YMMV / Doom II

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Icon of Sin becomes this if you're playing in a source port that allows free-look. Normally, you have to time your shots to just before the elevator reaches the top, since the vanilla Doom engine doesn't allow you to look up or down, while enemies spawn like crazy. If you have free-look enabled, you don't even need the elevator - just reach the top level where the switch to activate the elevator is and turn around.
• Awesome: Video Game Levels:
  • "Level 7: Dead Simple" made an impression with its arena-style game-play and was a popular deathmatch arena thanks to its simple layout. The level got a sequel of sorts in Doom 64 titled "Even Simpler" where the difficulty is increased further with a wider variety of monsters to kill before the exit unlocks. Final Doom: The Plutonia Experiment had "Caughtyard", where the gameplay is even more unusual with goal being to escape a small citadel yard by killing Mancubi and battling your way across the citadel walls to escape from the aforementioned "Caughtyard".
  • Level 8, "Tricks and Traps", the first level that throws Serious Sam levels of enemies at you, lets you fight a wave of Imps while invincible, and where you can cause infighting between a Cyberdemon and an army of Barons. You even get your choice of whether you want a long and intricate level with a lot of enemies to fight through or a quick and easy one that can be beaten in two minutes, since the starting point leads into eight different areas but only three are absolutely necessary to finish.
• Badass Decay: The Cyberdemon. In his first appearance at the end of episode 2 of Doom, he's quite the fearsome foe, with even the generous items the level gives you serving mostly to further demonstrate how deadly and indestructible he is - the extra health you earn from the Supercharges can be taken away with just a shot or two of his rockets, and the huge number of rockets thrown your way are entirely necessary, as he still will take dozens of exclusively direct hits to be taken down - but further appearances typically give the player a considerably stronger advantage, by placing him near an Invincibility sphere, a BFG (which can kill him much faster than the rocket launcher), or other powerful enemies (who can start fights with him to get his health down a bit before you take him on, if not kill him for you outright).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Though not quite a Game-Breaker, the Super Shotgun is at a point of raw power combined with general-purpose effectiveness where it can be actively tricky for players to stop using it to the exclusion of everything else once they've gotten your hands on it. It's a risk-reward weapon, but combat in Doom II is forgiving enough that charging in and shoving both barrels up an enemy's nose is rarely ever a bad idea. This can produce a rude awakening when switching to, say, Plutonia, where running in with a Super Shotgun and no plan is often a good way to die quickly.
• Contested Sequel: Debates about the game's level design and whether or not Sandy Petersen is a good substitute for John Romero are quite common. A significant amount of people consider levels from Doom II way too gimmicky and inconsistent, especially compared to the now-legendary level design of the original Doom, as well as thinking that the maps are too plainly textured and just ugly, with an overuse of brown. Some people only take issue with Sandy Petersen's maps, which have an abstract feel to them and aren't necessarily up to par with the style or quality of the rest of the maps. Others appreciate Doom II as an Even Better Sequel deemed very creative and exploiting tricks and ideas that could be executed with id Tech 1 - something that was further explored by fan mapmakers. Some people even consider Final Doom to be a superior sequel, particularly the Plutonia Experiment half thanks to improvements like higher difficulty and more consistent level quality. However, people tend to agree that the new monsters and the Super Shotgun are very welcome additions to the game's variety, and as such, Doom wads and all other sorts of mods for classic Doom will near-universally be for Doom II, with there only being a scant few wads that use Ultimate Doom instead.^note Most of which have since fallen off once source ports allowed for Doom II to have distinct episodes like the first game, with the added bonus that they can be of however many levels the maker wants rather than being constrained to eight normal levels and one secret per episode.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Revenants are tall, fast skeletons with sizable health capacity and the ability to fire missiles that have a chance to home in on you. The missiles can do up to 80 damage each, even stronger than Baron or Hell Knight projectiles, and if they're homing, they have a very good aiming trajectory. The worst part? Map makers love utilizing them in large groups. Have "fun".
