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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
After watching SGF I decided to finally play Alan Wake.
I'm usually not good at playing horror games because the tension is too stressful to really enjoy myself. I knew of this franchise but never had it recommended by a friend. The teaser for the DLC for Alan Wake 2 was probably the first time I understood the "vibe" of the game.
So I spun it up and I really like what they're doing with this. Obviously highly influenced by Stephen King's style of fiction as well as Twin Peaks vibes. I really love the atmosphere and the story. The main game play is good and on "easy" is tuned right. Resources feel constrained but they top you off frequently enough.
For me I could really go for a "story mode" with even less combat. I want to see what happens but I definitely have to prepare myself for being stressed in some dark woods. Currently on Episode 2. I'll definitely keep playing for the writing and story.
Glad you're finally giving it a try. Fair warning, the horror elements ratchet up and don't always have to do with combat, but if you're a fan of Twin Peaks keep pushing for some amazing entertainment.
You can also change the horror flashes from Normal to Low in the settings if you think that will help you at all.
Don't neglect Control also, if you haven't played it yet. Unfortunately it also has a lot of combat, but it's the same dev and the same universe.
Yeah I saw it on PS+ it's on my list to play. I know Alan Wake 2 references it but I heard it's more important to play Alan Wake 1 before heading into Alan Wake 2. What do you think?
Seems about right.
Don't forget that Control has excellent accessibility options for changing the difficulty if combat is a problem! It's a wonderful game though and I suggest trying it straight as is first before during on the aids.
I beat Wandersong last week, and it's become one of my favorite gaming experiences. It started out pretty silly and lighthearted, but quickly got pretty deep. The twist was also simple, but well done.
Wandersong Spoilers
Having an actual hero besides the Bard isn't the biggest twist, but the execution was fantastic in my opinion. Namely in the use of the achievements: the Steam achievements are tied to her actions, not the bard's. We get hints of it when we first see some monsters she'd slain, which feels weird since we didn't do anything ourselves. Then when she finally appears and slays the Chaos Queen, it becomes clear. I was surprised to see the achievements just rolling in when we switched to her POV before Act 4.
I get the impression that Audrey was chosen not for her power, but because her insecurities make it easier to make her go along with the plan. She was fervent about being the Hero because she wanted to be special and unique, to the point she pretty easily accepted that she'd be dooming the world and thus herself. Eyala even commented on how they usually reveal that the quest is to end the world towards the end, because most people would be pretty disheartened to find out their quest to "save" the world is the opposite.
I feel like the achievements themselves also added to that air of manipulation towards Audrey. As soon as I swapped to her in the intermission, they were coming in nonstop. There's the standard combat achievements, but I got achievements for jumping. Later in the game in the final battle, there were achievements for kicking the bard.
The achievements are all just so basic, it feels like they're meant to further encourage Audrey to keep doing everything she's doing. They're super hollow so they keep rolling in whenever she appears. It's a pretty cool bit of meta-storytelling.
I just wish we knew what happened to Audrey. Did she die by refusing to sing the Earthsong? Or was she just in hiding in the epilogue, too ashamed/upset to show herself?
Such a wonderful game! I never finished it, and have been thinking of restarting it to see it through.
Highly recommend giving it another shot! I found it pretty fun, and it's not super long in my opinion so it can be beaten in a few sittings. Also, I spent a lot of time just singing randomly and trying to make fun melodies.
Just a 10/10 experience in my book. Had a good balance of difficulty, enjoyable art direction, and didn't overstay its welcome.
Spelunky 2
This game isn't new at all, but it is a game I picked up a while back and never gave a fair shake.
This game is amazing.
The chain reactions that can happen are completely absurd. The platforming is great. The tools are all really cool. There are secrets upon secrets upon secrets.
The usual problems with procedural generation are there, with some levels having nearly impossible extras to obtain, but the goal of "go from entrance to exit" is usually pretty good.
Helldivers 2
When you get paired up with a good squad, it's an incredibly rewarding and engrossing game. The additional aspect of the overall galactic map creates some interesting grand strategy components to it, though that's largely manipulated by the game studio so it's hard to know how much any one player really influences it.
I haven't enjoyed an FPS for a long time until this game. The Starship Troopers-esque propaganda and speech is also very amusing.
It's so hard to find a good squad. When I have, agreed; it's reminiscent of when I have played in a well trained orchestra: everything just comes together at the right times.
