I had a pretty good time at Doom: The Dark Ages. Then I rolled credits, reinstalled Doom forever, loaded Mars Core, and realized how much the ID had lost its playfulness. It is less grounded than inland and less heavier than the weight, but this is only a small, least important, and the least creative of the modern trilogy. It is also the supple, gross, intoxicating beast of FPS. I like it. I’m disappointed. I can’t wait for the DLC to close it out. I don’t think that IDs can make bad games. I really hope that the next one is better.
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Game Director Hugo Martin has run through what a fair amount of investors talk about towards the release. It made me feel like a lab rat that I coca-doveyed with every single time I enjoyed myself. there is nothing. The Eternal dance had a signature move, but it gave freestyle space. Dark Ages – Simon, the enemy design of Call and Response, says Parry of the traffic light, wants to dance to the song. This is a campaign that requires fresher riffs for a long time.
Table cards, I comfortably call Doom Eternal a masterpiece. I hate it in a playthrough about 1.5 years old and was confused by why the ID fits the perfect oiled murder machine in Doom 2016 with unnecessary fuff tits. I clicked on it after that, but I actually can’t play 2016 now. It’s eternal for me FPS. I’ll go back to that at least once a year. Freeform Kacodemon Eye surgery and mancubus mashing ability ensure that you don’t step on the same Supergore nest twice.
Conversely, at worst, the Dark Ages feel normatively the point of limitation. Its combat sandbox never stops offering meat thrills, but begins to show creative limits before the end of a single playthrough. The ceiling of that skill may be a little higher than eternity, but the edges of the space for self-expression feel relatively suffocating. It’s didactic and honestly a bit of a favorite, abandoning bare orders and audiovisual synaptic tag hobs and feet full of pieces of armor from treating conveyor belts like Verser’s original day at the Grandad factory.
The problem begins with the strange, overjoyed philosophy of the stated simplification of ID. Certainly, Martin’s “Less Guitar Strings” sounds great unless you need a full range of notes. Most gun upgrades have been downgraded from active, switchable Alt fire mode to passive buffs. You can buy perks for plasma rifles that impact enemies, perks for bonus damage to shocked people, and a third to spread the stunjolt when shooting shocked demons. Shields have the same ability to activate Parry. Combine them and watch the blasted battlefield of hell brighten up with the convulsing, immobilized spray of hell. target. Shoot. Parry. Enjoy the fireworks. In the exception, I didn’t light those fireworks myself. They are passive effects of slotted skills in menus. Purchase and equip it until it’s done.
All this is done to ensure you can focus on the shield. Throw it at a group of chaff zombies, move it, and rocket it across the field to the surface of the Arachnotron and crush the armor. Parry the projectile to wobble it. Use that opening to slap it and set it on fire for fragments of bonus armor. He throws the shield again, stunning and stunning his brain. Mop along with the super shotgun. Suitable for the star of the show, as does the Shield, it also embraces the spotlight, toressss solos, and plays the second fiddle, leaving the gun behind.
The efficient play pattern made me clear about myself early on, and I felt punished in the experiment as the weapon switching was very slow. The weaknesses and reactions of certain enemies meant that the eternal arena battle had the ability to become strings for rehearsed combos, but these strings feel even more severely wounded here. Heavy and thick manacle. The Dark Ages hope you like the eternal marauder as you expect to rat tap on piping that pipes your feet as well, for at least a third of the demons here.
“The Sandbox of Destiny Full of War and Fortune” was one of the marketing lines for this. And… no. No, it’s not. Doom was combat, Eternal’s combat was electricity with combos and calculations, weak spots, weapon skills, Doom was combat, and Eternal’s combat was electricity. The “sandbox” here is a large map of five out of five out of 22 levels. This allows you to choose which of the three portals you want to close first? In some optional arenas, you can reward shards that give you 10% extra health or armor, with some optional arenas that have whittle the shields of elite enemy types you have already fought on. There’s also plenty of gold to collect – mostly in single piece increments, and upgrades cost hundreds of hundreds – nothing more destined than lifting up the map every five minutes to make sure you haven’t missed a lone good boy nugget.
