Have you ever wished the Tony Hawk games had demons? Well, more demons? And maybe you’re on a motorcycle the whole time? Let’s take a look at Motordoom.
Pretty cool concept, right? Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater mixed with Doom? But how does it play? Let’s jump in.
Trick System
The trick system feels good. You’ve got flips – which is going to be BMX type stuff like barspins and tailwhips. There are grabs too, of course. And you can hold L2 to do flips. But with how hectic this game gets, I didn’t do that much.
Rounding things out are grinds, manuals, and wallrides. Really everything you need for a Pro Skater style game.
But there’s one thing that’s significantly different – the gunplay. R1 becomes a fire button, and you have to shoot demons as they pop up. This adds a whole new dimension to the game, so that you’re constantly shooting enemies while trying to complete objectives.
And it has a few gameplay side effects. For one, the enemies chase you slowly. The longer you stay in an area, the more enemies there are. So, trying to collect a particular letter for a while, and you will be trying for a while, will attract more and more demons. Eventually, you have to leave the area or risk dying, which restarts your run.
The other side effect is that it’s hard to bail. You can land sideways, or even land in the middle of a trick animation, and it’s fine. This is a good thing when you’re being chased or fighting a boss – yes there are bosses, more on that later – but it sucks when trying to get a high combo. With so much going on, I’m watching my multiplier go up, and then it’s suddenly back at one. After a long time playing, I realized that it was because an animation wasn’t quite done yet.
There are also no reverts, but you can land directly in a manual from vert. It feels weird after years of Tony Hawk, but it works. Also, if you land backward, you spin back around automatically. That’s nice.
Demonic Contracts
The game doesn’t have stats, but it has something a little different – demonic contacts. Well, there are two kinds. One you get as a collectible, like a secret tape. But for the most part, the demonic contracts are stat modifiers – like better manual or grind balance, higher jumps, that kind of thing. But there are also weapons upgrades, like more damage, faster shooting, and the like. When you first start playing the game, you’ll get bombarded with these popups constantly.
It’s nice to be able to pick through them, because some of them are bad, like getting less ammo. But in the end, I switched the setting to automatically accept these, because it was driving me crazy how often they come up.
This is the part of the game that really sets it apart. It’s a roguelike, meaning that you’ll lose all this progress when you die. But as you play, you might get a ghost arm with a sword, or flames that shoot out during grinds. Maybe lightning strikes sometimes when you shoot. Every now and then, you’ll get a really strong combo.
For example, in this winter level, I basically became invincible. I wanted to collect gears, which you can use to buy upgrades to your bike. They drop randomly when you kill enemies. At this point, I had a chainsaw in front and in back of my bike, and a contract that refills my health when I get a kill. So I was able to just ride into waves of enemies and come back out the other side, turn around, and do it again. Of course, I still had to deal with the boss. Let’s look at the rest of the challenges though.
Challenges
As you might expect, there are three high score levels. These are pretty attainable. Then there’s a high combo – but instead of it being a score, it’s a high multiplier amount. This is an interesting take on this – and it’s probably done this way so you don’t have to try to do math while also maintaining a balance meter and also surviving a gunfight. So it’s simplified, but not necessarily in a bad way. The combo can be hard though, especially because your combo resets all the time if you land too early. I spent an eternity getting the snow level one.
Speaking of combos, there are COMBO letters to collect, which works like you would expect. There are also letters to MOTOR, which are like the SKATE letters.
Collecting letters is way harder than you might think. Even from the first level, you’ll find that it’s almost impossible to line yourself up for stuff a lot of the time. You hold A to accelerate, but you also let go of A to jump, so going slow and precise is very awkward. And it’s kind of a bad idea too, because it gives the demons more time to catch up with you. Everything has to be at full speed.
But then that introduces some issues. In this level, I have to grind corpses, and I have to hit kickers like these to do it. There’s nothing to grind that will put you perfectly in line for it, so you just have to whip yourself at it and hope. And hope again. And again, and again. Oh, by the way, don’t die, or accidentally kill the boss and get kicked out of the level.
Or, speaking of speed problems, there was a nearly impossible COMBO that I had to do. The C and O were no problem, but that dumps you into a straight line at a rail that you have to grind sideways for the M. You can’t ride over the edge of the bank without air time, so be ready to manual again, or try to jump all the way from there, but good luck. This drops you in line with a launch ramp that throws you up to the B, or way over it, in my case.
Turns out, my bike upgrades made my jump height so high that I would miss gaps that it’s designed for me to do. I guess that one was on me.
Levels also have something unique, like grinding those corpses or certain rails, wheelie over pentagrams, smash crates. You get the idea. These are my favorites, like they always are in games like this.
And lastly, there are bosses – for the first time in a game like this since Evolution Skateboarding, where you had to fight a semi truck. They appear once your timer runs out, and they are, of course, big scary demons. They have attacks, but the most annoying one is the pentagram. If you let it grow to full size, you bail. So you have to keep moving and not stay on the ground too long. This makes the combo-based challenges really tough, so I always tried to do those first.
What the game expects you to do is shoot the boss directly. You can hold L1 to slow down time, and it lets you aim and shoot. What I did was do combos and just shoot whenever my ammo was refilled. You do more damage while doing tricks, and taking the time to aim just sets you up to bail, which might cause you to get swarmed by enemies, or to ride into some lava which will kill you and end your run. But if you ride back and forth and just shoot whenever you can, you’ll eventually chip away at their health and win.
The bosses are never particularly difficult or intimidating. And sometimes they’re hard to find.
Upgrades
So you kill the boss. What do you get? You get an actual permanent upgrade once per level, and you collect gears, which you can use to buy bike upgrades. Higher jumps, better manual balance, better grind balance, stuff like that. But you can only pick one at a time. You can pick from a chainsaw, machine gun, or shotgun in the front, and something like bigger fuel tanks for fire in the back, or higher health. There are skins too, but I was only able to afford one in my playthrough.
These upgrades are a welcome addition to the game because they really do make it feel different. And I get why they don’t let you stack all of them. It’s more about the tradeoff of specializing one way or another. But the random aspect to the demonic contract upgrades undermines that a bit when it’s on auto. It would have been cool to be able to pick a strategy for that, like ‘collect firepower upgrades and ignore trick upgrades’ , just to make that a bit more seamless.
In the end, I didn’t beat the game, but I got close. I’m on the last level in the menu, and I only have to wallride 5 skulls and find the last demonic contract. But this level really got to me. Having so much trouble with the precision of collecting everything drove me a bit insane, and it also took me a few tries to kill this boss.
Like I said, the bosses don’t require special strategies or anything, but just in riding back and forth in this level and trying to do my thing, I would end up in the lava and die fairly often. And after roughly 32,000 attempts at collecting the COMBO letters, I was done.
So, what’s the verdict on this game?
I’m torn, because it’s such a unique idea and such a fun genre mashup. I would never have come up with Pro Skater with guns, as much as I would have liked to take out Eric Sparrow.
I like the design and aesthetic, with the PS1 vibes like Street Uni X has.
But to me, the weapons and the demons get in the way of the action sports collectibles side of the game. I mostly played it like it was Matt Hoffman, except I had to remember to hit R1 to kill stuff whenever it crossed my mind.
That’s just me though. You might have a ton of fun with the demonic contract upgrades, character customization, and the combat. Maybe you’ll have so much fun mowing down enemies that you’ll forget to do the high score.
The game is 14 bucks on Steam, and it has ‘very positive’ reviews right now. If it looks good to you, check it out. There’s definitely fun to be had.