  • Arch-Viles are easily one of the most infamous demons in the game, and are basically Bosses In Mook Clothing. For one, they have the 4th highest health for a demon in the classic games with 700 hit points, other monsters won't retaliate if it hits them, as well as the lowest flinching chance for a demon at 3.13%, so even a point-blank Super Shotgun blast will only stun it about 47% of the time. They also have the fastest running speed of any demon in the classic games, and a hitscan attack that can take away up to 90 health unless a wall is in between you and the Arch-Vile, so if you encounter one in an open area, you're screwed. All this while the Arch-Viles are resurrecting other monsters. This is moreso in Final Doom and fanmade maps however, as the Doom 2 developers really went easy on their usage, with the majority of Doom 2 maps having none, while there's only a single instance where you'll need to fight more than one at a time (that's in a map with copious Invulnerabilities at that), and are rarely utilized in situations where they're actually threatening.
  • Former commando chaingunners are not to be underestimated, in large groups especially. The careless player can lose health rapidly at close range, and at long ranges, can take damage unexpectedly from the dakka as long as they have line-of-sight with the zombie(s).
  • Pain Elementals when playing on Nightmare or with fast monsters enabled, as now they'll spit Lost Souls at you nonstop as long as they see you, meaning even one can fill a room up with Lost Souls really fast, while retaliation is difficult as the constant stream of Lost Souls will block your fire. The Lost Souls also become actual threats on Nightmare/fast monsters instead of just being ammo sinks that get in your way, as they'll charge nonstop at you on sight. Cover is a necessity to block their line of sight so they stop spitting Lost Souls, and dealing with multiple fast Pain Elementals without cover nor the BFG is a literal nightmare. The only reprieve is on Nightmare they and Lost Souls don't respawn, so once they're dead they'll stay dead.
• Difficulty Spike: Doom II never becomes a particularly difficult game on UV difficulty, but map 7 "Dead Simple" marks a noticeable up tick in difficulty, where from that point forward you start having to deal with the game's bigger and more advanced bestiary regularly - it's the level to introduce both the Mancubus and the Arachnotron - while having to fight larger hordes of enemies in general, with the next level afterwards having the infamous horde of Barons surrounding the game's first Cyberdemon.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • Many players see the Icon of Sin like this, as they see it as an annoying out-of-place Puzzle Boss that relies on engine limitations (mainly the lack of freelook/vertical aiming) to be challenging, when they would have preferred a more conventional souped-up boss monster to finish the game on. It additionally is a bit of a Luck-Based Mission, as the monsters it spawns is completely randomized, so one run you might just have to deal with predominantly Imps and Pinkies, while another run you might have to deal with Arch-Viles whose attack is nearly impossible to avoid in the IoS arena, which makes it a notorious run killer for full game single-segment speedruns. Then while in the rest of the game it is specifically coded that the player cannot be telefragged by monsters, the game makes an exception for the IoS, leading to the player often getting instantly killed by a monster spawning on them if they don't memorize the exact spawning locations. It also doesn't help that the Icon of Sin is just a texture on a wall rather than an actual monster.
  • This can apply to all the megawads out there that ended on an Icon of Sin level (which is the vast majority of megawads made before the 2010s). Even when Icon of Sin levels can be highly creative and vary greatly, players will often just activate the no clip cheat to attack the boss brain directly or just quit out and consider the megawad beaten, as due to the above, they just don't want to waste their time with it. The fact that so many older megawads ended with an IoS level is another factor in making the Icon of Sin so disliked among a significant portion of the playerbase, and this dislike is a major reason why more modern megawads avert this, with map makers instead using a custom enemy as the final boss or just ending their megawad with a conventional map.
• Fair for Its Day: Not the base games themselves but the inclusion of the Wolfenstein 3-D levels had the context of being an Easter Egg for fans who played Wolf3D before Doom hit the scene, and the novelty of mowing down Nazis with Doom's obscene firepower in classic levels. However, the swastikas and other overt references to Nazi Germany tended to be hot-button topics in later decades, leading to the exclusion of said symbols in rereleases of Doom II.