I'm still cracking away at Abiotic Factor as I have time. Pretty much have made it through Manufacturing, but I need to figure out how to get a few of the special items I need, such as the Fiber Optic cable. Finally encountered a new enemy type and I'm excited to take more steps into the area following Manufacturing, as it looks a lot more interesting. I do feel like I'm missing recipes, in spite of having so many I need to actually search for them in the list; I feel like I maybe need to be building things I don't think are useful or I'm not interested in, just to unlock more ideas.
Also making headway into Skald: Against the Black Priory, which is still a fantastic old school RPG. I made it to what I believe is the main city and am now exploring it and grinding through the sewers to see if I can get some more levels before I need to tackle the Warlords who've taken over. My party is all level 8 currently, my main character just hit 9, so I'm damn close with the rest of them to at least having some additional power to take them on. So far very much enjoying the story, atmosphere and combat and looking forward to spending more time with it.
AF started to lose me in Manufacturing. Direction becomes less clear which is both good and bad.
Oh yeah, it was a challenge; I felt stuck there and was getting frustrated, thinking about being done with the game, which I mention in my post about it last week. The Soldiers are obnoxious, especially when you lack decent weaponry and even after you get the Scrap Guns, they're still irritating. I ended up stubbornly exploring the area and killing them repeatedly just so I could keep making headway, but I was definitely getting annoyed and felt like I was ramming my head against the wall.
Having finally gotten past it in the last day or two, things are definitely getting more interesting again, but yeah, Manufacturing kind of sucks.
Steamworld Dig 2
It’s a really interesting take on a metroidvania with a tight interesting gameplay loop revolving around mining resources and selling them. It’s also short, maybe 10-15 hours or so to beat the main story which is pretty interesting. My 6 year old and I both loved it, it was way better than expected
The first Steamworld Dig is worth playing as well, but it’s definitely less polished and you don’t necessarily need the story to play the second game. Still with playing though, I got it for $0.99 on sale
A lot of the Steamworld games are similar to that description: polished, concise, fun for all ages, just generally enjoyable version of different genres.
I played A Highland Song, created by Inkle, developers of interactive fiction renaissance game 80 days and hardcore linguistics explorer Heaven's Vault (both narrative excellence IGF award winners). This one was also a good game! There's a unique combination of mechanics in this game; I'll do my best to touch upon everything.
You control Moira, a teenage? girl who leaves her home in the scottish highlands without a backwards glance. She's hiking to the coast to see the ocean for the first time and join her uncle Hamish, who is a lighthouse keeper. Hamish and Moira regularly exchange correspondence, and this time he sent Moira an intriguing letter: The selkies are beaching early, come and join me before Beltane if you want to see them. You have one week. Will you make it in time?
AHS plays as a sidescrolling platformer. You can run and jump left and right - and climb walls or slide down inclines. However, Moira isn't a videogame protagonist, but a "normal" girl. She has no climbing equipment, and can only climb a little before getting winded. She's extremely susceptible to fall damage, and if she falls she also gets winded. If she's winded, you need to stop for her to catch her breath. If she's too winded she can't run and she might fall and take even more damage. She also takes damage from adverse weather conditions - and it seems to rain all the damn time in the highlands. When her health is all the way down... She'll die. Or will she?
The highlands are hilly. Terrain is divided into peaks/mountains (sometimes with ruins of old towers and forts on them) with long smooth valleys between them. When Moira wants to run east or west from one mountain to another, you smoothly transition into a charming (not too difficult, just two buttons) rhythm game mode to the beat of one of several excellent, lively instrumentals. Missing a button will cause Moira to stumble and lose some health (eventually kicking her out of her sprint) while a perfect run will improve her health.
There's an orienteering component to the game. Moira doesn't know how to get to the lighthouse, and there are no real maps. She relies on vague knowledge from her uncle's letters (doled out piecemeal) and many other sketches, pictures, pamphlets and such that she finds littered throughout the highlands. And I mean many. You have to identify landmarks and mountain shapes, usually in two steps: First, whenever you climb a peak, you get to see a wide view of the surrounding land. The game then lets you drop a marker on whatever location you think each "map" currently in your possession references. Moira will comment on it, something like "I don't think so," "is that right?" or "that seems right". Moira can be wrong though. You can then attempt to reach the location you marked in order to "confirm" the map. That will give you a big green checkmark in your inventory's maps tab, and potentially confirm other landmarks like mountains that may be named in the map.
