Yes, both Doom and Doom 2 are essentially perfect games. But that doesn’t mean they’ll stay fresh forever, and FPS games have evolved plenty over the years, so why not bring some of that evolution back into Doom? That’s exactly the idea behind BorderDoom, which brings the loot shooting action of Gearbox’s Borderlands to the demon-infested halls of classic Doom.
BorderDoom’s enemies each have a level and associated pool of HP, and they’ll drop weapons and ammo when they die. Weapons are graded by damage, accuracy, rate of fire, clip size, and recoil – and yes, those latter two bits mean you’ve now got to worry about reloading and recoil rates in Doom. You can see a convenient comparison against your currently-equipped weapon by just looking at a gun on the ground, too.
You can get the usual array of shotguns and rocket launchers, though there are some differences compared with traditional Doom. Pistols have no rate of fire limits – you can shoot as fast as you can click – and you’ll find some brand-new weapons in the lineup, like scoped sniper rifles.
There’s an even wilder bit of offense, too – a demon staff that lets you absorb energy from enemies and fire it back off in a swarm of homing projectiles.
You can see the mod in action above.
The ZDoom forums have plenty more information on BorderDoom, including links to download the 1.0 release. The mod’s been in development off-and-on for years, and the proper 1.0 release landed just a few weeks ago.