• Fan Nickname: One specific Arch-vile in Map 27, Monster Condo, is notable due to being able to open the red keycard door that leads to the exit, letting you skip nearly the entire level by running past him before the door closes again. Thanks to this, it has been christened "Barney" by players, referencing the Half-Life security guards named Barney that open doors for the protagonist.
• Franchise Original Sin: The one that expanded to the fan Doom levels as well - MAP10: Refueling Base is known for having a lot of hitscan enemies and having almost 300 monsters in total on higher difficulties, yet back then it could be beaten with little problem thanks to enough open space to run around while also having a lot of cover to break line of sight, as well as a whole ton of secrets with useful goodies inside to make up for the trouble. When Final Doom came, the balance issues of Doom II MAP10 got amplified on certain maps, most notoriously on MAP09 of TNT Evilution, which took twenty years to be beaten on a Nightmare no-death run, as well as many Plutonia maps which used Chaingunners to punish the player for doing literally anything.
• God Damned Bats: Lost Souls are already a notoriously annoying enemy, so how about one that can spawn them? Meet the Pain Elemental, a Oculothorax like the Cacodemon that instead of spitting fireballs, spits a Lost Soul at you each time it attacks. They'll eat up a lot of your ammo and distract you from more threatening foes if you don't kill them promptly. Fortunately they're easy to stunlock to death, the vanilla game has a 21 Lost Soul limit (meaning once a map has that many Lost Souls, Pain Elementals cannot spawn anymore), and you can prevent them from spawning Lost Souls by getting in their face (where they're then helpless as they have no other form of attack), but this isn't always feasible (especially if they're flying high above you or over an inaccesible location), and source ports often have the Lost Soul limit removed, making them much more of a pain to deal with when utilized well.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The "Nightmare!" difficulty level and another optional flag for the other difficulties makes enemies respawn sometime after they're killed. Due to a quirk in how the game spawns in new enemies (as opposed to teleporting in existing enemies from a room hidden outside the normal playable area, which is how several Teleporting Keycard Squads work in every other level of the game), they will respawn at the coordinates 0, 0 - which, in the only official map to directly spawn in enemies like this (the final level) will make them respawn out into the void off to the left of where the actual playable area of the map is. The enemies that are spawning in are still going to be a problem, but at least they'll stay out of your hair once you put them down.
  • If an Archvile resurrects a monster who was crushed by a Descending Ceiling, that monster will become a "ghost" that can pass through (or over) obstructions and is invulnerable to everything except splash damage and other monsters' melee attacks. Once this bug was discovered, several custom maps were designed to intentionally produce this effect, so much that when source ports fixed the bug they had to add an option to replicate the old behavior.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Between the release of Doom and Doom II, someone messing with DeHackEd to alter monster behavior once complained to the devs that it was impossible to make a cacodemon spit lost souls at the player (either it shot out at the cacodemon's target but died on impact without damaging anything if it had a "missile" flag set, or it simply died on spawning if it didn't have that flag), with John Carmack responding that it wasn't the kind of thing that could really be hacked around. Then came Doom II, in which the Pain Elemental successfully attacks the player by spitting lost souls at them.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Icon of Sin is a gigantic demonic head embedded in a wall, rods and wires implanted in his skull. The center of his forehead is pulled open to reveal a burning portal, dropping one spawn cube after another. The rather literal crown jewel of the piece is the internal entity and weak point - the odd sight of John Romero's head on a pike.
  • The Icon of Sin's greeting message sounds even creepier in the custom megawad Alien Vendetta.
