Doom Eternal - HUGE GUTS

Digital Foundry talk us through the PC preview build of Doom Eternal, with special mention to the game's various high-end display settings and how id Tech 7 allows for blubbery, real-time, enemy damage. As well as allowing the player to centre the on-screen weapons straight out of the box (pretty sure we had to wait for that to be patched in last time), this sequel looks to have massively expanded the vertical play area, necessitating all manner of climbing and mid-air dash mechanics.

E3 - STEEL TEETH

2016's Doom is a strong contender for first-person campaign of the generation (it's either that, Titanfall 2 or the completely slept on Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare) so who wouldn't welcome a sequel that turbo-charges that game's liquid flow of slaughter? Doom Eternal adds even bouncier aerial traversal and big red death buttons just in case there's a chance you might stop killing things for even a second.

BRUTAL DOOM

As well as adding a shotgun strap that sways around like a pair of pendulous testicles, Marcos Abenante's Brutal Doom mod also reorganises the game's levels, replaces the puny pistol with an assault rifle, and accents the action with zillions of repulsive new gore effects.

Cross-gen video game sequels tend to rethink their progenitors, taking the original idea back to square one armed with new tech. Brutal Doom instead uses current hardware to scale everything up into delirium. More enemies on-screen, moving faster, behaving with a greater intelligence. Doom Dash Turbo. In that sense Abenante's take on id Software's classic has a lot in common with Treasure's Bangai-O - why burn memory building highly detailed sprites when you can just cram two dozen Hell Knights into a tiny room?

E3 2015 - DOOM

Despite the Crysis cyborg suit and a brand new mantling mechanic, Id Software's latest pass at Doom looks to be maintaining the original games core appeal of wildly cycling through loads of amazing, gigantic guns while throngs of demons charge at you from every angle. The de rigueur executions barely feel like a betrayal either, they're just another excuse to fill the screen with gibs.

Doom

A motion-sickness baiting gallop, surfaces crawling with prickle-shock detailing, and enemies that crumble into evacuated heaps. This is Doom. Played in such close proximity to Wolfenstein 3D, Doom feels like a show-off remake of id's previous effort. Unlike Wolfenstein's passive architecture, Doom's landscapes are teeming with scaling, clashing textures. To eyes since trained to expect an unobnoxious glide, Doom can be a disorientating, untrackable experience. Rather than hamper Doom, this mismatch heightens the game's core narrative text: invasion. Hell has literally vomited itself over this Martian technopolis, warping it in ways we can't quite understand. Enemy types augment this experience - corrupted reflection Marines that devolve into brutish, animalistic shapes, and abstract utilitarian gore-cobbles. Little wonder it became the blueprint for an emerging genre.

Wolfenstein 3D

Seventeen years away from cutting edge, Wolfenstein 3D's sprawling mazes of wandering Nazis retain a simplistic feedback charm entirely lacking from the brand it spawned. Booting it up today, the shock of the primitive is mitigated by a concise uniformity. Wolfenstein 3D's levels are easily tracked pastels and primaries, points of interest clearly signposted. The block colours give the game a crisp, readable clarity. A lack of browsable dungeon map is off-set by paper trail corpse retention, an atmospheric feature that has never quite caught on. Wolfenstein 3D's swaggering machismo - difficulty levels include 'Can I play Daddy?' for Easy, and 'I am Death incarnate' for Hard, as well as stages opening with the legend: 'Get psyched!' - frames the chubby foe renders as toys, and Wolfenstein as a grubbily interactive boy's own fiction.