Call of Duty doesn't lock you in predictable arenas for 10+ hours and force you to kill waves of enemies. There was a Call of Duty game that did that. It was called Call of Duty: Black Ops III and it was terrible. Call of Duty games set themselves apart by constantly mixing up the gameplay to keep things fresh. Stealth sections, vehicle sections, sections where you play as a dog, sections where you fight in space, underwater, in a collapsing skyscraper, etc. Doom 2016's combat does not vary meaningfully in that 10+ hours. You just run in circles shooting enemies wishing the game would do something unexpected instead of locking you in yet another arena to shoot even more boring demons. Doom 2016 plays a lot like Painkiller. It plays a lot like those terrible sections in Shadow Warrior 2013 where you smashed the shrine thing and all the doors locked and you had to kill demons that spawned from thin air for 10 minutes. Doom 2016 is obnoxiously repetitive. It's like playing a singleplayer arena shooter, and I think to some degree that's the audience it appeals to. Arena shooter fans. The arenas in hell are just as repetitive and boring as the arenas on Mars. You play 10 minutes of Doom 2016, and you've seen everything the uncreative, sloggish, and predictable campaign has to offer. You walk into a room and you know with 100% certainty what is going to happen.
I'd rank Doom 64 as the best Doom game and Doom 2016 as the weakest. It's a deeply mediocre game. But I do appreciate that some people love it, just as some people love Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Different strokes for different folks. For me, repetition and a lack of gameplay freedom, anything unexpected, or anything interesting are a design flaw in an FPS game.
And it's a shame because Doom 2016 is otherwise a really well designed FPS game. It's the repetition and poor pacing that kills it. Kinda like Mafia III.
