Gotta admit I hate DOOM II (just my opinion) – From /r/BoomerShooters

I’m replaying Doom and Doom II for the 999th time, but playing them back-to-back for the first time. I don’t know the community standard opinion for those two, but DOOM II has significantly worse level design and gameplay. I’ve never noticed it this clearly before.

DOOM itself is almost perfect, but please don’t get me wrong…

DOOM II on UV is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in any of classic DOOM games. You constantly run very low on ammo and have to skip monsters to complete the level. Levels are either extremely claustrophobic or uncontrollably huge, most of them look downright ugly too.

MAP13 is the pinnacle of DOOM II’s lazy level design, where Sandy needed a literal giant arrow to show where to start. Ugly grey and black boxes in the middle of nothing don’t help it either.

Monster numbers are insane and that’s ok, but their positioning is horrible. This game repeats itself every time: you pick up some power up or a key and a door opens revealing hordes of the same enemy type, sometimes some overpowered while you don’t even have enough ammo to deal with them.

The game just turns into a save scumming parade, which is a giant sign of bad level design and bad game balance.

The lack of episode separation was also a bad decision. Looks like id wanted to “move forward” but were not sure, where the forward direction truly was for DOOM. So they tried to make it more “realistic” with those city maps and all.

I don’t get why it’s so bad, because as far as I know id weren’t developing Quake yet.

Many of you won’t agree with me for sure, but for me it’s barely playable. I’m glad there are many DOOM 1 style WADs for DOOM II with its supershotgun.