YMMV / Doom 64

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Sister Resurrector, who wants revenge against you in The Lost Levels after you have killed the Mother Demon. She is essentially just a rematch with the Mother Demon, but due to the level's layout, it puts her at a major disadvantage. The Unmaker is immediately available in the beginning, and you need to collect the 3 required Demon Keys in the level to open her door, which also powers up the Unmaker at maximum power. There are also 3 Invulnerability Spheres in the level; you can use one or two of them to clear most of the area out (in case you fear the Cyberdemon) or speed run it, and then save one at the end for a free win against her. Once you open the door, you can immediately fire at her effortlessly before she enters the portal because of the small pillar gap where your Unmaker's shots are small enough to go through. If she decides to fight you before entering the portal, none of her 2 attacks can hit you because the pillars are blocking her attacks. Even if she were to teleport in the main battling area and you decide to fight her without the Unmaker nor BFG rushing her, there are so many side walls and cover that can block her homing missiles before it directs against you, making avoiding her attacks simple unlike in the much more open Absolution. Then if you rush through the level with the Invulnerabilities and avoid killing the Cyberdemons, upon her being set free you can simply hide in one of the elevated side rooms where her and the Cyberdemons can't reach nor hit you, and then just wait for the Cyberdemons to kill her in the inevitable infighting that occurs from them trying to hit you. That said, if you don't know exactly what you're doing then the level itself ("Final Judgement") still makes for a hell of an ultimate challenge, as you scramble to find the demon keys while being assaulted by an absolute horde of Hell's finest, scrambling for enough pickups to wipe them out as you track down the keys, with higher difficulties spawning an additional Cyberdemon with each key you pick up.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack may be very different from those of the first two games, but it does a great job of establishing a dark, tense atmosphere, and unlike the similar soundtrack replacement for the PSX port of the original, the music fits this game's darker and more sinister style like a glove. If you're really into ambient soundtracks, Aubrey Hodges released soundtrack an extended edition for the 20th anniversary of the game's release with two remasters of the intro theme.
• Breather Level:
  • "Level 7: Research Lab", whereas each map in the starbase episode kept climbing in difficulty as you progressed, Research Lab takes a significant stepdown. After the prior map, Alpha Quadrant, introduced Barons and Pain Elementals, and overall had some high enemy density, this map mainly just has small groups of the small fries, and just some isolated Hell Knights for anything bigger, with the absolute worst you'll have to deal with being a pair of Hell Knights in a smallish room.
  • "Level 10: The Bleeding" is considerably less frenetic after the surge of difficulty on "Level 9: Even Simpler". The level has fewer confined spaces and provides ease of exploration from the simple layout of the map. You can also pick up a BFG for the first time, completing or almost completing your arsenal (depending on if you obtained the Unmaker from the first secret level earlier).
  • "Level 30: The Lair" is an anomaly among the secret levels, as while the other secret levels provided a big amp up in difficulty (Outpost Omega throws far more dangerous encounters at the player than they'll experience in the rest of the first 8 starbase maps, In The Void is chock full of tough enemies and features plentiful Pain Elementals in vast open spaces, and Hectic and the "fun" levels are just unfair), The Lair instead gives the player a big breather. Despite you having done several maps in Hell at that point, you mainly just fight small swarms of small enemies like Nightmare Imps, Spectres, and Lost Souls, while the only bigger threats are a couple Hell Knights and a couple Arachnotrons, the latter of which you can easily fight isolated to minimize your danger. The Lair is additionally really short, doesn't have much in ambushes, and has two Soulspheres in the map, which with the easy combat should easily allow you to leave the level with 200% health if you save one for the end. Plus you can get the second Demon Key near the beginning of the map to power the Unmaker to Game-Breaker levels, and the puzzle to get it is a lot simpler than the puzzles locking the Keys in Outpost Omega and In The Void.
  • "Level 14: Eye of the Storm" offers a psychological breather after the two relatively bleak levels preceding it. The clouds of a distant lightning storm add a sense of calm to the castle-like setting, and the music is also surprisingly relaxing if still a bit sinister. The extensive use of blue shades can also be relaxing, and the lighting is higher than usual. The level is also one of the shorter levels and doesn't have any booby traps to worry about, besides the typical Teleporting Keycard Squad.
