Awesome / Doom (2016)

Spoilers Off on moments pages, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

"There's nothing wrong with you I can't fix...
WITH MY HANDS!"

Dark Souls: You're trapped in a room with demons.
DOOM: Demons are trapped in a room with you.

It's probably safe to say that no other video game has reveled in drenching itself with such pure and utter badass quite like this one.

---

• Admit it, by the time you finished your first round of demons, you didn't feel like a badass. You felt like a GOD. AND THE GAME JUST KEPT GETTING BETTER.
• Using the Chainsaw on the Baron of Hell. First, the Marine slices off one of its legs, and then proceeds to bring it down and saw off the top half of the Baron's head at the jaw.
• Any time you pick up the Berserk power up in a room full of demons, making you switch from your standard weapons to your other guns. It doesn't matter if you're facing imps or mancubi or even Barons of Hell — everything becomes meat for the grinder while you have this buff. And it is glorious.
  • Hell, anytime you do a Glory Kill on a particularly aggravating demon. Especially the more stylish ones like Death From Above or Sweep the Leg.
  • Berserk as a powerup is so awesome that it made into Quake Champions as the DOOM Slayer's active ability, complete with this game's version of "At Doom's Gate" playing on the background while you use the ability. Enjoy punching all kinds of species with your bare fists.
  • If you pick it up with the Savagery rune equipped, the Slayer becomes practically the ultimate example of The Juggernaut Lightning Bruiser, being able to barehandedly rip half a dozen demons twice as big as him to pieces within a couple of seconds.
  • Of course, the awesomeness is intensified if you crush the demons single-handedly without picking any powerup.
• The very opening of the game is one. The Doom Marine wakes up chained to an operating table/tomb, no armor, no weapons, and surrounded by Possessed. What does he do? He rips free of his shackles, crushes the head of a Possessed that gets too close, and picks up a dropped pistol to gun down the rest. Welcome back, Marine.
  • The opening quote in the loading screen before you start:
    Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.
  • And this bit:
    They are rage, brutal, without mercy. But you. You will be worse. Rip and tear, until it is done.
• From what we learn about him later on, it's not too much of a stretch to realise he wasn't tearing off his shackle because he was afraid of the approaching zombies. Nope, he just couldn't wait to get back to work.
  • He makes it clear that any business that isn't strictly killing demons is just a waste of time. Samuel Hayden contacts him through a floating screen, and the moment he proposes that they work together to solve the issue of the invasion, the Doom Slayer just grabs the screen and tosses it into the wall, basically saying "yeah, asshole, I know this song and dance and I'm not fuckin' with it".
  • There's also the elevator sequence after the initial 10-15 minutes of gameplay. Doomguy gets on an elevator to the Martian surface, Samuel Hayden begins talking as Doomguy cracks his knuckles getting fed up with the exposition, then smashes the speaker as a badass remix of "At Doom's Gate" from the first level of the original game plays... then the title comes on in epic fashion. DOOM IS BACK, BABY. Followed by Doomguy doing a dramatic shotgun pump as the final note. This is just enough for any player to already think, "Yeah, this game is going to kick ASS!"
  • As a bonus, look carefully at Doomguy's hands after he glances down at the butchered corpse of a UAC worker in the elevator, while Hayden tells him it was all to make the world a better place and benefit humanity — they're absolutely trembling. There's a reason he punches the comm speaker: he's not just annoyed, he's so enraged he can barely think, and he's going to make all of them pay.
• Your arrival in Hell is accentuated by a mysterious Demon voice (the same one that documents Doom Marine's infamy across Hell, even dubbing him the Doom Slayer) saying three simple words:
  "He is here."
  • And in the final level, that same voice is clearly disgruntled as he repeatedly commands the Demons to step up their fight and prevent you from destroying the Well. Considering this is their closest equivalent to Satan, you are probably the only entity in existence that causes what could very well be a dark god to falter.
• The entirety of Kadingir Sanctum. To recap:
  • The Doom Slayer is stranded in Hell. In any other game, this would be the lowest point of the story, with the hero desperately seeking a way back. What does the tip on the loading screen say? "Keep going, kill everything in your way".
  • The booming voice at the beginning of the level makes it clear you're in the demon's home turf, where they can pit everything they've got against you. They still get trounced by the score. And just to accentuate it, you get a serving of Ominous Latin Chanting every time you finish a battle.
  • It's also the place where you find the first half of the Testaments, learning the Doom Slayer is the one thing that terrifies any and all demons. The denizens of the Sanctum aren't attacking you out of mere enmity, but out of desperation.
    • Keeping that in mind, the brutal executions that the demons carry out on Doomguy aren't due to acting on sadistic impulses- rather, they're trying to make sure that he's actually dead.
