Doom II RPG

Doom II RPG follows up on the successful Doom RPG and brings id Software's legendary series into a turn-based dungeon crawler tailored to the small screens of period phones. The player once again moves through the UAC station overrun by hellish forces, but instead of an action shooter, a well-thought-out turn system takes charge: movement on a square grid, target selection, and planning each attack according to weapon type and enemy weaknesses. The character develops by gathering experience, upgrading weapons from the pistol all the way to the BFG, and finding keys and artifacts needed to progress through the maze of corridors. Compared to the first installment, new types of enemies and weapons were added and the maps are more sprawling, so the player spends more time on each floor of the station than in its predecessor.

On the technical side, the game makes the most of the limited resources of Java and Symbian - the 3D environment is simplified, but the atmosphere of gloom, flickering lights, and monsters jumping out from around corners works surprisingly well even on a small screen. The sound design relies on sparse but effective effects, the music is fragmentary due to devices' limited memory, yet it still evokes tension befitting the source. Controls were adapted for both the numeric keypad and the directional pad, so the game worked across a wide range of period phones regardless of manufacturer. In the press of the time, Doom II RPG was praised precisely for how faithfully it carried the Doom brand into a genre that might seem contradictory - an RPG with turn-based combat instead of controlled action.

Today the game feels like an interesting experiment straddling two genres and a reminder of a time when developers had to find creative solutions for extremely limited hardware. For fans of the id Software series, it's an interesting detour; for players interested in the history of mobile gaming, it's a demonstration of how a complex dungeon crawler could be squeezed into a phone with no touchscreen and just a few buttons. Together with the first installment, it forms a pair of titles that remain among the most-mentioned attempts to combine an action brand with a turn-based RPG on mobile.

Why play: For fans of id Software and anyone interested in the history of mobile gaming who wants to see how a complex dungeon crawler fit into a phone with just a few buttons and no touchscreen.