscalculation can leave you bloodied and desperate. Which isn’t to say Doom RPG doesn’t still get plenty tense.
DOOM WITH A VIEW
But first, you mostly just walk around, one step at a time, inside a Martian UAC base. You are playing as the same DoomGuy you know and love, though you’re called simply ‘Marine’ by the other characters. And yes, there are lots of people to talk to, by walking up to them, tapping the Enter key, and then scrolling through their dialogue. Scientists, soldiers and even civilians are everywhere in the base, and the tone of the conversations is very casual and friendly despite the fact that the base is also filled with hellish Doom monsters and large parts of the facility are on fire.
Everyone is worth talking to— characters often provide you with tutorial-like tips, like how to use a fire extinguisher to quell the flames and how to use a woodsman’s ax (a weird thing to see in DoomGuy’s hands) to break down doors and smash open supply crates. There are also the familiar color-coded keys to open
FANS ONCE AGAIN STEPPED IN TO SAVE THE GAME
blue, red, and yellow doors, but accessing the base is even more complex since some doors need specific codes you’ll find in computer terminals. Those terminals are everywhere, and they’re almost the best part of Doom RPG. They’re filled with email communications between facility staff, and are often hilarious to read. One details an angry email exchange between two scientists, which is followed up by a final email reporting that they stopped typing and beat each other up. Another gives you a password of ‘1234’ then points out what a terrible password it is. Even if Doom RPG didn’t have monsters, I’d have a blast just wandering around reading about the inner lives and petty disputes of the people working at the base.
Doom RPG does have monsters, though. Lots and lots of familiar Doom demons lurk in the corridors and chambers of the base, and despite it being a turn-based affair they’ll still pull some of their famous Doom tricks, like spawning in behind you, ambushing you when you open a door, and in the case of the Arch-Vile, using its turn to resurrect a monster you just killed with your turn. Yes, it’s all turn-based, but big fights can still feel exciting and overwhelming at times, as monsters slip out of your narrow view of fire or get right up in your face and blast you as you wait your turn. They miss sometimes, which is honestly quite nice, as if you’re frantically strafing around instead of standing still. And getting in the final shot on a Revenant or
Pain Elemental as you’re down to your final shreds of health is nearly as exciting as any fight from a traditional Doom game.
OFF BASE
The base is set up in segments, with a central hub connecting them—a safe area where you can walk around, buy supplies like ammo and health kits, and talk to characters between slugging it out in the progressively more difficult levels. Just like other Doom games there are tons of secret areas scattered throughout the base, walls that open when interacted with that reveal hidden chambers with power-ups and loot (and cash to spend at the vending machine in the hub), and at the end of each level you’re treated to stats telling you how many secrets you found and how many you missed. There’s an automap that will show you the layout if you’ve found the terminal that supplies you with map data, which can help you scour the level until you’ve accessed all the secrets. But even with a map, it’s tricky finding them all.
And even after playing for a while, I kept forgetting it’s, like, an RPG. But it is. You have an actual inventory beyond just your gun collection. When you gather enough XP by killing demons you level up and gain health and armor, and increase other attributes like agility and accuracy which determine how hard you are to hit and your damage. DoomGuy actually has a notebook for collecting door codes and other bits of useful information. Not only do I love Doom as an RPG, I’m starting to think I actually prefer it over the traditional Doom games.
And there are lots of little surprises. Two characters both insist they don’t have a code I need to advance, and keep sending me back and forth between them until one asks for a cash bribe and then, abruptly, turns into a monster. In one delightful level, the code to a critical locked door is actually only visible on the map itself, as the corridors spell out 1337. Genius. With the pace slowed down enough to really examine and interact with the characters and terminals, there’s tons of places to pack in clever writing and loads of humor. I became more concerned with finding every last bit of text than I was with opening secret doors to find shotgun shells.
TURN ON
And it’s amazing how quickly moving through the Doom world step by step and getting into turn-based combat with monsters starts to feel perfectly normal. To kill a monster, you need to get it in your line of sight, and that’s tricky because they sometimes use their turn to move sideways and out of the path of your gun. You can step closer or move over, but that may give them the chance to advance and attack. It’s like a violent chess game as you try to limit your risk while positioning yourself to make your enemies vulnerable. It’s always exciting, pumping a bullet at a time into a charging (well, moving closer one step at a time, anyway) Pinky as it growls and snarls toward you.
And plenty of standard Doom tactics are still perfectly viable. Is a mob approaching you, or worse, are they using their turns to skitter away, back off, or stay out of your line of fire? Stepping into their path isn’t always a great idea, because it may give them a free shot at you, but are there some barrels filled with toxic green goo nearby? Of course there are, this is Doom we’re talking about. Just like in the other games, one shot will make that barrel explode, and if there are more barrels within range it’ll set off a chain reaction.
I love Doom RPG. The game’s original files need to be modded to play on desktop, naturally, and let’s just say buying a copy of the 2005 mobile game isn’t exactly an option these days. I’m definitely not telling you to get those files somewhere without paying for them—that’s certainly not advice I’d give you in print. But if they’re out there somewhere, packed up with a nice utility that will quickly get the port unpacked, modded, and running on your desktop, I highly recommend it for any fan of Doom.
PLENTY OF STANDARD DOOM TACTICS ARE STILL VIABLE