At the end of the first level, I sat in the gun turret and peeled the flesh of my legs from the giant Titan. There’s a sense of scale in the later Punch and Dodge mecha section, as you understand why it’s there so quickly to give you a ground view of these giant demons. But here it is not only strangely about the mid-2000s film military shooter ratio trop, which 2016’s Slayer would have punched it like it was a second time to glue it down.
Missions are often separated by too long third person cutscenes. Potentially interesting characters like King Sentinel are completely wasted, with boring Chain of Command dish cloth plotting warfare and tweaking to Torque Talky about infringement. At some point there is a speech. There is at least one level, and after clearing up the devil’s field, you get a communication like “The enemy forces are being pushed back!” A lot of that feels like the first draft.
Certainly, Eternal has been lost in lore, but it feels like his dark age is plagued by bland storytelling. The Slayer is wrapped in the floor after being pinned during the villain’s monologue. The universe’s witch zaps the purple glowing light with the blue glowing light of the maiden Sentinel commander, the guitar tries to build the tension I should know. The monologue continues. Fuck it, Edge was right. I want to be able to talk to these creatures. Because they can ask if they kindly stop flapping their gums.
Any attempted intentional pacing becomes a stolen hole. There are multiple sections that swim very slowly in the long water. Music is useless. There are some great riffs and some filthy, rattle analog bass guitar lines, but sometimes it’s a creepy vibe for long stretches. Where is Mick Gordon when he needs him? oh. The drone vibe is probably appropriate because of the apocalyptic science fiction wars in this story, but why do they go with that tone in the first place? There are fewer darkness and fewer Goa police forces in Tokyo, increasingly expanding the fate of the C rank. It’s not as simple as “No Mick Gordon.” The Eternal level of design and scenario beat had a rhythm and playfulness to them being sacrificed in favor of a sandbox that they thought would feel less curated anyway.
But take a look. There was another reason to mention that I changed my mind about Doom Eternal Up Top. This is the reason. They are good at what they do. Even if I don’t love this incarnation, the failed experiment is far more interesting than stagnation. My intuition is that the Dark Ages are not robust enough to continue the test of time – to be honest, I’m already bored of it – but I’m not sure. Maybe the other shell casings will fall at some point.
Anyway, here are some things I loved. You can quickly switch between weapons in a specific category. For example, a shotgun or a super shotgun. This doesn’t make any sense if you’re not using a controller, but I’m not sure if you’ve ever played an FPS consciously designed for buttons and analog sticks.
The skull sculpture gun has the perks to increase the speed of movement after firing for a few seconds, spraying skulls in a wide arc with a group of moaning hell soldiers.
Tieing grapple analog to a permanently equipped shield rather than a situational super shotgun is a major change. Shaking across the battlefield in the chaos of chicken demons remains spectacular for dozens of hours. Scan the arena and note where the zombies are located as they are walking through grapple points, which are basically made of meat. Weaving 3D bullet hellish projectiles is perfect for feeling like a flash bastard, even if the pattern is simple.
And despite the abundance of serious third-person cutscenes, the game has not completely abandoned ultraviolent heroics like Slayer’s spine tap. There is at least one moment on my list of the best video games of all time. It’s great to get out of the hellish airship and land back in the first person, Dragon. CyberDragon itself is basically easy to forget (it’s awful writing that needs to be written), but I think these sequences have their place in terms of giving them a sense of the scale of conflict. Some of the city skyboxes you zip up are also real winners. Prince Ahzrak, the devil young man, is quite persuasive. And each of the three boss battles in the game is fantastic.
This was what kept happening to me during my first playthrough: I can’t wait to collect everything and get all the upgrades, so I’m worried about sniffing the air vent and puzzles, just turn off my brain and play Goshdarn Doom. I took it halfway through the next run before I realized anything. All this exploration, all bloody gold collection, it’s not something you should do once as an extra fun before the actual game begins. It is an integral part of the rhythm of the game that will fade with repetition without it. There’s not much to do here. There’s rarely any fighting. There is little reason to play the level. This is an FPS solid enough that I don’t regret playing – sometimes it’s indeed fascinating – but it was crushed under its extra weight, between mecha, dragons and all medieval armor.