  • "Level 20: Breakdown" has a remarkably ominous atmosphere and an infamous music track that is generally considered the game's creepiest track, but the actual combat in the level is rather light, with you mainly just fighting small groups of Formers and Imps in tight quarters with some Hell Knights and the occasional Baron, while you're armed with plenty of all types of ammo and get way more than enough health and armor (including a Mega Armor near the beginning, a secret Soul Sphere, and then an outright excessive Megasphere). The only tricky spot is the Red Key ambush that surrounds you with Pinkies, but that's easily manageable by using some rockets to quickly clear one side room of Pinkies and then huddling in the corner of the cleared side room with the Chainsaw or Chaingun to safely clear out the rest of the Pinkies. This level is additionally in the middle of the game's last third of levels, leaving it sandwiched between Doom 64's generally hardest levels and making the breather more apparent. The atmosphere of the level though still tends to leave an impression on players and makes it one of the most memorable maps despite its easiness.
• Cheese Strategy: Beating "Hectic" the intended way is normally a Trial-and-Error Gameplay experience, but due to an oversight, it is possible to actually collect the booby trapped Soul Sphere without becoming stuck and dying from a crusher. By making careful, slow movements, the supercharge is acquired but you're still outside of the pit, and can freely collect all the keys and exit without any of their traps setting off because the game can not run the encounter scripts simultaneously with the crusher sequence.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The buff to the Super Shotgun's fire rate and the prevalance of its ammo means that it'll probably be your go-to weapon for close-ranged encounters (i.e the majority of them). A point-blank blast does about as much damage as a direct rocket hit without the issues of self-damage at close range, enough to bring down a Hell Knight, Cacodemon or even a Mancubus in 3-4 shots, its stopping power will interrupt anything short of a Cyberdemon, and its spread means it can wipe out an small host of lesser demons like Zombiemen, Imps or Lost Souls with a single shot, letting you save the Rocket Launcher and Chaingun for long-ranged duels and the BFG/Unmaker for super-hard bastards.
• Creepy Awesome: The level designs, while dark and morbid, are very nicely done. One could argue that the demons of Hell have good taste in architecture.
  • Some of the levels in Hell resemble Medieval castles and Gothic cathedrals. Notably "Level 11: Terror Core", "Level 12: Altar of Pain", and "Level 23: Unholy Temple".
  • Some of the skies above the levels are kind of cool, even if they are sometimes imposing. Special mention goes to the calm, starry skies above the UAC levels, the dark, purple, stormy skies ("Level 11: Terror Core", "Level 14: Eye of the Storm") and the flaming green skies in "Level 23: Unholy Temple".
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Pain Elementals. While in Doom II, Pain Elementals were merely annoying mook makers that drew fire and distracted you from much more threatening enemies, they underwent a huge upgrade here. They shoot out two Lost Souls each time they attack instead of just one, and so will quickly overwhelm the player if they're not dealt with promptly. Additionally, if the player tries hugging the Pain Elemental's face to prevent Lost Soul spawning like you could in II, the spawned Lost Souls will instead explode and deal damage equivalent to a Rocket's explosion, turning them from completely helpless to extremely dangerous in close quarters. On top of that, the Lost Souls themselves are much more aggressive (but thankfully more frail), and will repeatedly charge at the player in sight unless stunned or killed, making them quite distracting and dangerous. All this results in an enemy that can soak up nearly as much if not even more ammo than a Baron of Hell, being nearly as much of an offensive threat as the Arachnotrons, and being able to completely trap and overwhelm the player unlike any other enemy in the game. Better hope you find the secret levels and the demon artifacts to power up the Unmaker before the later levels, where the game loves to throw multiple Pain Elementals at you at once in large open areas with little-to-no cover.
  • The improved Arachnotrons are borderline; they now fire two plasma bolts horizontally at once, which even with them pausing after every five shots, allows them to rack up damage even quicker than before and makes their attack cover more ground, making it very difficult to avoid without cover. However they are still large targets and can be stunned even easier than before, so can be managed well enough when the player is prepared, but should the player mess up or get caught offguard, Arachnotrons will kill even a boosted player with armor very quickly.
  • The homing missile launchers; you may have sighed a breath of relief when you saw Revenants were no longer in the game, but upon stepping into the opening room of Dark Entries, you're met with a horrible sound as a ton of missiles are launched at you, homing on you just as well as the Revenant missiles did and hitting you just as hard. And since they're not actual enemies, you can't destroy them and so will always have to deal with them when you cross the linedefs that triggers them. Fortunately for the player they appear in very few maps, but they're sure to cause a lot of grief for players their first time through the game.
