Doomsday on Demand 2
You knew where you stood at the end of Doomsday on Demand - if you were still standing at all, that is. It might have been a comfortable existence or one fraught with peril, a solitary life or one with friends by your side - but whatever it was had become your new normal.
That didn’t last long.
Nearly 16, you find yourself once again fighting for survival in the wasteland. This time, you’re taken in by the militant Sons of Tomorrow. From your base in the city of Novos, you’re sent out alongside other experienced fighters to bring the ruined district under control. As you make new friends (and enemies), discover new abilities, and maybe even start to fall in love, you keep hearing about the Oracle, a mysterious figure who can grant wishes.
Norbert Mohos’s Doomsday on Demand 2 doesn’t allow you to restore a save from the previous game. There’s no need, really: as long as you remember your character’s first name, the ending he got, and a couple of major choices he made along the way, you’ve got all you need to play the sequel.
I’m sorry to say this game just didn’t work for me. The new characters came across as either totally bland or implausibly caricatured, and sometimes somehow both at once. There were storylines with a lot of potential, but they tended to fizzle out quickly. The PC’s sporadic bizarre abilities and the enigmatic Oracle make it hard to take seriously what ought to be a gritty post-apocalyptic world.
Worst of all, the story is just plain hard to follow, as the actual progression of events is constantly broken up by flashbacks and flash-forwards and hallucinations and dreams. I love nonlinear storytelling, but Mohos simply doesn’t have the chops to make a narrative this needlessly complex actually work. If they got David Lynch to write the next season of Fallout but hired Uwe Boll to direct, the result would be worse than Doomsday on Demand 2, but not by much.
This game has eight possible endings, and I got a good one: my PC grown middle-aged in comfort and relative safety, still bearing the scars of the past but surrounded by loved ones. It should have been richly rewarding, after having seen this character through so much, but all I could feel at that point was glad it was over.