Doom

The Good
This was the must have game of its time, possibly one of the most accessible easy to play games; you simply run and shoot. The game excels in spades in this and little do you have to worry about why you're doing it, mindless monsters seem to have little better to do than threaten you in a variety of predictable mannerisms. What exists of a story involves something going wrong on a Mars research station and opening a doorway to Hell, or something like that. Story isn't exactly the strong point and it's all an excuse to put you in a position of blasting a lot of bad guys in an alien environment, avoiding any need to make it even slightly realistic.

It also spawned the modding community and is probably one of the most modded games ever, not to mention the most ported, pretty much every low power platform has had a DOOM version ported to it. This is good in opening the game world up to the user, though most of the mods just means more levels of blasting.

The Bad
It brought the gore home really, creating the video game nasty, removing any need to ask why you were doing what you were doing, and just shooting. The game holds up poorly to the test of time now, as it becomes boring due to the game designer focusing mainly on shooting monsters with a variety of weapons. Any intellectual elements, such as puzzles and level layouts are really just copies of Wolfenstien 3D, where you have to pick up a blue key to open a blue door, and of course find where the door is.

This kind of simple puzzle, compared with say, System Shock's more complex communicating a clue then you solving the problem, lead to the huge initial separation between action and adventure games that marked the mid-90s and beyond. It also started the decline of the adventure genre, with adventure makers switched off by the pointless brutality, and action gamers getting into shooters and being able to ignore any thinking beyond monitoring their health and ammo.

The modding helped this as it was easier to make new levels and arrange monsters in those levels than it was to try and tie a cohesive story to your mods.

The Bottom Line
This is another historical curio, only really worth playing for the first few levels to get a feel for what the state of the industry was like at the time, and see what the fuss at the time was about. The graphics were good for the time and of course runs smoothly, but with no ambition in terms of storyline, there's nothing left to grab you now that graphics are far better. This shows the true need to invest some thought into games, as even text adventures hold up better now that games that rely purely on technology for their sales. If you want to play an old shooter, play System Shock instead, guaranteed it'll have you hooked for longer.