Doom & Destiny Advanced plays out like a weird dream. It’s at once both familiar, yet incredibly surreal. Mechanically, Doom & Destiny Advanced plays out like dozens of other RPGs that I have played in my life, but an abnormal control scheme …
Doom & Destiny Advanced plays out like a weird dream. It’s at once both familiar, yet incredibly surreal. Mechanically, Doom & Destiny Advanced plays out like dozens of other RPGs that I have played in my life, but an abnormal control scheme punctures that familiarity while a tacky sense of humor detracts from the experience overall.
In our review of the original Doom & Destiny in 2013, we really liked the game for its humor, mechanics, and level design. I missed out on Doom & Destiny the first time around, but luckily (sort of), the enhanced Doom & Destiny brings in new content while allowing first-timers like me to get their hands on the franchise without a need for past experience. As it turns out, I found issues with the game’s humor, control mechanics, and the fact that some of the levels just didn’t look very finished.
Hooray for a difference of opinions?
Doom & Destiny Advanced follows a group of friends as they try and figure out what the heck is going on after they were seemingly thrown into a Dungeons and Dragons game. The group of friends move together in a line, Snake-style, and are controlled by the player gesturing their movement with a thumb-stick. While the movement controls are pretty simple to get use to, what threw me for a loop was that when it comes to actual menus, and combat, those gesture-based controls remain.
The game ignores the best part of playing an RPG on a tablet: touchscreen controls.
Not only is sliding through menus clunky and slow, but it’s a complete step backwards, away from benefits of touch screen technology. If I was playing Doom & Destiny with a control pad a decade ago, awkwardly sliding through menus would be okay. But it’s 2015 and having to slide-slide-slide-slide through a menu when I could have just tapped three times is just silly.
While some may enjoy the humor in Doom &Destiny Advanced, I found it completely forced, and all around cringeworthy. The game tries so hard to reference as many things as possible. I think there were Star Wars, Star Trek, and Harry Potter references all within the first five minutes — and shortly after that I was fighting a monster made of poop and a skeleton who was lamenting over his missing wiener.
I love funny games, and I even enjoy a tasteful bit of immature humor here and there (Tales from the Borderlands is a great example), but too much of it is a bad thing, and that’s just what Doom & Destiny Advanced’s humor felt like: overkill.
On top of the weird controls and tasteless humor, the dialogue was often clunky or incorrectly phrased. I am not going to pretend to be the best writer or writer in the world, but if I get tripped up over wording more than a few times and spot spelling errors with regularity? That shows me the developers didn’t bother consulting with a professional wordsmith or editor before releasing their product. And in a story-based game, there’s really no excuse for that.
Beneath the grime is a zany RPG that I really wanted to like, but I ultimately found Doom & Destiny Advanced just wasn’t worth wading through the sludge to endure for long.
