I’m getting endorphins just thinking about it. This changes the heavy laser gun into an allpowerful charge beam, much like the core on Iron Man’s chest. My final favourite weapon mod in Doom-and one that completes the fantasy of being Iron Man, if Tony Stark fought demons instead of Captain America-is the gauss cannon’s precision bolt. Why can’t guns always be this fun? Who still gets excited about basic machine guns or laser rifles, no matter how good the sound design is? Videogame guns should be stupid, novel and indulge the whims of players who want to inflict as much mad shit as possible onto disposable enemies. The mods collectively make Doom’s armoury feel more inventive than anything I’ve encountered in a shooter since the first few Halo games-they make other FPS devs look like they’re not trying. There’s enough delineation between the weapon mods that I feel a certain level of attachment to my favourites-and I never get this invested in guns in other FPS games.

I essentially unload every gun I have upon waves of enemies, in the order that I enjoy firing them, until I’m out of ammo for each. I never have a strategy in Doom, and I expect you don’t either. My use of the word “strategy” in that last paragraph was disingenuous, actually.

When Heat Blast is fully levelled up, it can even shred enemies in your vicinity to pieces, which feels like a Sith power. Another favourite of mine is the Heat Blast function of the plasma rifle, which unleashes a radius knockback attack, giving you the chance to chain a few melee kills together.

I love how they can combine with some of the other weapon mods as part of a strategy for clearing out waves of monsters. They latch onto enemies or the environment, then explode a second later, with a satisfying high pitched comic book sound effect. The heavy assault rifle’s rocket rounds are incredibly cathartic. That was when I realised this wasn’t just a gory shooter that reheated old character designs, but a smart, logical extension of the earlier games, heavy on player expression. The 2016 reboot didn’t really interest me until I had the game in my hands. I wondered why he was that excited about what we were seeing on screen, which at the time just looked to me like a pretty shooter with recognisable Doom iconography. I rolled my eyes and thought, “cool your jets, pal, it’s just a ruddy chainsaw.” By the time the Elder Scrolls Online footage started, he’d obviously calmed down. When the first footage of Doom was revealed, he screamed “oh my God!” When Doomguy chainsawed through a monster in first-person, I swear he grabbed his girlfriend’s hand really tight and shouted “oh shit!” with a hysterically over-the-top cadence that I’ll never forget. At Bethesda’s 2015 E3 conference in Hollywood, I was sitting next to one of those guys in real life.

Doom best weapon mods