Quickview: Bloom (Doom 2 mod)

[Doc_Brown]

I have a soft spot for the original Blood.  Of the three most famous Build engine games (the others being Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior), Blood was my favorite.  The problem is one of diminishing returns.  The first few levels are fantastic (Phantom Express is one of my favorite levels in gaming), but things start to drop off after that.  The same holds true of the episodes overall, a common issue of shareware games (since the first episode is released for free, they tend to frontload the best content).

Bloom is a Doom 2 mod that combines the two games very literally.  Each episode is a surreal hybrid of their respective counterparts, so level 1 is a mix of the first levels of both games, and the enemies are all combinations of an enemy from each game.  This means you end up with things like an Archvile that can not only resurrect fallen foes but outright spawn zombies, or a gargoyle/cacodemon that can shield itself from damage with its wings.

Interestingly, there seems to be a bit of randomization in play, where exactly which enemies spawn changes with each reload.  On the downside, from a design standpoint the developers don't bother to really introduce you to each enemy, so you'll spend a lot of time on your heels just figuring out what they can do.  The mod is also on the difficult side, so I'd recommend playing at a lower difficulty than you normally would.  Nothing worse than reaching the last level to realize you're in over your head.

One thing that isn't hybridized is the player character.  You can choose between playing as either Doomguy or Caleb, and each is limited to their respective arsenals.  Personally, I chose to play as Caleb since I already have Brutal Doom but don't own Blood.  It is interesting, however, to compare the two and see the differences.  Doomguy, for example, can throw grenades offhand, but Caleb has three different kinds of TNT, and they each have a pair of shotguns which all behave differently.

The mod has a ton of options, to the point that there is literally a search function.  I needed it to figure out how to, say, turn on the crosshair, or assign a button for Doomguy to throw grenades.  I should also mention that when you launch the game by dragging the Bloom.pk3 onto the gzdoom executable, the window that pops up will still list Doom 2 as what's loading.  Other than those quirks though, Bloom is a good mod.  It isn't perfect, but it's the way I've chosen to get my Blood fix.

[Starfox]

Bumped up by admin. Reason: published time consistency.