This 2025 shooter made in a decades-old Doom engine is gorgeous, fun, and tough as nails

Petaka freaks out against a green background.

(Image credit: Hellforge Studios)

The best games ask big questions. Planescape: Torment asked what could change the nature of a man. Disco Elysium asked if, in dark times, the stars should also go out. Today, Mala Petaka asks: what if Doom was a gumdrop-sweet game they made in Japan in 1992?

Created in actual GZDoom, the open-source Doom engine first forked all the way back in 2005, Mala Petaka is a for-real modern Doom clone that swaps out the hell and heavy metal for a lot of primary colours and some banging chiptunes. I've spent a bit of time mucking about in its demo and, my friends, it works.

Using an ice shotgun. — (Image credit: Hellforge Studios)

It's also hard, or maybe I'm just bad at it. Your skull-faced protagonist, Petaka, goes from blemish-free to bloody in record time, and enemies approach you in swarms and hails of gunfire. I died. A lot.

To deal with this challenge, Mala Petaka incorporates a few modern-shooter gubbins into its GZDoom framework. Most notable is a pseudo-glory-kill mechanic: whittle enemies down enough and you can eventually deliver a quick rat-a-tat of punches that turn them into a fountain of ammo and health chips.

But on top of this we also have status effects, movement tech, and a variety of pickups to colour and shift your playthrough. Freeze enemies who won't stay still or whose bullets you can't dodge, leap enormous gaps with the gun that lets you long-jump, or activate the pick-up that literally just turns on god mode—that kind of thing.

Using a grenade launcher. — (Image credit: Hellforge Studios)

It's a very good time, and well worth checking out if you're of a boomer-shooter inclination. Plus, I gotta be honest—it's just kind of wonderful that we're still making things in (a variant of) the Doom engine in 2025.

There's probably a lesson somewhere in the fact that, for all the modern niceties and nanite whatevers baked into your UE5s and what-have-you, you can still wring an enormous amount of fun from tech that wouldn't be out-of-place in a dev studio in the mid-'90s. Turns out, they actually do make 'em like they used to.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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