While there's a clear side objective (with achievements to match) of climbing every peak, and find out the name of every peak from these vague maps, the main objective of orienteering is finding the best paths to the "next" valley - that is, the next parallax layer in the sidescroller (toward the screen). Changing valleys will make the day advance several hours. Time management is important in the game, not only because of your one week target, but because as a "regular girl," Moira needs to sleep. If it's deep night and you haven't yet chosen to sleep, she'll just pass out right where she is. Sleeping out in the open, or in any unsheltered, cold location, will lower Moira's maximum health, sometimes by a lot, affecting the speed of your progress. Ideally you want to find abandoned buildings to stay the night.
But even abandoned buildings aren't always unlocked, which leads us to the game's final system - the inventory. Here Moira is a good videogame protagonist in that she's more than willing to hoard all the crap the finds littering the highlands in her backpack, if you want (and you should! Always pick everything up!) Some items are door keys or "keys" (like a crowbar) or can be otherwise used for traversal, like cutting ropes. You can also, however, choose to leave items behind on the hilltops. If you leave the "correct" (usually thematically correlated) item on a peak, the spirit of the peak will bless you with good weather, and possibly other kinds of assistance!
Eventually you'll reach the lighthouse. On my first playthrough, which took just under three hours, I arrived two days after Beltane. Not to worry! It's impossible to experience the game in full in a single playthrough. If you choose to play again, you will retain your backpack - your "maps", objects and knowledge of mountain names and paths. The game is designed to be played multiple times, as, just like in 80 days, there are countless routes you can take to reach the lighthouse. There are "maps" you find in the later valleys that point toward locations in earlier valleys. And much of the story of Moira, Hamish and their family will only become clear after a few playthroughs. I arrived on time in every playthrough after the first; in my fourth playthrough I made it in two and a half days. There's even an achievement for making it without sleeping - that is, in a day! (Didn't get that one!)
That sounds delightful! Thank you! I just picked it up!
It’s done by the same people that put out one of my favorite mobile games - 80 Days!
(80 Days is effectively a roguelike interpretation of Jules Verne’s Around The World In 80 Days, which has some very nice presentation.)
Oddsparks. I've done my minimum duty to share here, I'm going back to playing. It's Factorio / Stardew / Against the Storm. I think I saw it had like an 88 or something on Steam? Underrated.
I'm playing Indika right now which is a really interesting game so far. Love little stories like this that are really focused and tell a short story nicely. I also love a good walking simulator from time to time, so this was a good break from everything else.
Watched a lot of the trailers from SGF and have quite a few that caught my interest:
Nobody Wants to Die
The Alters
Metal Gear Solid
DOOM
Tenjutsu
Alan Wake 2 DLC even though I've not played Alan Wake 2 yet
I was playing mass effect (ME1 in the legendary edition bundle), but a few missions from the end and I was distracted by my wife with the suggestion to start playing some Minecraft.
I never really played Minecraft before except for once, also with my wife, years ago. We never made it very far back then. Explored overworld, farmed some wheat, raised some cows, mined some iron and a few bits of diamond, but then got distracted by something else.
This time I've been really getting in to the redstone and villager mechanics. Built a few basic automatic farms, got more addicted to redstone contraptions, built some multidimensional farms, and now I'm exploring the nether with enchanted diamond everything looking for my first nether fortress. Super into it. Just built my first automatic item sorter last week, and now I'm working on a more sophisticated sugarcane farm.
Seriously addictive. Surely everyone else has already gone down this rabbit hole, but if you somehow missed it like I did, then I fully suggest giving it a try.
Cheers!
I returned to Destiny 2 to play through The Final Shape expansion campaign and see the conclusion to the 10 year narrative of Light vs Dark and I have to say, this expansion is a great return to form for Bungie after the disappointment that was Lightfall. The Pale Heart sets the gold standard for patrol zones now, and Overthrow is a significant improvement on public events. The zone itself also looks beautiful and there's a plethora of secrets and other collectibles scattered about.
The campaign story itself did not disappoint, though for the sake of avoiding spoilers I won't mention any specifics here. All I will say is that it provides excellent closure for both in-game characters and veteran players alike, and the final mission is a real spectacle that does the ending of such a long story justice, with many callbacks to all the events and seasons that have transpired in the past years. What's even more surprising is how well they set the ending up for the continuation of the story in new directions. I thought I'd just come back to beat the campaign and raid and then be done with the game but I suddenly want to play Destiny again.