  • The room you come upon near the end of Monster Condo (Map 27) that's filled wall-to-wall with human corpses dangling from the rafters and impaled on poles. Presumably a "pantry" of sorts where the demons store their snacks.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The maps of Doom 2 would explore various mapping ideas and gimmicks, but were often handled with kid gloves even on UV difficulty (e.g. Archviles were hardly utilized, and even more rarely in threatening scenarios), or just plain weren't executed well (such as the infamous city maps, which barely resemble cities and are often difficult to navigate), and most of the maps in Doom 2 look boring with its drab environments and plain texturing. Back in 1994 when Doom 2 released, people were just happy to have a Doom sequel with new content and more official maps to play, but with a hardcore map-making and modding scene spanning nearly three decades that have produced an unfathomable amount of new maps and megawads, fans have become much more attuned to the qualities that makes a map fun and engaging, and their standards have risen significantly as a result, making Doom 2's maps unappealing to the modern audience. It's a common opinion among fans that while the core gameplay of Doom 2 is amazing, the maps are lackluster or outright bad, and thus the real appeal of the game is within the game's mapping and modding scene, while it's also a common view that Final Doom, Doom 64, or even the first Doom are better standalone games among the official classic titles because of having better and more consistent map design. This gets exacerbated by the vanilla engine having strict limits to what individual maps can handle, whereas within a few years of Doom 2's release, fans already created source ports that could run maps far beyond these limits. So just by a technical standard, Doom 2's maps could not hope to hold up to what fans have been able to create since.
  • The Master Levels for Doom II expansion is generally considered a pretty crummy and poorly aged mapset nowadays, as while it has a couple decent gems, it mostly consists of primitive and ugly maps full of Guide Dang It! moments and unengaging or unfair combat encounters. At the time it was released though in 1995, decent WADs were hard to come by, most map makers didn't really understand back then what constituted good map design while lacking good tools to make maps, and there was a lot of unofficial add-ons on the market that consisted of blatant shovelware (which is the reason why the Master Levels exist, with id commissioning some of the more well known map makers at the time to create them as a response to the unofficial shovelware), so an official mapset that guaranteed levels of playable quality and some cohesive design was not such a bad deal back then for those wanting more Doom content. Nonetheless, while The Master Levels has been a free add-on with most releases of Doom II in the 2000s, most players will pass over it or play some of the levels once and forget it, with there being countless WADs since the turn of the century greatly outclassing anything in the Master Levels.
• Polished Port:
  • The PlayStation version (on the same disk as Doom I) had plenty of extra levels, tons of new colored lighting effects which were pure Scenery Porn, and an atmospheric soundtrack that increased the horror factor.
  • The Game Boy Advance version has the technical issues of running in a handheld device (less buttons, lower framerate, low-res visuals, altered levels) and some bowdlerization of the blood and gore, and yet ended up as remarkably well-done port considering the GBA's limitations and impressive additions to the system's library of first-person shooters.
  • The 2019 Unity port by Nerve Software for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Android and iOS was originally a rather poor conversion, including a messed-up aspect ratio (displayed at its original 16:10 aspect-ratio from the DOS version without scaling for 4:3 as intended, stretching the overall image), poor-quality music and sound effects, and most infamously a mandatory login for the "Slayer's Club" features. After the patches, it has gone from one of the worst ports of the classic games ever to being almost comparable to playing the original games on a source port: displaying the visuals and playing sounds properly, bumping the resolution up to 640x400 with the frame-rate raised to 60 FPS, added rumble support for controllers, a weapon carousel to help with weapon management on controllers, and official add-ons that includes both halves of Final Doom for both games, the No Rest for the Living episode for Doom II from the original XBLA port, and SIGIL for Doom I, along with other various curated WADs being released on top of free content updates as well. The 2019 version would later be re-released on PC as well through Bethesea.net and later Steam with the ability to side-load custom WADs compatible with the new re-release for the PC and mobile versions. Another update for this suite of ports went even further by introducing official widescreen 16:9 presentation with the option to play in 4:3 like in the original, gyro motion controls for controllers that supported it, variable frame-rate options, toggleable V-sync, a revamped deathmatch multiplayer, a new Ultra-Violence+ difficulty, restored unused features from the original DOS release, and DeHackEd mod support along with other quality-of-life improvements. The only major downside is the multiplayer features are local-only, unless you're playing the Steam version, which can workaround this by using Steam's Remote Play feature to stream the game with other players. This version later appeared on Xbox Store for Windows 10/11, GOG.com, and Epic Games and the latter added the ability to play all available add-ons on both games.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The first several levels are pretty standard difficulty. Things really ratchet up once you hit "Dead Simple" and "Tricks and Traps", when large groups of high-tier enemies appear very frequently.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Several Alice in Chains tracks are replicated to a shameless degree in the game's soundtrack, including "Angry Chair" ("Adrian's Asleep" from MAP25: Bloodfalls) and "Them Bones" ("Bye bye American Pie" from MAP23: Barrels o' Fun).
