DOOM + DOOM II Run fast, shoot faster

There is no crouching, no jumping, no aiming up or down. You run, you strafe, you shoot, and the game asks you to do all three at once. Demons pour out of teleporters and dark corridors, and standing still is how you die: movement matters more than cover. The weapons each earn their place, from the shotgun workhorse to the Super Shotgun's 20-pellet blast at point-blank range, up to the BFG-9000 that erases everything in front of you. It is easy to learn and hard to master, especially on the higher difficulty settings, where ambushes and traps will kill you the first time through.

This is both games and nearly everything ever made for them: DOOM with Episode IV, DOOM II, TNT: Evilution, The Plutonia Experiment, the Master Levels, No Rest for the Living, John Romero's Sigil, and Legacy of Rust, a new 16-map episode from id Software, Nightdive Studios and MachineGames with new demons and new weapons. That is 187 mission maps in total, from the moon bases of Jupiter to the darker shores of Hell. You get the original DOS versions too. Some later add-ons lean on mazes and traps that can leave you genuinely lost, so expect to check a map now and then. The sheer amount of game here is hard to overstate.

The music has always been half the appeal. The original tracks borrow their riffs from metal albums of the era, and they drive the pace of every fight. This version lets you pick: the original MIDI soundtracks or the modern IDKFA recordings by Andrew Hulshult, with metal guitars and double-kick drums that come at you as hard as the demons do. The sound design around the music holds up too. Guns bark, demons growl somewhere in the dark before you can see them, and the chainsaw has a rasp you will recognize for the rest of your life. Choose the modern tracks and the whole game gets louder in every sense.

Hell is better with company. Online co-op and deathmatch support up to 16 players across platforms, and there is local split-screen for up to four. Drop into a lobby, pick a map, and fight through the campaign together or turn the rockets on each other: a new deathmatch map pack adds 26 maps, on top of 43 deathmatch maps in the collection. Co-op DOOM is its own kind of chaos, two marines clearing a room while the friendly fire question answers itself. Sessions are quick to set up and rounds move fast, which makes it an easy game to just jump into with friends for an evening.