MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED
DOOM RPG
A strange forgotten gem.
By Chris Livingston
The shotgun. A classic.
The chaingun still makes a mess.
Get used to shooting one bullet at a time.
Helpful but helpless scientists are worth talking to.
INNER DOOM
Some of the wildest Doom mods
LYCANTHORN
A gorgeous 3D Castlevania-like where you play as a werewolf with an enormous axe.
FORESTALE
A colourful 3D platformer where you’re a rabbit speedrunning to save a forest.
SHADOW OF THE WOOL BALL
It is an FPS just like Doom, but you’re a hedgehog fighting space kitties. Naturally.
ZOMBIES ATE MY NEIGHBORS
A remake of the LucasArts NES game as an FPS.
Brace yourself for a bizarre series of statements. There’s an official Doom game that’s a turn-based RPG yet still an FPS. It’s a game that was designed and developed for mobile phones by id Software co-founder John Carmack in the era before smartphones became available. It’s been essentially unavailable to buy or play for over a decade since the ancient phone hardware quickly became obsolete, so it’s largely been forgotten. Also, it’s… kinda awesome?
Doom RPG is one of those weird game concepts that sounds like it wouldn’t work at all, but instead works amazingly well, and so it’s doubly mystifying and tragic that it died so quickly and was never officially remade for other platforms. It’s a real Doom game! Why would absolutely no effort be made to put it for sale on PC, the original home of Doom? Well, where developers and publishers utterly dropped the ball on Doom RPG, fans once again stepped in to save the game from a fate worse than death. The dedicated, genius hobbyists at GEC.inc have reverse engineered the source code for Doom RPG and created a PC port. Finally, at long last, you can play the weird but wonderful turn-based shooter right on your desktop. And you should. Right now. It’s strange, but it’s excellent.