XBLIG Review: Night of Doom 2

“The Only Night of Doom is a Night Playing This Game.”

An XboxHornet Review By WDesm.

Night of Doom 2 is a first person shooter survival horror, where the goal is to last as long as possible in the face of ever-increasing waves of monsters.  The game starts off with a rather pea-shooter pistol, but includes the option of gaining some rather high-end firepower, including an uzi and a shotgun.  The heavier weapons come with a highly limited ammo supply, so supply boxes (dropped from fallen foes) are rare caches to be lunged for in wild desperation.  With a few different monsters to fight, a local leaderboard, and 4-player offline couch co-op, this sounds like an amazing game, right?  Well, it might be, except that it misses the core ingredient in a game: Fun.

Night of Doom 2 is, bluntly speaking, painfully dull, despite the apparent “spooky” atmosphere backgrounds stolen from a Halloween display.  Sound effects are weak, lighting (as shown above) is poorly implemented, and a lack of tension-building makes the entire gameplay experience one bland note, as opposed to a creative juxtaposition of high-stress and denouement-reloading.

The controls are clunky and the player’s stats are incredibly weak, which means that you can barely outrun even the slowest of shambling hordes .  Slow controls and the lack of a strafe option means that all of the FPS skills gained in the last 2 decades are meaningless, and you are stuck playing the XBLIG equivalent of DooM without any of the glorious nostalgia or E1M1.  Poor animations further degrade the experience, as enemies almost float in and around terrain, while you swivel around to aim headshots at the horde shambling after you.

The gameplay isn’t anything horrible, and to be honest, it’s technically complete – the game goes above and beyond “bare minimum” by including local multiplayer and a local-only leaderboard.  Night of Doom 2 falls into a trap that many XBLIGs have fallen into before: If a game is simply adequate, it is easily forgettable and neglected.  It is far better to make a simplistic game fantastic than it is to make an ambitious game adequate.  As it is, multiple XBLA- and disc-based titles have proven that horde-based group co-op is a huge success.  Night of Doom 2, however, will almost certainly never be mentioned alongside any of those successful titles.

Game Score: 3/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.