Final Doom - The Plutonia Experiment

Plutonia took the controller from you first and left you standing like an idiot. What is this? Doom with a new set of maps from ID Software? Not a chance — here, the fans take over, the ones who decided the original game was too soft. The Plutonia Experiment came in the nineties as the second installment of Final Doom and hits way harder.

It's still the classic top-down side-scrolling view, shooting monsters, and collecting health. But the environment has different logic — it's not gothic temples and infernal hallucinations, more like almost military bunkers and industrial complexes. The maps are more complicated, harder to read, more intricate. And the enemies? They're deployed without shame. Where you'd see three demons in the original Doom, here you're counting ten, scattered all over the place and merciless because of it. Schwarzenegger would be drowned.

The controls are the same as the original — WASD, mouse, bomb and weapon keys. But the gameplay gets a real smack in the face. You're forced to constantly wait for the moment when your enemy reveals itself. The walls are narrower, the passages tighter, and suddenly you feel like your gun isn't quite as almighty as you thought. The difficulty settings here aren't just for bragging — it's a direct lesson in humility.

Plutonia became a cult thing for those who wanted Doom with barbed wire. ID Software actually released it as an official expansion, which means they took the game seriously. At a time when everyone already knew how to play it, this was like smashing your face into ice. Some maps are truly hellish — even today you sometimes slap your forehead when you rush into a room full of cyberdemons and get knocked senseless.

Today the retro charm is completely different — you already know how the game works, so the frustration is more fun. You try to see if you've progressed further. And the difficulty isn't just brute force anymore, it's a puzzle where you read the map differently, wait for the right moment, plan your approach. You can play it in a browser through emulators — and if you've ever come back to Doom, Plutonia is exactly the piece that reminds you why that game is worth paying attention to.