• Disappointing Last Level: "The Absolution", when played normally will avert this, as it puts you up against an army consisting of most of the demons in the game, while infighting is disabled on this level so you can't get the army to kill each other, and then you have a legitimately challenging boss afterwards when much of your ammo has been depleted. If you go into the level with at least two Demon Keys however, it falls right back into this, as you can skip most (with 2 keys) or all (with all 3 keys) of the initial army sequence, while the powered-up Unmaker will make even the Mother Demon a complete breeze to kill.
• Game-Breaker: The Unmaker, once you find two or three secret artifacts, becomes the bane to the legion of Hell. It goes from an unspectacular laser beam to a powerful, rapid-firing spread shot that decimates enemies in no time while completely stunlocking them. Even the Final Boss can die in a few seconds from it at level-3 power with little chance to retaliate, and the aforementioned Pain Elementals with all their Lost Souls can be destroyed within a second by it without any retaliation. The scarcity of plasma ammo prevents the player from being able to rely on it as their primary weapon however, preventing it from eliminating the game's difficulty, but as long as its ammo is adequately conserved, it can get the player out of every tight combat spot in the game.
• Genius Programming:
  • Just booting up the game ROM was potentially an awe-inspiring experience because the game starts with an actual rendered cutscene with the camera flying around a battle between multiple space marines and some of the monsters you'll be facing such as the newly-modeled Arachnotrons, Mancubi and Cyberdemons. The camera then aims down and ascends into the sky showing the structure in the middle of the cutscene map to be the "DooM" logo, and the floor texture is disabled to present the Unmaker Insignia in the background for a unique seamless title screen effect. Quite an advancement from the static title cards of the previous iterations.
  • Doom 64 does a nice job taking advantage of the Nintendo 64 hardware despite being 2.5D, and smooths out the textures nicely with the hardware's 3-point filtering capabilities. Scripting was added to the system, allowing some cool tricks like the illusion of 3D bridges, dart & homing-rocket turrets, and conditional triggers on geometry as well as monster spawning. The engine was also upgraded with subtle features like the ability to display 3D support beams without the skybox obstructing visibility up on top. Thanks to using pre-rendered sprites rather than potentially-blocky models, the monsters can almost pass for 3D and are also smoothed by hardware filtering.
  • "Level 23: Unholy Temple" is like a tech demo for engine tricks, with very convincing 3D bridges, a combination lock puzzle, and some nicely detailed citadel walls around the central temple.
  • A simple but effective alteration was made to the Cyberdemon: they now actually fire their rockets from their rocket launcher instead of from their center mass, resulting in them aiming their rockets at a downward angle towards you. This allows their rockets to explode near you as they hit the ground, making their Splash Damage a big threat even without the aid of a nearby wall and making the player have to be more considerate with where they strafe, especially if they don't have the room to circle strafe.
  • The Unmaker's lasers can be notable as they appear to be simple rays accompanying the Hitscan effect, however, when unofficial ports and total conversions were in their early stages, this was found to be a difficult special effect to replicate, due to the carefully crafted sprites placed in such a convincing perspective that it appears the game is rendering an actual laser ray(s). For the constraints of the Id Tech 1 engine, this could be seen as an impressive trick.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Lost Souls are much less durable then in the previous games, but are now far more aggressive. Should one get close, they will rapidly spam their charge/bite attack, quickly eating away at your health. If you fight enough of them at once they can easy reach Demonic Spider status.
  • The Nightmare Imps. While they're not more durable than a regular Imp, their fireballs are fast and can be tricky to dodge in narrow confines. And, like the Lost Souls, Nightmare Imps can eat a lot of your health away if they attack in groups.
  • The Hell Knights. They can be dispatched easily with a super shotgun and some patience. However, their attacks are just as damaging as a Baron of Hell, so they are still a reasonable threat. Also, Hell Knights have a nasty habit of showing up when you least expect (or want) them. The "Watch Me Die!" difficulty setting loves to use Hell Knights for either a Monster Closet or a random ambush, with the Hell Knights being the most common enemy after the cannon fodder zombies, Imps, and Pinky Demons.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The new episode included in the 2020 re-release, "The Lost Levels", has maps that are all high quality, but there's only six of them plus another bonus "fun level", whereas the size of a traditional Doom episode has typically been eight or more maps long (although some of the maps are absolutely massive, the biggest in the entire game). If you like Doom 64 you'll certainly enjoy the new episode, but after finishing it you might be left yearning for more.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • A subtle example with some of the background music. Depending on your musical tastes, some of the songs can be creepy, yet strangely calm and relaxing. "Level 1: Staging Area" and "Level 10: The Bleeding" are two possible examples.
