Reviews for Doom #4: Endgame

The average rating for Doom #4: Endgame based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-25 00:00:00 Christopher Haas Read the review of the entire series (plus much more ranting on the overuse of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) at The Books in My Life. Let's get through this as quickly and painlessly as possible. Beware of spoilers, I think. I mean let's face it, if you can make it to the end of this novel, the more power to you. The only reason I did was for the sake of this review. Two hundred fifty pages of pure chore. You're welcome. The Freds (ugh) are dead. Well, the ones on the ship our intrepid heroes are travelling on are. The ship will arrive on Fredworld (ugh) in several weeks' time, which means centuries will pass on Earth, and Albert and Jill will be no more. The gang figures they're not going to survive very long after landing once the Freds (aargh) start firing. Twist! The entire species of Freds (…) are dead, killed by a rapidly evolving alien species dubbed the Newbies. (I swear I'm not lying.) One Newbie remains on Fredworld, and the gang realizes the rest of the Newbies are headed for the planet Skinwalker and then Earth. How they obtained this information, I have no idea. I nodded off and skipped a few pages. So they crash-land on Skinwalker or Skinworld (doesn't matter) only to find a desert planet and a handful of humans. These humans are hundreds of years younger than Fly and Arlene would have been had they remained on Earth. As you can imagine, humanity has changed quite a bit over the past couple centuries. The entire planet is now a communist state, and humans are terrified of death, being the only species in the universe that can die. Everyone else just hangs out in their corpse until rebirth. I shit you not. Being that they fear death, they look out only for themselves and have no sense of unity. Fly is horrified by this, despite claiming to be an unapologetic individualist in the previous novel. These humans kill the two Klaves (I think. They end up dead somehow. Does it matter?) and imprison Fly and Arlene on a ship bound for Earth. What I am about to describe actually happens in the book. I swear. Fly somehow deduces (with the help of a bowling ball type robot dubbed Ninepin…ugh) that the Newbies have evolved to a molecular stage and have infiltrated the humans' bloodstreams. Fly then realizes he can destroy the Newbies by convincing the humans of the value of faith. Let me say that again: Fly then realizes he can destroy the Newbies by convincing the humans of the value of faith. What kind of faith? Faith in God or other humans, but if they remain with their current lack of any kind of belief, the Newbies will survive. Fly and Arlene then preach their way to victory or so it would seem. They rescue a lot of humans but are eventually overwhelmed and tied down. I'm going to try and rush through the rest of this nonsense. It's so ludicrous, it doesn't deserve full explanation. You're welcome. The Newbie-infected humans force Fly and Arlene into a computer simulation of the demon-infested Phobos, where Fly has to repeat the efforts detailed in the first book. Being forced into this program seemingly destroys his soul because why wouldn't it? When he encounters the first imp, he realizes he can preach to the imp and thus get it to join forces with him. He imparts faith to the imp and makes it realize it's part of a computer simulation. Fly then gets the imp to preach the good word of blah blah blah to the other demons, thus forming a rag-tag band of brothers blasting their way through Phobos. They eventually find Arlene. We switch to a new chapter and find Fly and Arlene arriving on Earth. Seems their souls weren't destroyed but copied. They then go to Salt Lake City to find Albert, hoping he succeeded in cryogenically freezing himself. He didn't. They find his ashes and a naked clone of Jill, which Fly ogles over, which is creepy because Jill is fifteen years old. Then we change chapters again and Fly and Arlene are back in the simulation. They destroy a giant-sized Newbie, realize they're stuck with these born-again demons, and they accept their fate. After all, they can manipulate their environment, so it's not all bad. Oh, and this version of Fly and Arlene is their copy. I didn't realize this at first and was hopelessly confused. Am I dense? Did I nod off one too many times? No. Hugh and Linaweaver mentioned the copy nonsense once, then neglected to transition between the chapters concerning the copies and the ones concerning actual version of Fly and Arlene. This book is diabolically bad. For several reasons. For one thing, it's a story of one-upmanship and is thus no story. Let's kill one set of aliens. Oh look, they've been killed by another set! Let's kill them now! No, wait, now they've been one-upped! Let's exclaim a lot!!!!! If you cut out most of the aliens and focused on one set of them (and cut out all the exclamation points), the story would be too short to print. Additionally, schools of literary thought are warring on each other. The only possible way to end this war is to preach the merits of faith. It occurs to me now that we are dealing with self-published Christian hack writer nonsense, but the problem is that this book has been published. Did no one other than the two writers read this before sending it to the printer? Probably not, and I doubt the writers read their final draft either. Also, this book is filled with propaganda, even going so far as to name drop one of Linaweaver's favorite authors that I don't currently recall, but you can look him up. I'd do the leg work, but he's a writer who pens right wing sci-fi short stories and treatises on the second amendment. Moreover, Fly becomes increasingly hostile to college students for no fucking valid reason other than Linaweaver hates leftie college students. There are no college students in this story! Granted Arlene briefly went to college, but Fly "won't hold that against her." There are no more colleges! There's