• Take That, Scrappy!: The Spider Mastermind was considered to be a terrible final boss in the first game due to being a step down in every way from the Cyberdemon that capped off the second episode, and in general is considered a poorly designed enemy that's very difficult to use effectively in a serious and fair manner, so the creators didn't hold back at making fun of her in Doom II, using her mainly as a Joke Character. Its first appearance on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare difficulty is as the punchline of "Level 6: The Crusher", where you flip a switch and the crusher in question effortlessly crushes the Mastermind to death. "Level 20: Gotcha!"'s major setpiece is a duel between a Spider Mastermind and a Cyberdemon, which the Cyberdemon wins almost every time without interference, and even if the Mastermind does win, it'll be near death and a non-threat anyway. "Level 23: Barrels of Fun" has one in a monster closet but is flanked with Arachnotrons, faring little better since the latter can in-fight with "mama" and even win with their superior numbers if enough gang up on her at once. "Level 28: The Spirit World" finally has two of them, who can easily be fooled into fighting each other, as well as another big swarm of Arachnotrons nearby that can dispatch them, and multiple Invulnerabilities plus a BFG with a huge cache of plasma ammo nearby to blow through them with if the player doesn't want to sit through the infighting.
• That One Level:
  • "Level 10: Refueling Base" is swarming with former-humans, which means that bullets will come flying at you in large quantities. In Doom, hitscan enemies are usually the easiest to kill, but are ironically some of the most challenging foes, because dodging their attacks comes down to random chance on where they aim. Refueling Base also has the greatest number of preset enemies of any Doom II level, almost 300 individual enemies on the highest difficulties.
  • "Level 24: The Chasm" can be confusing to navigate, and often forces the player to navigate balance-beam rails surrounded by hazardous waste. The first time playing, it is very possible to spend too much time figuring out where you have to go next within the massive structure. For the extra kicker, the ending sequence of the level has the player run over a thin maze-like rail that decreases in width the closer it gets to the end (to the point that it becomes nearly invisible from how thin it gets), while being assaulted by a bunch of Lost Souls from all directions, over a nukage pit that the player cannot get out of should they fall. So you play through this long, confusing, boring level, and then have to restart it at the end, because you got hit by a Lost Soul or made a misstep off a stick-thin railing. It doesn't help that this level is so short on ammunition pickups and long on enemies that it's one of the few places in the original two games where a player on a full campaign playthrough is in serious danger of running out of ammo. On the Speedrunning front, the treacherous rails make it very easy to make a mistake as well and their presence alone is almost universally hated among speedrunners.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While considered a great game, Doom II really doesn't take advantage of its Earth-based setting, aside from having a few levels near the middle portion that vaguely resemble cities and residential areas; since the opening act follows a "starbase" theme that could have been set on any planet, if it wasn't for the title and intermission text you wouldn't even know you're on Earth, and even the few levels that are supposed to be city areas look nothing like they're supposed to be (e.g. Suburbs just has a few wooden structures that do not look like actual houses - despite them being based on real houses, specifically one the level designer had lived in and one he was building at the time - in a large open gray area with a large puddle of nukage). One would think a game like this would have large epic battles between the Earth's military and the legions of Hell, or Doomguy going out into the wilderness every once in a while. Sadly this wasn't the case, likely due to the limitations of the original idTech engine. The 2011 version of Doom 4 was seemingly going to explore at least the former concept, before it was cancelled and re-built from the ground up. Thankfully, Doom Eternal gives the Hell on Earth formula another, more successful, try.

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