  • Another minor example with the secret Level 31 "In The Void". It's described as an especially horrific place even by Hell's standards. The starting room has corpses all over the place and it's supposedly a place that "no nightmare could have prepared you for". And yet in spite of all this, the level has a light, cyan blue sky and background. Though it's also arguably what adds to the bizarre nature of the level. But still, cyan blue is the one of the last colors you'd associate with Hell.
• Nintendo Hard: By Nintendo64 standards, Doom 64 was a rough ride due to the less than ideal controller scheme and the game not shying away from placing you in heated situations against heavyweight monsters, especially on the harder difficulty levels. The game could also be notoriously dark on the televisions of the time and the lack of Save Scumming meant that you'd need to clear a level in one sitting or pause the game and hope there is no power outage. Besides the monsters, the game also has environmental traps that can kill unaware players, such as traditional crusher traps, dart shooters, homing missile launchers (very damaging), a few inescapable toxin/lava pit traps that will send you all the way back to the start of the level, and mandatory treks across damaging floors in on occasion. Mercifully, this game lacks Chaingunners, Revenants and Arch-Viles so you at least won't have to face the worst of the Doom II roster.
• Paranoia Fuel: Very much so.
  • In addition to the creepy ambient background music, monsters have a tendency to randomly teleport and appear from out of nowhere at the worst possible times. Sometimes, monsters will even appear and ambush you when you return to rooms that you had previously cleared out. ^note The Mancubi in the secret Level 29 "Outpost Omega" are a notable example of this. It's especially nasty on the (appropriately named) "Watch Me Die!" difficulty. The random ambushes become more paranoia-inducing when they involve powerful enemies like Arachnotrons, Mancubi, Pain Elementials, or even a Cyberdemon.
  • And speaking of the creepy ambience, some of the tracks feature low, demonic growls and moans or robotic/electronic voices which can give you the false impression that a monster is sneaking up on you. Level 20: "Breakdown" is the most notorious example of this, but Level 8: "Final Outpost" and Level 15: "Dark Entries" are also noteworthy.
• Polished Port: The 2020 re-release of Doom 64 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC saw a multitude of enhancements over the original N64 version, such native widescreen and HD resolutions, 60 FPS gameplay (with the PC version being capable of running at 1000 FPS), new lighting options, touch screen support on Switch and motion controls on supported systems, and best of all, an entirely new second chapter to the game, one designed to fill some gaps in the lore between the classic and modern Doom games. The Xbox One version also comes with two unique traits: it has the ability to play the game with keyboard and mouse controls, and it is the only game on Xbox One S that can render at a higher resolution than 1080p, rendering at 1440p instead.^note For some context, the Xbox One S supports output up to 4K, but this was only intended for watching videos and to allow for better upscaling on 4K TVs.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The addition of the Unmaker basically makes the Plasma Gun obsolete due to the Unmaker using cells. Once you've upgraded the Unmaker only once, there is no reason to even bother using Plasma Gun; the Unmaker will have a greater rate of fire after the first upgrade, and regardless of upgrades, each laser shot deals 10-80 points of damage versus the 5-40 a single plasma shot will deal, and despite the lasers looking like projectiles, it's a hitscan weapon, meaning it'll hit its target instantly unobstructed with full accuracy. Get the second and third upgrades, it'll shoot two and then three laser shots at once, giving it an incredible rate of fire that can stunlock even the Cyberdemon and Mother Demon to death, leaving the Plasma Gun hopelessly outclassed. The Plasma Gun also got nerfed, fires 1/3 slower than the original version of the weapon, and emits an annoying loud buzzing noise at idle. It's somewhat more useful in The Lost levels and prior to finding the BFG, as the player doesn't get the Unmaker or any keys until the final level. That said, most players will save their cells for the BFG once they get one (a secret one can be obtained as early as the second level). And for those Pistol starting every level or otherwise accepting the penalty of losing everything for dying instead of reloading a save upon death, the Plasma Gun will find good usage as a rapid fire weapon that's stronger than the Chaingun (each plasma ball deals 5-40 damage vs 5-15 for bullets). Also, the Unmaker only appears in four levels (five with The Lost Levels counted), while the BFG is also uncommon and difficult to find in most maps.