As for the raid, my clan is one of those casual groups of friends so we gave the first encounter a few tries on contest mode on friday evening and then we had to get back to life stuff. The raid race itself was mildly interesting to follow but the fact that it was won by a team that wasn't even streaming to a large audience was pretty funny. Also Saltagreppo is an elitist prick so him not taking world's first again pleases me. My clan will give the raid a proper shake some time this week after reset and it'll probably still take us multiple sessions to finish it even with guides out, what with it being the most difficult raid yet and all.
BZZZT
Last week I mentioned the reviews saying it takes 2 hours to beat. It took me 4.5 on normal mode, though I wasn't speedrunning it. Most of the time I was trying to collect all the bolts as I went (which isn't necessary). For fun I also went back and replayed the first 'row' of levels (so about 1/4) to collect the 'perfect run' trophies (where you collect all the bolts and finish in target time) before trying to beat the rest of the levels. As of today I have gotten the perfect trophies on all of the levels, so basically 100% the game on normal, and it took me 10 hours. So, I think I got my money's worth, and I'd recommend it if you like platforming games.
Only achievement left at the moment is beating the game on Insane mode. The dev just dropped an update with a Very Easy mode, and they hinted in the steam thread that they will be adding more difficult stuff later, so maybe I'll come back and revisit it then.
I like the music in the game, it's got that retro feel you'd expect. Minor gripe is that there are a few vocal lines thrown in that I could have done without (typically a robotic voice saying generic things like "more power"). The sprite work for the enemies and environments is also good.
Gameplay nitpicks: when you start a level, you have to wait a second or two for your character to do a little animation. I'm not really mad about the time lost but it makes it feel unresponsive and when you're doing time trials it's not good to not know when you can start dashing. After a while you get the timing down but it still feels a little annoying. Second nitpick is in the same category, after you finish a dash there's a cooldown to when you can dash again or use your second jump, and there were a lot of times I pressed the button a little early and the input is lost. I think it would feel better if this window was a little more forgiving. However I can understand if it is the way it is to enforce tight challenging gameplay.
Wingspan
Played my 3rd game of this and came away with my first win. Lesson learned from last time: cheap birds early are good. Lesson not learned: don't commit too hard to the round objectives. I ended up taking 1st in 2 rounds and tied for 1st in the last. The game felt pretty tight, in that I was always just barely able to get the resources (cards, food, eggs) I needed to do things just before the round would end. One of my opponents stumbled in the opening but developed a really strong engine that would have clobbered me if the game went on another round. The other opponent had a massive point lead from birds on the board but didn't spend any actions in the last round getting eggs on them (which I think was probably overall a mistake, though he did have some compensation from objective cards and getting additional birds down).
There are a lot of things I really appreciate about the design of the game - how certain food types can be a little bit scarce but it's really easy to convert other types, how some of the spaces let you squeeze out a little more from an action if you give up a resource from another action type, how you lose an action each round but your individual actions become much more powerful as the game goes on.
I think the thing I still don't really like is the randomness of the birds. After playing a few times I have a bit of a better eye for some of the birds that you want to try to take quickly if you see them...but sometimes you get 3 birds that no one wants sitting there all round, and you don't know what the top of the deck will give you. And all 3 games I seem to struggle to find really good engine-building birds, maybe it's bad luck or maybe I'm just not drawing enough.
Oh man, Wingspan is one of my favourite games, both the board game and the video game version, which is really just a very faithful implementation of the board game. The thing that you brought up as a negative - the randomness of the birds - is one of my favourite things. It can be hard to figure out how to deal with suboptimal birds in your opening hand. Sometimes you get Killdeer + Chihuahuan Raven in your opening hand, and you know what kind of game you're going to have, but sometimes you have to figure out what you're going to do with a weird bunch of birds that don't mesh with each other.
Do you have / play any of the expansions? My wife and I play a fair amount of Wingspan with the European and Oceanic expansions, and it is pretty great.
No, I haven't tried the expansions. My friend whose copy we were playing did say he was considering getting one.
They're well worth it. Oceania especially changes up the flow of the game by introducing Nectar as a mechanic, which in turn lowers the reliance on eggs (and therefore everyone just spamming the most cost effective egg action in the last round).
Unfortunately, it does add more cards to the pile making it even more random than before. Though it never feels like it's too much or that an expansion isn't coming to the fore. I don't know how they did that but it works.