• The Doomguy's new backstory is pretty much a chain of these. He is the Sole Survivor of the Night Sentinels, protectors of a realm called Argent D'nur. After it fell and was absorbed into Hell, the Doomguy launched into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, tearing through Hell and destroying its temples and armies. Empowered by the Seraphim and clad in Powered Armor built by a rogue demon, he quickly became The Dreaded throughout all of Hell, and a Titan was summoned to stop him. He killed it in single combat, and then continued his rampage. Doomguy only stopped when he walked into a trap and had an entire temple dropped on him, buried alive... until the UAC dug him up.
  • A player on Tumblr summarizes it really well:
    Demons have whole scriptures and runes etched with stories of the “Doom Slayer” and his rampage through Hell before they could even manage to seal him and put him to sleep. Like we are talking absolute bloodbath that made every Demon tremble. When this game happens, you are the ancient evil in that whole “An Ancient Evil has awoken” trope.
  • UAC backlogs reveal that towards the end of their latest excursion where they picked up you, the demons began fighting with even more ferocity than before. Basically, they realized where the puny humans were going and decided "Fuck it!" and just went all-in against them, just to keep you from getting out again. And then they found out they failed.
  • At the start of Mission 10 ("Titan's Realm"), you stroll through the remains of a demon who is so absolutely massive that a single vertebrae is about five or so times Doomguy's size. At the end of the field is a Demon Lore stone that recounts Doom Slayer's victory over Hell's champion, the aforementioned Titan. Yes - those giant remains you just strolled through are of the very same Titan that Doomguy killed by himself.
    • Another small detail: if the order of the Slayer Testaments matters, then that means the Doom Slayer killed the Titan before he got his impenetrable armor. No wonder he has every demon scared shitless.
    • Even Better, he did this all without a single gun to fire. That's right: he fought countless monsters and beat a colossal demon in single combat armed with nothing but a sword and shield.
• The Final Battle with Olivia Pierce as the Spider Mastermind. No longer the Anti-Climax Boss from the first game, she is extremely durable and loaded with different weapons, putting up far more of a fight. Special points go to the Finishing Move performed at the end of the fight: shoving the BFG-9000 into her mouth and blowing her entire head apart.
• The "game completed" screen? Doomguy standing on the corpse of the Spider Mastermind, looking cool and collected with the BFG in hand, as if daring Hell to send something better against him next time.
  • This trend continues in Doom Eternal, with the defeated corpse of the Icon of Sin. Hell certainly did try to send something better to kill the Slayer...too bad it still didn't work.
• The intro to the Cyberdemon fight: the large doors in the Lazarus Labs slowly open before a large arm smashes through, grabs Doomguy and then flings him into the arena before unleashing an epic roar to start the fight.
  • What makes this even more badass is the reason why he eagerly grabbed you... he remembers you. According to the Codex, this guy was once a powerful demon known as a Baalgar, an ancient shadowlord that was presumably killed by the Doomguy during the latter's rampage through Hell. His remains were then taken by the UAC for study, where he was brought back to life with Argent Energy and turned into the UAC's most dangerous weapon. And now he is pissed.
  • That's not the only awesome part; the other one comes from how Doomguy handles being thrown by something twice his size into the arena - he stays standing throughout and grinds to a halt seemingly through sheer rage.
    • The utter Death Glare that Doomguy and Cyberdemon give each other when they meet. It's like Doomguy is daring him to Bring It, and Cyberdemon accompanies his with a roar of utter fury before picking up where he left off.
    • What makes this moment truly special? Every demon up till this point and beyond it is utterly terrified of the Doom Slayer. The Cyberdemon feels no semblance of fear, and instead runs on such incredible fury, rivaled only by that of the Doom Slayer, that he goes at you without hesitation. Even after the Slayer tears out his power supply, the Cyberdemon manages to WILL HIMSELF BACK TO LIFE and give one last attempt at his mortal enemy's life out of sheer, rage fueled determination. Un. Believable.
• Just about any large fight will be one, especially on harder difficulties. Ducking and dodging between fireballs and plasma shots, quickly picking off enemies, darting in for a Glory Kill before evading another deadly attack by inches, all at a breakneck pace.
