I casually finished this in 3 hours and 33 minutes, and for some reason I’m intrigued by the idea of submitting the first ever speedrun for it ever since.

I did play this on the Vita because who really has a j2me capable phone laying around anymore anyway? It played perfectly and the save data is fully compatible with the PC port, and thus presumably most other ports too.

You do have to look around a bit for the actual file and then convert it using some weird tool. It’s not annoying, but it was enough of a barrier that I put this off for a month. That’s kinda the nature of playing abandonware games for dead, niche platforms I guess.

Doom RPG is a dungeon crawler. Turn based, first person, mazes. But there’s no random or procedural generation of the mazes, every level is static and the codes used to unlock certain doors are static as well. Which means once you know what you’re doing, you should be able to fly through this game. And thankfully it’s not too mazy.

Gameplay is straightforward. Navigate, pick up items, locate keys to progress, and shoot enemies. You can only fire your weapon when there’s an appropriate target directly in front of you. Things like barrels, crates, or enemies. This makes it impossible to hit enemies using only the rocket launcher’s splash damage, as you cannot fire any weapon at walls. That’s kind of an annoyance since it comes it handy a lot in normal Doom gameplay. It’d be nice to have the ability to just fire at anything. While it’s not exactly game breaking, it does get in the way of some strategies you might want to employ.

The story is reminiscent of Doom 3 in some ways. It takes place in a populated UAC just before disaster hits. You end up interacting with soldiers, scientists, and asshole scientists. The story takes place entirely via dialogue with these folks. It’s not like any other Doom game. Even 3 isn’t this heavy on NPC interaction.

If you’re very curious, give it a play. If you’re only a little curious, maybe look up a video of someone playing it? It’s honestly hard to recommend this one.