Doom II

Doom II: Hell on Earth, released September 30, 1994, is the sequel to Doom, which was released a year earlier.

Story

Immediately following the events in Doom, the player once again takes the role of the nameless Space Marine who has proven too tough for the forces of Hell to contain. After being killed on Phobos, and subsequently fighting his way out of Deimos and Hell itself, the Marine is back home on Earth, only to find that it too has fallen victim to the hellish invasion.

The player progresses through 30 levels (not including two secret ones), and on the way he learns that the remaining survivors of Earth's population are being held in a space port and must escape via transporter. Once the Marine accomplishes that, he is free to live out the rest of his time alone on Earth while humanity hopefully continues on elsewhere. But before long the Marine learns of a way in which he can finally thwart the invasion once and for all...

Gameplay developments

Doom II was not a dramatically different game from its predecessor. There were no major technological developments, no major graphical improvements, and no real changes in fundamental gameplay. The game still consisted of the player negotiating non-linear levels, picking up keys to unlock new areas, and of course shooting hundreds upon hundreds of monsters.

There were several new additions in terms of monsters and enemies. A new zombie, the aptly-named Chaingunner, was added, wielding a chain gun. New additions for the forces of Hell proper included the following:

The Hell Knight, a junior version of the Baron of Hell.

The Mancubus, a large, blob-like creature with flame-throwers instead of arms.

The Revenant, a skeletal creature armed with a mixture of guided and unguided rockets.

The Arachnotron, a junior version of the Spider Mastermind, though armed with a plasma gun instead of a chain gun.

The floating Pain Elemental, which resembled the Cacodemon, but which launched Lost Souls at the player.

The Arch-Vile, a thin demon which had the ability to resurrect certain kinds of fallen monsters. Its attacking move engulfed the player in flames for a short period, after which a violent blast would throw the player into the air, causing great damage.

A new boss, the overall end boss, called the Icon of Sin, which was really nothing more than a giant wall (with a goat's skull visage) with a small hole in the forehead where its weak spot was. Inside this weak spot, as a joke, was the disembodied head of John Romero impaled on a spike. The Icon of Sin could summon an infinite number of monsters to kill the player.

The SS trooper from Wolfenstein 3D appeared in the two secret levels, which were throwbacks in design (and music) to the Wolfenstein 3D game. Also, a hanged Commander Keen figure made a cameo in the second secret level.

The player's only new weapon was the Super shotgun, a double-barreled, break-open weapon which used two shotgun shells to produce slightly more than double the firepower of the pump-action original shotgun, firing twenty pellets to the single-barrel original's seven. A close-in blast from the super shotgun was devastatingly useful against the Demons, Cacodemons, any form of medium-sized monster, and other players.

There was also one new item, the Megasphere, a tan sphere that gave the player 200% armor and health.

The flow of play was slightly different to the original game (which was still referred to as "Doom", rather than "Doom 1"). Rather than the player progressing through three separate ten-level episodes, Doom II took place over thirty-two linked levels, with brief interludes in order to advance the story. Instead of watching the player's progress on a map (as in the original episodes of Doom), the screens between each level simply showed a background with a score. The player was allowed to carry his or her weapons throughout the entire game, rather than starting from scratch at the beginning of each episodes. Two of the levels were secret; after visiting them, the player was returned to the flow of the thirty core episodes.

The level design, as in Doom, was only loosely based on the areas the player was going into. As the game was taking place on Earth, a real-world look was attempted, with some levels taking place in certain kinds of military installations, and others taking place in residential areas. Although some areas do resemble places on Earth (like Downtown), most seemed relatively abstract. Towards the end of the game, Hell had begun to merge with reality, and the final levels took place in a nightmarish, Dante-esque subterranean miasma of flowing lava and hot springs.

In general, Doom II was well-received but was regarded in some areas as a disappointment. In particular, its lack of major new features and its uninspiring, sometimes drab level design were the biggest complaints. It did, however, introduce the FPS multi-player world to the map known as Dead Simple, which is regarded as one of the best deathmatch maps ever. Nevertheless, Doom II went on to sell two million copies, making it the highest-selling id Software game to date.

Elements from the game would be used in the expansion pack Final Doom.

Levels

Speedrunning

TAS runs

External links

Wikipedia article about Doom II
Level credits: "Doom Credits" (last updated 7 January, 1998, retrieved 27 October, 2004) by John Romero, available as part of the archived copy of Lee Killough's Doom pages on Romero's website.