• Sure, it's in the hands of an amoral corporation. Sure, it comes with violent, horrendous consequences. But you gotta admit, the fact that humanity has been mining Hell for its resources like the oil fields of Texas is pretty cool. If for no other reason than the sheer ballsiness of the concept. And if Olivia hadn't been corrupted/manipulated by the Slaves of Doom (the powered exoskeleton allowing her to walk causes her constant borderline unbearable pain, to the level that anesthesia and painkillers would affect her judgement/clarity of thought, and a way out of this WITHOUT returning to a wheelchair is likely HOW the Demons initially got their hold on her), IT WOULD HAVE WORKED! The basic technology for filtering the Demonic Influence from Wraith/Argent energy works flawlessly, as does the transmission system - and had worked perfectly for over a century (going by the fact that Hayden had lived as a cyborg for 100-140 years so far, and his body explicitly RUNS off the stuff). That is, until Doom Eternal showed in gruesome detail exactly what Argent Energy was made from and what kind of detrimental effects it had on those who grew addicted to it...
• Doomguy's response to all of the technology involving the Argent Tower is to break it, despite Samuel Hayden chastising him and demanding he not do so. This might sound like Cutting the Knot, but Doomguy is not happy at what happened on the Mars Facility, and Smash to Black in the beginning of the game makes it clear that he is not having any of Hayden's shit. Doomguy knows that messing with anything involving Hell is a bad idea, so he is not taking any chances, Utopia Justifies the Means be damned.
  Hayden: You must understand. Our interest in their world was purely for the betterment of mankind.
  Doomguy: (Looks at the mangled corpse of the UAC worker at his feet, cracks knuckles angrily and then smashes the comm unit.)
  • Depending how you look at it even more awesome, the first time Samuel Hayden tells him to stop and starts explaining why he shouldn't just break it, Doomguy stops and listens. He's not merely an unfeeling juggernaut of destruction—he was willing to entertain the idea there might be a good reason to keep stealing energy from Hell. But he was also savvy enough to see that Samuel Hayden was not giving him a good reason that wasn't motivated by personal gain first and foremost, hence looking at the mutilated innocent bystander while Samuel rambled about the greater good.
• Some of the ECHO playbacks in Hell show Hayden and a squad of marines on their initial incursion. The marines are clearly terrified, nervously looking about and pointing their weapons wildly, as you'd expect from somebody traveling into Physical Hell. Hayden, however, doesn't even look remotely frightened. Sure, he's in a nine-foot tall robot body, but still.
  • The reason Hayden's a cyborg to begin with? After his research into Argent Energy made him stinking rich, he was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. Rather than moping about his short, sad life, he began research into Brain Uploading and got back to work.
• Just getting the BFG-9000. You have to deactivate the security system (while dodging deadly laser grids), making you work harder for it than any other weapon in the game, Then, after you get it, a door opens up to reveal a horde of demons and some more ammo for the BFG, allowing you to get a free test-shot. It just works.
• The chances for a Glory Kill on an enemy controlling a demon in multiplayer are very few, so the ones that do happen are, well... glorious. Especially gruesome ones include pulling the esophagus of a Revenant out through its mouth, gouging the Revenant's eyes before snapping its neck, knocking the gigantic Baron of Hell to the ground before ground pounding its face, tearing apart the jaw of a Prowler, or getting a Mancubus to blow its own brains out.
• Turning into a Baron of Hell in multiplayer transforms the experience into a very gruesome game of tag as you chase down your terrified adversaries and pull their limbs off.
• Glory Killing the third Hell Guardian at the end of the battle to claim the Crucible. Each of the three Guardians gets its own unique Glory Kill, but the third takes the cake. Doomguy forcibly rips the chest armor off the thing's front and throws it aside, then reaches in and yanks out the worm-like pilot creature. The music switches to the game's main theme as Doomguy holds the screaming, struggling creature in front of him and grabs it at both ends, pulling until it snaps in two like a Christmas cracker, just as the final notes of the theme play to underscore the whole point of the game: Doomslayer is one hardcore motherfucker.
• The first cutscene where Doomguy runs into the Imp. At first you might be forgiven for thinking it shrieks to intimidate the player, but after you learn how much the demons fear you it takes on a whole different meaning. The Imp isn't trying to scare you, it's actually screaming in terror when it realizes the Doom Slayer has returned.
• The entire end credits montage is a crowning moment of awesome. It's full of scenes of the Doomguy (including the Marineguy doll version) kicking all kinds of ass.
• Samuel Hayden deserves some points for the ending. After the Doom Slayer had destroyed pretty much all of his progress in achieving a new source of energy, he doesn't back down - he gravitates the Crucible in his hand, deciding that it would be the perfect way to continue his sciences, and then, with an insurmountable amount of balls of steel, he essentially wins the game by sending the Doom Slayer off to parts unknown, emphasized by him being the one to activate the Crucible. The Slayer may have been the most badass One-Man Army to exist, but Hayden's brilliant mind goes unequaled. DAMN, Doc. GOD. DAMN.
  Samuel Hayden: Our time is up. I can't kill you, but I won't have you standing in our way. Until we see each other again.

---

Rip and tear, until it is done.