I have two of the expansions; if you're interested, here's my opinions on them:
European Expansion - this adds two new power colours, blue (I think they might call it teal?) and yellow. Blue powers trigger at the end of each round, before the end-of-round goal is scored. Yellow powers score at the end of the game, after all the rounds are done. It also adds some new goals. Overall, this is a decent and easy expansion to get into, and you could probably do so with just the summary that I have provided here. This expansion is fun, simple, and easy: 4/5
Oceania Expansion - this adds a lot to the game. It ships with new boards, new dice, new birds, and a new resource called "nectar" which is basically a wild card. The boards make the game a bit quicker, and the nectar can often be used as an alternate resource or as one of any food. When you play nectar for any reason they stay in the zone you played them, and you get points at the end of the game for having played the most nectar in each region. This expansion is one of the better game expansions I have played - it fixes some issues with the OG board, and while it introduces some more complexity to an already relatively complex game, it's not bad once you get into it. We added a house rule if playing with Oceania - if you use any Raven power (where you discard an egg to take food from the supply), you cannot take nectar for the food. Ravens are still the best cards even with this nerf, but it makes it a bit more even. Overall, this is one of my favourite expansions to one of my favourite games: 5/5
I just saw the release trailer for Tom Francis's third game, Tactical Breach Wizards
I'm about half an hour into the demo, and I really like it! It's a turn-based strategy game, similar in feel to Into The Breach, but I actually got a few unexpected chuckles from the dialog! It definitely has the humor of Tom Francis's other games, Gunpoint and Heat Signature, but I think it works better this time around.
I'll be looking forward to the full release in August!
Well, that goes on the wishlist then. I played the hell out of the other two.
I gave Noita a try. And it's way, way too punishingly difficult. And so I installed a few mods to mitigate things (lightly healing gold, tinker anywhere) and it's still extremely hard but at least somewhat accessible to me. I'm now enjoying it quite a bit and I can see why people are so into it.
Glad you are trying Noita! I am a huge fan and always push people to try it!
Some tips from someone who's got like 300 hours in it and was also very frustrated at the start.
Don't try to linger too much, try to get to the end reasonably fast and if you die that's OK! Some runs when you are new are just doomed because you run into something that's new or you don't have the muscle memory to deal with it etc. That's what's important to try and get exposure to.
If you're making it down to hiisi base fairly regularly that's normal, it's a bit of a run killer for new players. It's perfectly normal to get there and die.
Some players get trapped in a loop where they spend a long time in the previous levels "powering up" for hiisi then die anyway, which just makes them more frustrated, hence I recommend just going for it. You'll learn to pick up good/fun wand builds and you'll start making it through with good consistency to see the stuff later on.
Likewise it's ok to watch a wand building video or two, it's not cheating as there's so much in the game and a lot of it is totally obscure to the player you'd never work it out yourself.
Regarding mods, obviously it's good to have fun in a game, don't not have fun, but I'd err on the side of caution with some of the "cheat" mods in noita. In almost every case there is an ingame solution (including your health drops!) but learning about it, and using it is part of the game. A player with knowledge can get their grubby hands on all the goodies early in a run and be good forever.
Hopefully this helps a little, stick with it! Beating the boss is literally the tutorial in noita and it's a huge game with a lot of content!
Still playing factorio. In my current save, have launched a rocket with my modular base setup, and have decided to reach for 1k spm. Have ported all my science factories to fully beaconed layouts capable of producing enough, now working my way backward ensuring I have enough production of intermediates.
While I was at it, also walled off more area than I will need, and developed blueprints for defended outposts. Artillery is fun!
XDefiant has been a breath of fresh air as a long time Call of Duty player. The game still has issues to iron out (hit registration mainly) but its just so much fun. The matchmaking, the gun play, everything is just so much better than what I've been used to with the last four years of Call of Duty.
I also recently got my hands on a PSVR2 headset, which I used to play Gran Turismo 7 on Saturday, and it's just so revolutionary to me. The ability to look in to turns and feel some sort of spatial awareness is just outstanding. I did a 50 lap race against the AI on Saturday and before I knew it an hour and a half had gone by.
Last but not least I bought a Steam Deck a few months ago and I love it! Having the ability to go through my entire PC library and play most of it, as well as the fact that if I purchase a game on my deck I can also play it on my PC is just awesome. I honestly think this might be the way for me in the future.
Completed Sayonara Wild Hearts earlier this week. It's only about an hour or so long till credits roll - longer if you want to 100% it.
Stunning visuals - incredibly pretty game. The soundtrack's nice, though many of the songs sound alike to me.
It has an overwhelmingly positive score on Steam, but for some reason it did not click with me at all. I like that there was variety in the gameplay, but it all just felt odd.
It's quite unusual for me to not like such a highly rated game.
