Doom has been many things over the years — a pioneering first-person shooter, an RPG, even a board game — but Mighty Doom is the first time this franchise has been cute. Your cartoonish Slayer in this mobile top-down shooter is just as adorable as the chonky cacodemons and prowlers with pinchable cheeks he is mutilating. The whole thing starts out as a lively single-stick roguelite that has you marching through demon-packed levels toward… well, I’m not exactly sure. I never saw the end of it, because a hellish difficulty spike clearly designed to bully me into spending real money on in-game power Glory Killed any desire I had to keep playing. There’s a fun, fast-paced, delightfully gory game in here, but it’s chained to a mountain of free-to-play garbage that leaches the fun out of the experience once you reach a certain point. The result is a monetized nightmare that feels less like Doom and more like Candy Crush Saga with Hell Priests.
You control your Doom Slayer using an onscreen joystick, but shooting is automatic. That means all you have to do is move around the arena-like stages avoiding enemies, projectiles, and environmental dangers like spikes and saw blades. You also have a couple of slots for special weapons, like a rocket launcher and BFG, that you can deploy with the press of a button after a cooldown period. The touchscreen controls aren’t super precise, which becomes a problem when the screen is filled with enemies and bullets later on, but they’re mostly adequate in earlier levels.
As a roguelite, you start each run with only the persistent gear you’ve equipped between levels, but you’ll earn lots of temporary upgrades as you slay demons mid-run to increase your combat capabilities. This is incredibly empowering, as toward the end of a run you might be double-firing spread-shot rounds that bounce off walls and ricochet from one enemy to the next, while lobbing grenades with upgraded splash damage. These upgrades go away at the end of each run, but they make Mighty Doom exciting and rewarding on a moment-by-moment basis.
Most levels are made up of 40 stages roughly the size of tennis courts, with bosses to take down every 10. Bosses are big, souped-up versions of standard enemies like imps, soldiers, revenants, and prowlers, but they have their own unique attacks and patterns, so they feel fresh — at least the first few times you encounter them. The enemy variety in the levels mostly works well, too, with weaker pawn-like foes up front, sturdier tank enemies in the middle, and ranged opponents in the back. Your demon-slaying runs are accompanied by a heavy-metal soundtrack that sounds like it was pulled straight from recent Doom games, too, giving the whole thing a boost of intensity as the announcer growls the names of your upgrades in a delightfully over-the-top manner.
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Take all that together and I had a lot of fun in my first few hours with Mighty Doom. After one run, I always wanted to start another to see if I could get closer to beating whatever level I died on. During those early hours, I could make progress at a reasonable rate as well — I might die on a stage 10 boss, but I’d be able to make it several stages deeper the next time after upgrading my Slayer between runs.
I was somewhere in level four when I hit a steep difficulty spike that halted my progress like a BFG blast to the chest. Two things happened: first, the enemies became noticeably more powerful, draining big chunks of my health with a single blow. On top of that, the number of enemies on screen in some levels increased to the point where it could be difficult to tell what was even happening. I’d find projectiles flying at me from all directions, pinkies and lost souls charging in from offscreen, and revenants dropping down to lob missiles at my face. I’d often see my health bar draining and have no idea what was even hitting me.
After struggling to make any headway for a while, I spent $15 on in-app purchases to upgrade my equipment — both because it seemed like the only option I hadn’t tried to make progress, and because I wanted to see if my growing pay-to-win suspicions were correct. The boost that money provided did get me through level four, but not much further. Level five introduces waves of enemies, while also giving those enemies another enormous power boost. That’s when Mighty Doom started to feel downright unfair, and the emphasis it put on its purchasable loot boxes meant the difficulty struck me less as a balance miscalculation and more of an unspoken paywall.
Whether you want to spend a whole lot of time throwing yourself against this frustrating and repetitive challenge or a whole lot of money to make it slightly more reasonable, you aren’t going to get past this point without jumping through even more free-to-play hoops. And Mighty Doom has free-to-play hoops galore. You have an avalanche of currencies to keep track of: unique keys for each equipment type (there are eight), energy, coins, and crystals, the last two of which can be purchased with real money. You have to spend five energy to start a run and you can only carry 20, which means you can’t always dive into another run when you want to. Your energy replenishes slowly over time, but of course you can speed it up by spending crystals. You can also spend crystals to buy loot boxes to increase your Slayer’s power, but the number of crystals required to open a loot box with a chance of containing a rare or epic item is steep.
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Each piece of gear can be upgraded dozens of times by spending coins and equipment keys, but individual improvements are barely noticeable. Coins can be used to upgrade a random core stat, or “mastery,” but after hitting the difficulty spike, those power boosts felt inadequate as well. Other monetization options include purchasing new Slayer skins and weapon skins, using either crystals or real money directly depending on the item. You can even spend crystals to revive your Slayer once mid-run. And, to get even better gear as you play, you can purchase a battle pass for $6.99. Basically, whatever aggravating monetization scheme you may have heard about in the last decade is probably here.
The one alternative to spending in-game currency is spending your real-life time watching ads. You can watch an ad to avoid paying to revive (this is a limited privilege, I discovered). You can also watch an ad to open a very basic type of loot crate containing coins or common gear. And while you can earn the currencies just by playing, it’s never enough to make much of a difference after that level four difficulty spike. No matter what I did, I never had the currency needed to make progress at a reasonable pace unless I was willing to open my wallet.
Trying to wrap my head around all the free-to-play junk surrounding the basic game felt like I was studying for the Bar Exam. I understand some of this monetization is necessary, or at least accepted as common practice for many mobile games these days, especially free ones. But buying skins or a battle pass in Fortnite or Marvel Snap feels different. Those games are centered around multiplayer, and showing off your favorite cosmetic upgrades at least seems to serve a purpose — plus they’re easy to ignore if that’s not your thing. Mighty Doom is a single-player game, so you don’t have anyone to impress with your new Slayer skins except yourself. And paying for power upgrades to complete a level you’re stuck on due to an artificially punishing difficulty spike is the very definition of pay-to-win.