D-Touch by Beloko Games

I'll readily admit to anyone that I'm just not a first-person-shooter kind of guy. The last time I played Call of Duty, I morbidly embarrassed myself. Sadly, most FPS games these days are so driven by story and scripts that I think they forgot that just shooting stuff is fun. When I play a game, I want to play the game, not sit all day watching cutscenes, and I also don't want the game to have me playing through scripted events that take away the freedom of gaming from me. If I want to watch a movie, I know how to log into Netflix.

To me, Doom is the perfect FPS game. It always has been. I was right there when it first came out, shelling out a few bucks at a computer fair for a couple floppies containing the shareware version. My poor old 386 couldn't even run it at more than the size of an index card without looking like a slideshow, but I still loved it.

Fast-forward over 20 years, and thanks to id Software releasing the source code for the game's original engine, we now have many ways to enjoy Doom on modern hardware and often with significant improvements. iPhone users have been lucky enough to enjoy an official port of Doom for some time now, but there has never been an official release on Android, but thanks to the efforts of Beloko Games, we have something even better.

D-Touch is actually a port of three different modern Doom engines: Chocolate Doom, PrBoom, and GZDoom. They all have their own features, but GZDoom is by far the most advanced and customizable. Choc Doom provides an experience as close to the original as you can get without eschewing modern niceties like widescreen displays and higher resolutions. PrBoom offers both a hardware mode that runs at your device's native resolution and a software mode very similar to Choc Doom.

GZDoom is where all the real fun is. Not only are there a zillion mods for it, there are also a lot of great features, far too many to list, that make this the definitive engine to enjoy Doom on modern hardware. What really propels Doom into the modern FPS era is the ability to look up and down, something you could never do in the original game. It's actually completely unnecessary as the game still automatically aims vertically for you, but the psychological impact of playing Doom this way really does make it feel like a new game.

Beloko has done an amazing job of making his application accommodate just about everything you can think of. It'll download soundfonts automatically to make the music sound awesome. It'll download freeware WAD files if you don't have the official ones. It also has extremely robust control configuration, both for gamepads and onscreen controls. One particularly neat feature is being able to use pinch-to-zoom on the automap, a particularly nice mobile-only feature. The app also sees regular updates, and the developer has helped me on two occasions when I was having difficulties, so don't be afraid to spend the money on this app if you're worried you can't get it to work... Beloko can help!

D-Touch is quite possibly the best way to experience classic Doom on any platform. The controls are great, with or without a controller, and with three game engines to choose from, robust options, and an eager developer who continually improves his apps and is always happy to help, you'd have to try really hard to regret this purchase.

Random Sidenote: At the time of writing, the price of this app was $2.25... it's an absolute steal at the price and easily worth double! Beloko also has several other game engines available for similar games such as the Quake series, the Jedi Knight series, and even a free app for Wolfenstein!