  • Downplayed with the BFG. It's still very efficient with cells against a large hoard of monsters and against individual Cyberdemons at point-blank range, and still has a higher sheer DPS than even the fully upgraded Unmaker, thus it is never obsolete. However, the Unmaker shares its ammo and it isn't always obvious if using the BFG is more efficient as the amount of simultaneous monsters rarely stretches the BFG's maximum output. You are also vulnerable while holding out for the charge-up time, and you'll still need to keep your aim steady after firing and be close to the targets to ensure the bulk of the tracers hit. Conversely, the upgraded Unmaker will just start blasting through foes instantly with little concern for distance nor locking your aim and has the advantage of stunning monsters in a Cycle of Hurting, greatly reducing the chance of being hurt from retaliation by your targets and overall being a much easier weapon to use, especially in panic situations.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Among the console Dooms, Doom 64 is considerably more difficult than the thematically similar PlayStation ports despite having the utterly broken Unmaker, and lacking Revenants, Chaingunners, Arch-Viles and Spider Masterminds. The increased difficulty comes from larger and more complicated levels, not having limitations in enemy variety per level (so unlike Playstation Doom, Doom 64 can throw all its strongest monsters at you in a single level), Lost Souls and Pain Elementals being made significantly more dangerous (the latter now being a bonafide Demonic Spider used liberally throughout the game), plasma cells being significantly more scarce (so the player has to be really stingy with their use of the Unmaker and BFG to ensure they have ammunition when they really need them), a plethora of death traps to quickly kill a unsuspecting player, arena-type levels having a special flag set that prevents monster infighting from happening (so you can't rely on monster infighting to thin out the the large swarms of monsters you fight in arena levels), a new final boss that's significantly harder than the Spider Mastermind, and just generally putting the player into more dangerous situations in general. Previous entries usually have 1-3 event-triggering scripts in the entire game that is usually reserved for the final boss or specific level (i.e. Killing 2 Barons of Hell in Doom 1's Episode 1 opens up the building). Doom 64? Very common element; see Level 17's Watch Your Step where you HAVE to kill a group of enemies to bring back the next batch of enemies.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The intro music is exceptionally similar to the opening of Batman (1989), complete with a flyover of the game's logo identical to one used in the film.
• That One Boss: The Mother Demon is a killing machine. She possesses the Revenants' homing missiles, fired in quads, as well as a flame trail that is fired in all four compass directions. Without the Unmaker powered up at least twice, she is nasty opponent to fight. Also, your resources are partly spent from The War Sequence that must be fought in this instance. However, if you find the secret levels in the game to assemble your aforementioned ultimate weapon it becomes a breeze. Find all three artifacts and you can seal off the demon portals and proceed to the final battle immediately. The Unmaker acts like a laser minigun, easily stun locking her and leaving her dead in seconds. But good luck finding those secret levels without a guide.
• That One Level:
  • "Level 6: Alpha Quadrant" is where levels start causing easy deaths, especially on Watch Me Die. What makes it painful is an abyssal room with severe darkness, populated with specters in the pit that can corner you easily, and Barons of Hell impeding your progress from across the room. Much time can be spent, trying to clear a safe path through this room to hit the switches you need to access the final key. By the way, you can't save scum on the Nintendo 64, so if you die in Doom 64, you go back to the beginning of the level.
  • "Level 9: Even Simpler" can be very fun, but get ready to be barbecued after raising the elevator in the center of the arena, your first time through. "Watch Me Die" has you completely surrounded by Mancubi, who carpet the air with their painful fireball attacks. The mercy here is that if you die a lot here, you haven't lost much progress. The rest of the level is certainly "not simple" due to the nasty assortment of monsters, including Pain Elementals, and you don't have the BFG nor the Unmaker powered up beyond level one yet. Despite all of the above, the level may give one a sense of triumph once they complete it due to how intense it gets.
