Originally published on Trevor Trove on February 5, 2016
Earlier this week, the Doom reboot was given a release date and box art.
As the series is one of the most iconic first-person shooters, I’ll be interested to see how the game turns out. The original installment made one of my Favorite Games lists for PC and I’ve been mildly intrigued by the notion of the series’ reboot for the past year or so, mostly because I’m incredibly curious to see if the team can make a Doom game that has the spirit of the original but also feels relevant in the 2016 landscape. Machine Games set the standard with this with their Wolfenstein reboot and I’m eager to see if id/Bethesda follow suit.
But that artwork, huh?
I got a kick out of seeing some of the meme designs pop up this morning that highlight just how generic it is by incorporating the design into other titles…
One of the standout features when I think of early Doom was it’s monster designs so admittedly I really don’t care about the character since he’s traditionally nothing more than an avatar for the player. But this artwork stands out as the epitome of focus-tested non-descript armored character that we’ve been seeing in shooter box art for years. So I immediately thought back to when I discussed this topic on the Kinda Funny Gamescast last year. Here’s hoping the gameplay comes across as somewhat less derivative than the artwork might imply.