REVIEW: DOOM - The Spectrum Version

Doom is up there with Lemmings, Rise of The Robots and Street Fighter 2. If you look hard enough, you'll find a version of it on most game formats known to man and beast. As of late Doom has be converted to the Amiga and even the bloody Acorn RISC OS system.

But even before that, last year an obviously russian coding group went ahead and "converted" it to the speccy. It sounds impossible, but they did a fucking good job of it.

For idiots that don't have a single brain cell in their stomach, DOOM is THE game (let's forget about Wolf3D for now) that began the 1st Person shoot-em-up clone race. Gameplay is simple. You shoot anything that moves, collect keys to enter doors, find the exit, leave. If you want you can go and look for secrets, but most don't bother. Doom spawned several reincarnations (The stupidly Commercial only Doom2, Final Doom, Ultimate Doom and the endless mission packs availible) all keeping with the samey gameplay.

The graphics in Doom were found to be easily convertable, and really weren't massivly brilliant. The monsters/players were simply 2D scaled sprites, the 3D world was a naffly textured 2D software trick thing too (there was only ever one floor, dispite how the lifts fooled you). So it was reletivly easy to convert to other formats. However, Id had never planned on doing a Spectrum version of the game. Several mad russians saw to that.

In the speccy version, gameplay is exactly the same, shoot what ever moves, pick up whatever etcetc. Except there's only one level, doh. It can be played in 3 graphics modes, Monocrome (best detail, small screen) Fullscreen 1 (shat lined thing) and Fullscreen (Coloured blocky ok ish). The controls are normal enough (traditional Q,A,O,P) and the game is underway in a matter of seconds......

And then you realise, this isn't fucking doom! I've never seen a level like this before? Eh?

You see, the makers of this hack have seemed to have soley concentrated on the Doom graphics engine, and have seemed to have forgotten all about gameplay. Firstly the gun given to you is horribly underpowerd. It takes ages to kill any one monster. Also, these monsters arrive in clumps at a time, you get killed before you hit the space key. Even on the easiest of modes its rock hard. And totally unplayable.

The resulution of the spectrum does let this game down slightly, extra detail - so you can see far into the distance - is seriously needed here. Yes, the textured "3D" world is impressive, but it's more of a graphics demo than a game. All a bit pointless really. Shame.

Oh yeah, and there's no Sound FX to speak of......

OVERALL SCORE: 3/10 - Marks for trying, eh?

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