  • "Level 16: Blood Keep" has a layout that is fairly complicated to figure out, and is a fairly long level. What really makes it frustrating is that the exit room has a cheap death trap if you're unfamiliar with the map: Some Lost Souls assault you and are easy enough to deal with, but after they die, the edges of the room (2/3 of the room) lower into an inescapable death-pit that kills you, which means that if you happen to wander here at the wrong time, you go back to the beginning. Note that Doom 64: Absolution, a game mod that recreates the game on the PC, has an alteration of this trap, that is not to be confused with the original, where the sides lower right away, and the safe zone is even smaller, with the player surrounded by hell-knights. This game engine is built on JDoom and allows Save Scumming unlike on the N64, lessening the likelihood of redoing the level.
  • "Level 21: Pitfalls", oh...damn. This level certainly has pitfalls with plenty of lava to swim in, and a treacherous layout somewhat like "The Chasm" in Doom 2, only you're more tense about dying because of the "no save scumming" limitation. The castle-like halls in another section of the map also contain some nasty traps, and there is a confusing point where you must back-track to the beginning to flip a switch you probably forgot about, confused as to why you're stuck. The music track for this level, "Perfect Hate" by Aubrey Hodges, is like a theme for the Nightmare Fuel page, that leaves a helpless feeling.
  • "Level 22: Burnt Offerings", while not the most outright difficult level, has a dirty trick that feels poorly thought-out. At one point, you need to progress by picking up a Rocket Launcher, but if you happen to be full on Rockets, then you may become stuck as you can not progress without picking up that Launcher. When you do take the Rocket Launcher, you are lowered into a shallow pit and four dart launchers start firing at you which can lead to your death if you were unprepared and running low on health. Replacing the Rocket Launcher with a Mega Sphere would be a simple fix, preventing a cheap death and providing a challenge to get through the sequence with as much health as possible. (there is a hidden switch nearby that keep up the barriers surrounding where the launcher was, thus shielding the player from the darts, but there's no hint that it exists)
  • "Level 23: Unholy Temple", which combines all of Doom 64's hallmarks; long levels with complicated layouts, nasty ambushes by high level monsters in tight situations, death traps, and mandatory puzzles (with the one here spanning across the entire level), all rolled into the game's ultimate Marathon Level. The visual design of the temple, however, is a great example of Genius Programming on the Doom 64 engine, easing the pain of this level with Quake-like 3D illusions, and a neat demonstration of the game's scripting capabilities in general.
• Vindicated by History:
  • In its day, 64 was criticized for being yet another Mission-Pack Sequel at a time when not only was the id Tech 1 engine no longer considered impressive, but that the original games had received sub-par ports on every other console for the last couple of years. As such, it drew unfavorable comparisons to the more modern Quake and other more technically-impressive N64 shooters like Turok and GoldenEye, and it was also lambasted for lacking any sort of multiplayer, as PVP shooters became all the rage after GoldenEye's release. With the benefit of its fan-made Doom 64 EX port, it's considered an overlooked gem for its solid map design and creepy atmosphere, and featuring a Final Boss that's a huge step up from the Spider Mastermind. It's not uncommon to find people who consider it a better Doom 3 than the actual Doom³. This came to a head with Doom 64 finally getting an HD port to modern systems and computers in 2020 along with a set of brand new levels to tie it and the first two games into the Doom (2016) continuity.
  • Additionally, while criticized in its day for not being a true 3D game at a time when full 3D games were heralded as the wave of the future and 2D was considered obsolete, when compared to its N64 shooter contemporaries and other games of its generation in general, its usage of sprites and 2.5D engine helps it hold up much better graphically than the other N64 shooters and most fifth generation games, whose primitive 3D models are very apparent in their age. Plus, it features the fast, classic Doom gameplay that still stands on its own today while its contemporary 3D shooters play much clunkier and have been long obsoleted by modern shooters. Its entire focus on good single-player shooter content also made it stand out more as time went on, when the shooter genre has become maligned for its over-focus on multiplayer, with there being a significant lack of shooter games with solid single-player experiences after the turn of the century.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Doom engine was really stretched to the limit for its time, even exceeding the capabilities of Hexen in some respects^note the game's capabilities could only be fully replicated in GZDoom, a highly advanced source port. Textures and sprites are smoothed out to eliminate pixelation, level geometry can now be scripted into intricate special effects, the skies are able to be smoothly animated and even display thunder and lightning, and levels can be made to fool the player into thinking they are more 3D than they really are. The levels in the second act of the game and latter really stand out with their castle-like designs and well animated skies, and the entire presentation wasn't quite like anything else on the N64.

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