only pinko future Earth, but give Fly and Arlene enough time and they'll convert the masses back to 1996. I'm blaming all this bullshit rhetoric on Linaweaver because he's the only one of the two still working and spewing rightie nonsense all over the internet to scores of'who exactly? Perhaps people who made it to the end of this series and said to themselves, "I get it. Faith solves all problems." Dafydd ab Hugh (pseudonym for David Friedman because why the hell not?) hasn't published anything since the nineties, and his prior work (mainly novelizations) were not, in a surprise to no one, well-received. I blame him for all those friggin' exclamation points. I should have been tipped off to this nonsense by the lack of violence in these novels. That's right, the lack of violence. For a series about gunning down zombies and demons, the descriptions of the deaths are not graphic in the slightest. Instead, Fly tiptoes around these descriptions, opting more often to react rather than depict, like when he describes turning the "pumpkins" into "pumpkin pie" over and over and over again. The curious use of expletives, or lack thereof, should have tipped me off as well. For a series about hardline marines, "fuck" is uttered once. "Butthead" is uttered about two dozen times. Maybe they wanted to spread their faithful message to the heathen players of violent videos games, and they knew if they could hook them with the first two volumes, then readers would be obligated to finish the series. I realize this sounds conspiratorial, but what possible reason could they have for penning these stories? There's bad, and then there's Doom bad. A garbage plot is fine. I want that. I mean, look at the covers. I'm not expecting Oscar Wilde here. To inject a message into a series about aliens and demons (though they're not really demons, just estimates of what we think demons should look like because who the fuck knows why) is nonsense. Give me Fly and Arlene, an arsenal of weapons, and room after room of baddies to eliminate. I would read a thousand pages of that. A thousand pages of this? There are so many more productive and entertaining things I could be doing, like ironing my socks or cutting my lawn with a pair of scissors. So my curiosity is satisfied. I now know that the final two novels are bad. I just never would have guessed the exact reason why, and if you had told me, I wouldn't have believed you. You probably don't even believe me. Go ahead and find out for yourself. There's a twenty dollar copy of book three on Abebooks. The price is so high because the sellers don't want you to subject yourself to reading it.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-15 00:00:00 Marvin Kizerian I've finally made it... I made it to the end of this absolutely awful series. If this wasn't the last book in the series, I never would have bothered reading this thing. I can't, for the life of me, figure out why ID agreed to commission this book after the third book had almost nothing to do with the Doom series. Or why they didn't kill the contract at this point. "Endgame" has even less to do with the Doom series and even if this wasn't a Doom book this would still rank amongst the worst books I have ever read. If this had been a stand alone book and not the last in this series I probably would have called it quits by page 50. I'm usually fairly easy to please in the sci-fi department, so for me to say this is pretty out there, usually I can find some reason to kick things to a 2 or 3 star... but this book has nothing worth reading. I would actually give this book zero stars if that was actually an option. I don't even know where to begin... If you'll remember, I complained in the last review that "Infernal Sky" had way too many first person voices, well "Endgame" brings us back to basics like "Knee-Deep in the Dead", so all we hear is Fly Taggart's narrative. At least that aspect of the book the authors made better. As we've been subjected to the entire series, the naming convention chosen by Dafydd and Brad are just terrible. Even the first book deviated from the actual game by naming the monsters differently and that should have given us all red flags from day one. The naming conventions created by the characters in the first book were terrible and that theme just gets progressively worse as this novel series continues. It was already a literary tragedy when they named the species at fault for the Doom monsters "Freds", but they took it to all new heights of stupidity in this book. In this book, they find an even more threatening alien species and they call them the "Newbies". Are you serious??! When this happened I just wanted to throw the book across the room. Somehow these two authors managed to take bad writing and make it worse. One of the big climaxes of "Infernal Sky" was that they were finally on their way to the Fred planet, who were the species responsible for sending the Doom monsters to Earth. When they finally arrive, after pages and pages of just nothing about what the characters do on a near deserted space ship, they get to the Fred planet to find out they've all been killed off by these Newbies. WTF. So... no big boss battle... in a book, allegedly, in the Doom franchise... right. THEN they go after the Newbies and get to the planet they're supposed to be. Deserted. No battle. (They find some humans there, but read on for the next rant.) Eventually, the main characters finally get back to Earth... no battle. Also, deserted. So, like, the fourth book in Doom is 95% "character development", because there's nothing to really fight anywhere the heroes go. What in the world is the point of even writing this? When our heroes finally catch up to the Newbies on a different planet they actually run into a group of humans there. But they're infected by the Newbies. The Newbies evolve ultra fast and by the time our heroes get there they've evolved into microbes instead of whole humanoid like beings! You heard me... they evolved INTO microbes. Now these microbes can take over the human