Ballistics Report

Pros

Doom on the go:
Waiting in line at the DMV again? Whip out that GBA and blast a few imps. Got an hour to kill in between classes? Beat down a cacodemon or two. Depending on your lifestyle, you probably spend a good deal of time being irritated, standing in lines, wishing you could shoot something. Now you can do it without making the 6 o’clock news. Unless being a sociopath is your bag, in which case we suggest Grand Theft Auto 3 for PS2.

It’s virtually identical to the original:
This might easily go into the cons section as well, but I picked up Doom for GBA because I wanted the same experience in portable format. It says Doom on the box, and that’s exactly what it delivers.

Controls get the job done:
Surprisingly enough, the controls don’t suffer too badly with the GBA. The shoulder keys make for natural strafe buttons, while the control pad moves and aims your character around. Circle strafing is very doable, and the 2.5D nature of the game makes aiming up and down unnecessary.

Check the map

Lots of guys in there

Aim for the barrels

Hard to see into the distance

Variety of enemies here

Boomstick!

Cons

Hard to see the action:
This isn’t a fault of the game itself, but the GBA’s screen can make it hard to see the action in most lighting situations. The developers thoughtfully included an option to turn on static lighting and a gamma adjustment utility, but those only help matters marginally.

A bit more expensive than regular GBA titles:
Regular price for Doom GBA is about $40, which is five or ten dollars steeper than normal GBA titles. The extra money probably went into paying for the extra memory that the game takes up, compared to other GBA games.

Multiplayer requires a cart for each player:
Most Gameboy Advance games like Mario Kart allow players to engage in multiplayer matches with only one cartridge among all the players. Doom for GBA requires each player to have a Doom cart. This probably isn’t greed – it’s more likely related to the fact that the game takes up a lot of memory, and there isn’t enough in the GBA’s multiplayer buffer to let players share one cart. However, it’s also the reason why we didn’t review the multiplayer aspect. We could easily find someone else with a GBA but couldn’t justify the cost of buying two copies of Doom just to test out multiplayer.