Doom II

The Good
The game sports an impressive framerate with slowdowns absent most of the time, so you can play the game at a comfortable pace. Some of the limitations that reduced the sizes of the maps, altitude of the higher places and the lack of lighting are more welcoming than they are disappointing as they make the game easier. It's satisfying that the Nightmare difficulty is actually the Ultra-Violence mode.

This port does include some new surprises, particularly the Industrial Zone and Chasm both being divided into two levels. The fact that corpses disappear means it's impossible for an Archvile to bring the monsters back to life. As a nice touch, the notifications at the top tell you when you found a secret area, something the original DOS version did not. Another thing you can only do in this version is kill the Icon of Sin with a BFG 9000. Very intriguing.

The Bad
The weapon mechanics seem a little off compared to the computer versions, especially the inability to properly shoot a row of zombies and imps with a shotgun, which eats up your ammo and makes the fire fight last longer than it should. It gets worse when you try to use hitscan weapons to snipe your enemies from far away; you'll hit the walls more often than your intended target. The other irritating problem is that at the start of each level, your armour value is ignored until you collect an armour pickup.

Other little problems present are that you can only save in-between levels, there are two missing music tracks and it's hard to select the weapon you want. However those are forgivable and don't really do anything to ruin the game, just add to difficulty, which balances the easiness in the levels.

The Bottom Line
It is amazing that the entire game could fit in such a small gaming device, I haven't the heart to criticise the sacrifices that needed to be made to the game's design to get it running. Apart from a few quirks, this port captures the elements of the computer versions rather well. This is just the game to take on any road trip. It really would have been nice if Torus Games had applied the same treatment to the first GBA game.