Last week, mobile games publisher Jamdat sent me a lovely new Sony Ericsson phone loaded up with their new Doom RPG, programmed by Fountainhead and endorsed by Id. When I first heard about this I was sceptical about how a remix of this benchmark shooter would work, but also intrigued by the fact that the developer had recognised the limits of the hardware and tried something new.
Been playing it for a few hours and am genuinely impressed. All the original Doom graphics are here, as well as the monsters, the weapons and the familiar find-coloured-key-open-door structure. It all looks very blocky, but that – of course – is the reality of the original PC titles, and fans will quickly find that their memories of 12 hour demon-blasting sessions come flooding back in the jerky haze of low-res sprites.
But here's the difference (and the clue is in the title): this is an RPG.
There's an inventory for storing and accessing items, passwords and weapons (there are eight guns, some classic, some new), you can collect credits to spend on health and ammo at vending units, and there are characters hanging around each level who can be approached for hints and plot information. Also, every time you kill a monster you earn experience points, which improves your strength and allows you to take on the more troublesome enemies. Movement works like an old skool text adventure – you can go forward, backwards, left or right, with each touch on the controller shifting you a single step. No scrolling here. Look, I told you, this is a nostalgic experience.
Actually, it reminds me a little of Amiga classic Dungeon Master often cited as an important forerunner to the Doom experience. It feels like an adventutre game with ponderous pace and restricted mobility, but yet, when a door slides open and you encounter a hell hound or zombie marine, you have to shoot quickly and sometimes leg it when your health is bottoming out. This is an awkward mix but, as with the lack of strafing in the Resident Evil titles, it sort of works in context. (I also like the fact that the in-game display perfectly resembles the original Doom design, right down to the increasingly bloodied representation of your character's face to indicate health.)
Plot-wise, it's standard Doom stuff – the Union Aerospace headquarters on Mars has been over-run by monsters and you're sent in to find out why. The narrative unravels through chats with scientists and civilians on the base as well as accessing computer terminals – very Half-Life. The text-based interactions are clipped and functional, although there is the odd post-modern joke (one email you find has the sender talking about a retro game he's been playing called, Doom. "It bears a remarkable similarity to our situation," he notes).
I can't quite believe I'm enjoying this, but I am. For an old Doom junky, it's fun to face all the familiar demons, and to spot classic elements of the series (there are secret doors spread throughout each level, naturally), plus it reminds me of formative titles like Alien and the aforementioned Dungeon Master – games that existed before rigid genre boundaries, when action games slipped seamlessly into graphical adventures, and when the elements of the now heavily codified RPG were first being forged. The maps are impressively large too, providing a modest element of exploration. There are ten levels in all - at least eight hours of gameplay according to Jamdat.
Doom RPG looks rough - humorously limited even. But it's a careful, respectful mobile interepretation that actually addresses key issues with mobile gaming and makes the very best of a very limited platform. If only other developers treated their source material so logically, this industry might actually start making the impact it has been promising for five long years.
