Legacy of Rust is an old-school Doom campaign for a new age
8.15.2024
By Rick Lane, Contributor
The Incinerator is the first new weapon added to Doom in 30 years. Replacing Doom's traditional Plasma Rifle, this squat, black flamethrower spits out globules of fire that stick to the ground, burning any demons that wander into it. The Incinerator can wipe out a cluster of weaker demons in seconds, or render larger demons helpless as you stunlock them in a scorching torrent.
It's a devastating weapon in the right hands. But what really defines the Incinerator is how treacherous it is in the wrong hands. Used carelessly, it will torch its wielder as mercilessly as it barbecues demons. This makes it an ideal weapon for Legacy of Rust, where every wrong step will burn you.
Legacy of Rust is the headline feature in Bethesda Softworks' double-barrelled rerelease of Doom + Doom II, which overhauls both classic shooters for modern machines. The rerelease enhances both games' visuals, improves performance, provides cross-platform multiplayer support, adds 26 new deathmatch maps, and folds in several notable additional campaigns for the games, including Final Doom's The Plutonia Experiment as well as Sigil, John Romero's unofficial fifth episode for Doom.
Legacy of Rust is Doom's latest descent into hell. It's co-developed by Nightdive Studios and MachineGames, who have partnered on several recent campaigns for older id Software shooters, including Dimension of the Machine for Quake, and Call of the Machine for Quake II.
The Quake campaigns were superb supplementary adventures, but Legacy of Rust is MachineGames' boldest foray into the past yet. Not only does it add new levels to explore, it also takes the unprecedented step of expanding Doom II's weapon and enemy roster. Transporting players to a secret UAC facility built inside hell itself, Legacy of Rust adds two new firearms and six new foes to Doom II's existing retinue.
It doesn't hang about introducing you to its new features either. As you open the portal to hell at the end of Legacy of Rust's opening level, Scar Gate, out pours a torrent of Ghouls, the first new enemy you'll encounter. These floating heads are reminiscent of the Lost Soul, but instead of rushing at your face to chomp on your nose, they shoot golden projectiles from their gnashing mouths.
Other new enemies include the Mindweaver (a variant of the Arachnotron equipped with the Spider Mastermind's heavy chaingun) and the Shocktrooper (an evil Doom Marine that wields the plasma rifle Legacy of Rust nicks off you).
But my favorite new foes are the Banshee and the Vassago. The Banshee is a scarlet floating head that emits a horrible scream as it floats toward you, before bursting in your face for immense amounts of damage. The Vassago is a burly, goatlike demon that throws fireballs, only its flaming projectiles remain burning on the ground for several seconds after landing.
Each of these enemies poses a unique challenge on Doom's infernal battlefield, forcing you to move and think in new ways.
The Ghoul increases Doom's aerial threat, forcing you to keep one eye on the sky almost constantly. The Banshee lets MachineGames spring some nasty ambushes, often rushing at you shrieking from some hidden door. The Vassago withstands considerable punishment, best countered with a sustained belch from the Incinerator—but doing this requires you to stand still for several seconds, a luxury which Legacy of Rust rarely tolerates.
Indeed, the most striking aspect of MachineGames' campaign is the challenge it throws down, which ranges from "formidable" to "eye-watering." It varies depending on your chosen difficulty level, of course. But even on Hurt me Plenty (the difficulty level most players gravitate toward) Legacy of Rust is significantly harder than vanilla Doom.
The second level, Sanguine Wastes, puts you on the back foot from the moment the menu screen bleeds away, assaulting you from all angles with imps and ghouls, while shotgun zombies take potshots at you from clefts in the surrounding canyon walls. The third level, Spirit Drains, does obscene things with Arch Viles, a demon from Doom II that can resurrect fallen foes.
Crank up the challenge to Ultra Violence—the difficulty John Romero always designed his Doom levels around—and Legacy of Rust will introduce you to a whole new meaning of pain. Some of the scenarios are truly brutal, such as trapping you in a twenty-foot square with Imps, Pinkies, two Hell Knights, and a Pain Elemental vomiting lost souls at you from above.
Perhaps the toughest level is The Coiled City, a devious non-Euclidean design that combines M.C. Escher's "Relativity" with a distinctly intestinal theme, filled with an army of Vassagos that pummel you with fire from every corner of the map. Unfolding The Coiled City's entrails took more than an hour, and even then I only digested about a third of its demonic horde.
Legacy of Rust is undoubtedly a campaign for seasoned Doom Slayers, more so than MachineGames' and Nightdive's previous embellishments to Quake and Quake II.
Yet while Legacy of Rust can be punishing, it doesn't just throw demons at you with zero regard for design. Most of its scenarios have been crafted to test you in different ways, and many of its levels are as entertaining to unpick logically as they are to fight through. The second episode in particular has fun with transforming arenas, with maps like Dis Union slowly unfolding amid torrents of blood like a flower on a carnivorous plant.
Your reward for pushing through these iron-oxide meatgrinders is one more new weapon, the Calamity Blade, which asks the all-important question: "What if the BFG fired a projectile the length of a washing line?" When charged, the Calamity Blade emits a searing arc of energy that cuts down anything in its path. After hours whittling down hordes of enemies bullet-by-bullet, shell-by-shell, suddenly being able to carve through them in one fell swoop is downright delicious.
Not that Legacy of Rust lets up at that point. The Calamity Blade is simply another excuse to further crank up the pressure. The closing levels feature some truly colossal encounters, where demons fall to your assault by the score instead of merely by the dozen.
With Sigil, John Romero showed that Doom didn't need to change to remain excellent—but with Legacy of Rust, Nightdive and Machinegames demonstrate that PC gaming's oldest war dog can still learn a few new tricks.
Doom + Doom II is available now on the Epic Games Store.