body/mind, but not our heroes. Oh no, they have a secret immunity. Faith. Fly has faith in god and Arlene has faith in humanity... it has to be one of the stupidest attempts at inserting some sort of religious concept into a book I have ever stumbled into. It's like this whole veiled attempt to tell readers "See, faith can save you!" This series was already getting a little preachy with the Mormon's showing up, but now it's gone full tilt. Aside from the religious dogma being thrown at us, which they try to make seem "inclusive" by having Arlene, an atheist (and having faith in whatever you want)... this book takes a whole new turn into political systems and economics. See, the authors find the time in this book to rail against socialism and communism for some reason. Based on their assessment of human society I feel like neither author even remotely knows what either of these things are. Apparently, while building a society based on community and serving society as a whole, people will become so individualistic that they won't be able to have a working military anymore. Why? Well, because you can't take orders if you're an individual... or so their theory goes. Last time I ran into books about actual Communism it didn't stop Stalin from having an army... Also, Capitalism is the only possible way for the human race to survive, because even though under this new Socialist government the authors dreamed up they were able to advance technology to extreme levels, people just can't function as a group and don't know how their technology works... it's starting to feel awful Brave New World up in here. The authors also take whatever chances they can get to take pot shots at college educated people. Never mind the fact that Arlene is apparently smart and college educated, Fly hates colleges. Teaching people how to think is bad in Fly's book and he hates officers because of it. I mean, who could ever want an educated population? They try to wrap up the Jill and Albert story lines, albeit horribly. They even have a section where Jill wrote a thing about why the Freds and the rest of the Aliens in the galaxy were even having a war. They were fighting over a literary interpretation of ancient texts, which was brought up in the third book... guess what. This "explanation" just rehashes the same explanation from the prior novel. It's almost like the authors forgot they said this already. It provides no new insight and they don't even say what these texts are. Give me a break. To make matters even more idiotic, Jill also wrote two books on the history of the Fred invasion... guess what their titles are? That's right! The first two books in the Doom series written by our authors. Anyway, Jill figured out how to clone herself and Albert. Fly and Arlene find their clones frozen in stasis awaiting revival. Jill had her clone grown to the age of 15 and no further... why? Probably because the authors wanted the original party to be exactly back to where it was. Oh yeah, and this is on an entirely abandoned Earth mind you. What happened to the rest of humanity? They don't even say. Yeah... Oh and the Klave characters just leave once they make it to Earth. That's it. They just go home. The only combat we really run into is in a simulation where Fly and Arlene's souls are trapped into a computer by the Newbies. Guess what? It's a simulation of the first novel! And our authors spend pages upon pages going through the first book again. Sure there are some changes, but WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!?!? Oh, and I can't forget the sexism. The sexism is infuriating at this point in the four books. I mean, it's pretty constant throughout the series, but it just feels so excessive at this point. Every chance the authors get Fly quips in about how he noticed Arlene's breasts jiggle under her shirt. Just to constantly remind us that Fly is a hot blooded American manly man? Okay, I have no issue with it being brought up at all, because guys do notice this, but the constancy with which they bring it up is what's disturbing. But then they spend an obscene amount of time with Fly explaining over and over how he would never have sex with Arlene, because they are just friends... but, just so you now, she's pretty hot... que topless scene. The constant explanation just feels like page filler at this point, because the authors have to meet their commission, and what better filler than constant objectification of women. I think the real horrific part was the end of the book where it features the 15 year old Jill clone naked and "Fly trying not to look where he shouldn't". Are you serious right now? In the earlier book they even mention how Jill tried to seduce Fly, but yet her clone is 15? But let's not forget Jill is a genius... and, obviously, her best chances at landing Fly is in her 15 year old form. Authors... I have questions about your interests... Finally, the book closes with "The End...?" No, dude, no. No question mark. This series needs to be done. Save trees and hard drive space by never writing in franchise ever again. At the heart of things, I feel like these authors wanted to write an entirely different book and from day one they were thinking of how they could possibly start with the premise of the Doom video game and somehow transform it into veiled lecture about being over educated, faith being essential to human survival and capitalism being the only possible economic system that bestows individuality on our species. Please, don't read this book. I read it so you don't have to. The book really makes no sense and is just bad writing and bad story telling all around. It's so inane that this is like an incredibly bad fever dream. I'd say it was like a bad acid trip, but that would probably be more interesting. This is like the authors taking acid and they trip out and do nothing, except make up stupid names for things. Just absolutely awful. I hated this book... but I assumed that going in and it lived up to my expectations. Even exceeding them in some cases. Please, don't read this.