Picked up Vintage Story because of this thread, and oh dear, I may be in trouble. I have so much to get done this week, too....
But seriously, I'm really enjoying it. I've burnt myself out badly on Minecraft (at this point I've even tried scores of modpacks from mildly altered to massive rebuilds), and this is different in ways that make it feel like not-Minecraft enough to get past that. It's a lot slower-paced but also less forgiving, with a rather well-done little in-game manual so I've yet to have to look anything up in a wiki (and I plan not to if I can avoid it). It has finicky touches and weird little hidden places and the drifters are assholes-- I don't know if they remind me more of angry sloths or some kind of cranky gibbon.
Good times. Worth a look for anybody else who just can't find the joy in Minecraft anymore and wants to.
V Rising
Player it a bunch when it was in early access. Now that it has been officially released I'm giving it another go. I remember it as more difficult, but now it is a bit quicker to get through the different bosses. I like the introduction of trader camps, nice when missing some particular resource.
My main gripe isn't with the actual game, but with the lack of a Linux based server option. I'll look into setting it up with wine in a docker container, but it's a bummer they've made it more difficult to host a server. Seems like a nobrainer to compile a Linux option for the server part at least... should try going to their office to complain ;) or just ask them for the source and build it myself! I did try for a few minutes to decompile the binary and figured I could rebuild it, but couldn't get it to decompile with dotPeek unfortunately.
I joined a friends' dedicated server just after they already progressed through the game and I thought to myself that it was way way way more difficult than I remember.
It wasn't until gearscore lv 30ish that I figured out I was playing on Brutal. It really does make a difference and it still seemed fair. Difficult for sure, but fair.
As I have mentioned previously mentioned, I'm really enjoying the original Doom and Doom I.
I find it really interesting that people seem to have come to a consensus that Doom is the ultimate run-and-gun game, that Doom 2016 is the modern evolution of Doom (and that Doom Eternal is the natural evolution of Doom 2016). Doom, specifically most of Doom 1, is not this super-hype 'gotta-keep-moving-at-all-costs' hyperfocus on movement game. A good portion of it is jump around a corner, prioritize a target, fire, and jump back behind the corner. Once you kill all the hit scanners you can generally come out freely, but I find most of my 'movement' is actually stand in one place (and in corridors, it is almost always dead center) and move a foot to the left or right to dodge an incoming projectile, then move back to the original location.
On top of that, I would argue that Doom (again, Doom 1 in particular) rewards careful behavior over frantic action with ammunition limitations. There are certainly levels where this is not an issue - ammo is found everywhere and you'll spend the entire map nearly maxed out for at least one weapon (usually the trust shotgun) and never feel short for your other weapons. But there are levels where it is a verifiable drought. Not many ammo pickups, and most enemies are demons that don't drop any. The immediate example of this is E2M2 "Containment Area". You will be bone-dry on ammo and the map knows this, you quickly find a Beserk pickup that allows you to one or two-punch most enemies in the level. I played this on Ultra-Violence yesterday and I felt I had to be EXTREMELY cautious when approaching enemies. I find it very easy to accidentally charge toward an imp and find it suddenly starting their range attack animation. Now, I will admit, maybe I just suck at close melee combat, in every FPS I play I more or less dismiss melee attacks because I am interested in the Shooter portion of FPS, so maybe my skills here just suck.
That being said, that map is an extreme outlier. There are maps that provide just enough ammo to get you through. You need to be ultra conservative with your movement because your currency is no longer your health, it is ammunition. It is more important to accurately shoot enemies, there is no more cross-level sniping, you need to move to midrange and do the 'shoot, move a foot left to dodge a projectile, shoot, move back a foot right to dodge another projectile, fire again'. And it's not just because you need ammo this level, if you don't remember what the next map holds you don't feel comfortable knowing you are going in with nine shotgun shells and thirty bullets for your chaingun. Even if you have a comfortable amount of plasma and rockets you don't want to waste them on low-end enemies, because coming up against a Baron without these means a slow and methodical dance involving (by my count) around sixteen shotgun shells.
Now, again, this changes a lot for Doom II. There are more levels that take place in open outside spaces, and who can forget E1M7 which is the first time where you are rocketing (sometimes literally) across the level putting out fires everywhere all at once. But the original Doom games are not just an adrenaline fueled ballet dance of violence - they are also a slow hide and seek involving peeking around corners. I'm not bold enough to say they are cover shooters, they aren't, but there is more than one flavor of gameplay of Doom that should be acknowledged. These variations of gameplay is what makes the game good.