Even Doom's Boss Fights Are Incredible

There’s lots of things the new Doom game does well, but one that took me completely by surprise was its excellent boss fights.

Warning: There are spoilers for Doom in the paragraphs ahead!

You encounter a number of familiar faces in Doom, faces you’re asked to blow up over and over. Imps, cacodemons, pinkies — the gang is (mostly) all here, ready to meet your trusty double shotgun. Though personal favourites like the spiderdemon didn’t make the cut this time around, I knew there was no way I’d finish the game without a one-on-one with this guy:

When the original Doom was released on PC, the cyberdemon wasn’t even mentioned in the game’s manual. He was a nasty secret waiting for players.

“Some of the monsters you’ll face aren’t shown here,” reads the manual. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

That wasn’t the case for this game. Bethesda Softworks and id Software revealed what the cyberdemon was going to look like early on, as evidenced in the screen shot above, so it was a question of when he would show up.

“When” happens pretty late into Doom, and the game spends an entire level hyping it up. The only way for you to return to the Hell dimension is to extract an item that just so happens to be embedded in the cyberdemon.

The way it plays out when you reach the end of the level is fantastic:

The life bar is what surprised me the most, though. No other enemy in the game has one of those, and this guy gets the most video game-y thing ever! But it’s fine, as it lets the player understand their progression in the fight, rather than having to frustratingly dump bullets into a giant sponge.

Though it’s a novel encounter, what’s actually memorable about you vs the ol’ cyberdemon is how damn fun it is to fight this lumbering monstrosity.

Boss fights are bad in most games that aren’t Dark Souls. Too often, it feels like an outdated relic of game design that’s hung around because developers aren’t sure what to replace it with. Other times, the fights are tonally at odds with the rest of the game. (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, anyone?)

Doom‘s fight with the cyberdemon is ridiculous, tough as hell and makes excellent use of everything you’ve practised in the game to this point. That’s how a boss fight should work, ideally: an extreme test of skill.

This new Doom isn’t just about strafing left and right; it successfully expands on Doom‘s combat by integrating verticality. The jet boots, which let you alter your direction mid-air and jump twice, widen this further.

You need to make use of every single option to survive the cyberdemon, whether it’s dodging the missiles that come flying from the sky: