Doom is one of the most influential games of all time, and it is one of the few game franchises that can get me to buy a new console in order to play. When Bethesda released Doom (2016), that was when I finally bought an Xbox One — three years after its initial release. Bethesda released the latest entry in the series, Doom: The Dark Ages, on May 15.
Read more: 5 Tips to Get You Started in Doom: The Dark Ages
If you’ve already beaten the medieval-inspired Doom game, or you want to play other entries in the series before jumping into the latest game, you can play other Doom games on every major platform.
The story of all the Doom games is fairly straightforward: demons from Hell have traveled through a portal to this universe, and it’s up to you to stop them. The gameplay is fast and brutal, with hordes of enemies to dispatch, and you have an arsenal of weapons to use, including a chainsaw.
Many of the games in the series focus on this fast-paced gameplay over story. So you don’t have to play the games in any specific order to understand what’s happening. The newer entries in the series, like Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, weave more lore into the games, but all you need to understand for most of the games is that you’re the Doomguy/Doom Slayer and your mission is to kill demons.
There are a lot of expansions for Doom games, but for our purposes, we’re going to stick with the mainline Doom games. Many of these games are on services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, but it can be difficult to decide which game to play first. If you want to play the games in the order they were released, here’s your list.
How you can play the Doom series
Here are the main Doom titles in chronological order by release date:
- Doom (1993)
- Doom 2
- Doom 64
- Doom 3
- Doom (2016)
- Doom Eternal
All of these games are also included in the Doom Anthology bundle on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Steam. You can play the entire Doom series on both Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ($20 a month) or PlayStation Plus Premium ($18 a month).
Watch this: Hands-On: Doom The Dark Ages
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However, you don’t have to play the games in this order. Some people consider Doom 3 to be more of a survival horror game and an outlier to the core Doom games. And there’s debate about whether this game and other Doom games take place in the same universe. For those reasons, I’ll still talk about Doom 3, but I’ll include it near the end.
Here’s what to know about the different Doom games.
The classic Doom games
These games are the original entries in the Doom franchise, which are light on story but heavy on gameplay. If you just want to mow down pixelated enemies without much story, check these out.
Doom (1993)
