A great bargain, if there ever was one.
User Rating: 8.1 | DOOM: Collector's Edition PC
When the Doom games were originally released, they came at price tags of upwards of fifty dollars. With that in mind, the three-game Doom Collector’s Edition comes across as one of the greatest bargains of all time. It not only includes Doom and Doom II, but also the wildly under appreciated Final Doom, which consists of sixty-four brand new levels. At prices of under ten dollars, it's easy to recommend the title to almost anyone. Still, you have to keep in mind that these games are all over ten years old, and from a purely technical standpoint, they're all very dated. Aside from that however, their fun factor remains, and it's still very enjoyable to play them. Assuming that you can get past their age, it should be very easy for anyone to have fun with this game. For the uninitiated, which should be very few of you, given the popularity of the series, the Doom games star you as an unnamed marine, all alone in a world populated by demons and undead humans. Each is a first-person shooter, although much more basic than the ones that are being released today. There is no jumping, nor are you allowed to look above or below you. When you fire your weapon, the shot merely goes towards the closest enemy that is directly in front of you. There isn't much difference in the core gameplay of the three different titles at all. Doom II simply adds a few new, although interesting, enemies and weapons, while Final Doom is just basically 64 new Doom II levels. In each of them, your only objective is to collect the red, blue, and yellow keys scattered around the levels so that you can reach the exit teleporter, which takes you to the next stage. In doing so, you have to avoid swarms of enemies which often number in the hundreds. Your foes are absolutely everywhere, meaning that combat occurs almost constantly around you. It truly can be enough to exhaust some people. The game's graphics are all colorful and fun to look at. However, every single object is a two-dimensional sprite, instead of a three-dimensional polygon. This means that every single enemy, power-up, and object is completely flat. You'll often notice just how odd it is that a corpse or a weapon looks exactly the same from every possible angle that you could see it from. Still, since flat objects take up less space than three-dimensional ones, this does make it possible for the game to display dozens of foes at a time without any slowdown. It is very easy to get tired of the fact that every single enemy and object looks the same, no matter what. You may be able to look at your foes from different angles, unlike stationary objects, but you still have to get past the fact that every enemy is identical to every other member of it's particular species. They all move in the same way, and they all die the same way. Still, it's possible to enjoy the game's dated look for what it is. Sound is another rather low point. Most of the music is bland, mechanical stuff that repeats itself endlessly. Given that, it's likely that you'll get annoyed with hearing the same songs over and over again. Still, some of the tunes are a bit likeable, so you won't have a totally awful time with it. Sound effects also suffer from the same repetition problem. Every enemy has one or two sound-effects that are assigned to it, and these repeat themselves every time you come across a foe. Still, the repetitiveness of these sounds won't bug you quite as much as that of the music, but it can still be a tad aggravating to hear the same things over and over again. All of the things mentioned above can be a bit off-setting at times, but they don't do much to hurt the game. After all, it's hard to fault the game for not magically evolving over the last ten years or so. However, there is one bug that can ruin the game for nearly anyone playing it. Sometimes, when loading a save file, the game freezes, forcing you to close the program to regain use of your computer. Repeated attempts to load the save file will bring the same result, meaning that one's save file will end up being lost in it's entirety. To continue playing, you'll have to either restart the level, or restart the game. This is an incredibly aggravating problem that can completely ruin the experience for the player, especially given how often it happens. The frequency of these errors also doesn't seem to differentiate between the different games in the collection, which means that you won't be safe from it no matter which of the three you are playing. While it doesn't damage the gameplay at all, it's still intensely frustrating to lose a save file and have to either restart a level without any of your weapons, or the entire game, thus costing you all of your progress. Doom Collector’s Edition is a huge bargain, and one that should not be missed by anyone with an interest in the series. It's wonderful to be able to play any of the first three incarnations of the series at any time you wish through this special release. The games haven't aged very well from a technical standpoint, but they're still some of the most flat-out fun there is available today. The save bug is the game’s one, almost crippling flaw. It's hard to stand for it when you lose multiple save files for some unknown reason. It ruins the mood of the game, and costs you whatever progress you've made. You can get around it by using cheat codes to regain all of your weapons, or possibly by creating backup save files in case one goes wrong, but these precautions shouldn't be necessary in a game like this. Still, at a price of around ten dollars, Doom Collector’s Edition is still one of the best purchases that you can make.
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