Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Panic Button
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

The Doom reboot, as it heaped its exploding vesicles of demonic gore on mainstream platforms, was an unholy marriage of technology and superb art direction. What then of this Switch adaptation? The art direction is still there, though it's been smudged in Vaseline, so low is the resolution. The engine's special effects have been largely disabled or scaled back, and occasional framerate troubles compound things. While it delivers on the core experience and is at least recognizable as the same game, gargantuan sacrifices had to be made to get it running on the Switch's years-old Tegra mobile chipset.

If not anything else, time has certainly not benefited Mick Gordon's bizarre dubstep soundtrack, which is just as dour and irritating as ever. What's more, and presumably to fit the files onto the Switch's "game cards", the music is enormously compressed sounding, hearkening back to the 56k Napster days. The game's sound effects and voice acting survive intact though.

The entire campaign from this new Doom is present, and the game controls and physics feel exactly the same as in the game's original slate of releases. The Switch "joy con" analog sticks don't have much range of movement, but the platform's "Pro Controller" feels very natural. The entire multiplayer package is there as well, but there is a hammer blow: no "SnapMap". To this reviewer, the integrated Timesplitters-esque map editor was the game's central party piece, and its absence leaves a Hell-like void in the overall package.

To those who are hardcore into technology, this Switch rendition of 2016's Doom is fascinating; the essence, overall feel, and effect of the original release are still here, crammed into a handheld-- cut back in sometimes dramatic and surprising ways, yet fully intact in others. The trouble is, why would anyone want to play this version over the others? It looks dismal, especially on a television, and the game's best feature didn't survive the chopping block. It's quite clearly a very clever adaptation, but it's equally clear that the hardware isn't really up to the task.