DOOM Eternal is one of my favourite games of all time, and easily my favourite entry in the long-running id Software franchise. It’s the only shooter I’ve played where the end of every encounter makes me feel like I just finished jogging up the stairs for an hour. It’s a game that tests all your senses and fires all your synapses and locks you into a gameplay loop where you never. stop. moving. In DOOM: The Dark Ages, you need to stop moving. The game has swapped the jump and dodge action of the last entry with a new combat loop focused more around universal weapon utility, slower and steadier battles, and a melee parry system. It’s a wildly different direction, and while the result is absolute demon-blasting ridiculousness that’ll make anyone smile, it never quite reaches the same constant highs of the last game.
Doom: The Dark Ages isn’t just a major shift for the series due to its new focus on stand and fight combat, it’s also far more story-focused and dialogue-heavy than the prior entries in this Doom reboot saga. Rather than telling a story that follows up on the events of the last game, we’re instead tossed deep into a prequel set hundreds of years earlier, in the time period only briefly touched upon in some of the story beats of Doom Eternal. While the last game dipped a toe into those waters, this one does a triple-spin canon-ball dive right into the deep end. Back in this distant past, the titular Doom Slayer is in forced servitude to the Maykrs – a clan of robotic angels that are hardly concerned with the fate of anyone but themselves. The Doom Slayer gets to kill demons, but only when the Maykrs decide to let him. It’s clear their hold over him is waning, though, while the demonic threat facing the planet of Sentinel Prime grows and the Night Sentinel crew is thinned out in its defence.
And so, you rip and tear, but your reasons for doing so are muddier than ever in some ways, and more complicated than ever in others. The story of the Night Sentinels and Argent D’Nur is kind of eye-rolling sci-fi slop, but it’s the kind that’s so endearing in it’s cheesiness – and also endearing in how it never gets in the way of justifying the most ridiculous and heavy metal concepts for your growing arsenal of weaponry. Sure, this is some kind of Dark Ages adjacent sci-fi world where people ride mounts and swing axes, but they’re actually laser axes, and you get to pilot a giant robot, and also, does that dragon have jet-engines and shoulder mounted machine guns?
In the same sort of way a Godzilla fan might jump out of their seat when a new movie wheels out a reference to their favorite monsters, there’s something really exciting and endearing to the way this game builds up to reveals and moments tied into concepts and characters from the last game. At times it had me absolutely screaming. Just don’t expect an incredibly emotional or pathos-filled story to go along with those bits.
What you can expect, though, is a lot of action. Those frequent story scenes that bookend levels don’t take away from the fact that Doom: The Dark Ages is packed with over twenty chapters of demon-killing fun, even if the way you kill those demons has changed. Early encounters do a good job of introducing you to the new mechanics of combat, but it took hours to truly get used to them. I approached every battle expecting the same run-and-gun electricity of battles in Doom Eternal, but without a double-jump or a dodge button, I ran into frequent reminders that this Doom Slayer takes it slow and steady. Your general goal in battle is to mop up the grunts with gunfire, and then lock in your focus on the big, armoured enemy that you’ll have to engage with in a series of blocks, parries, and melee attacks. In the last game, you felt so much faster and stronger than anything you encountered, and the “rip and tear” tagline really made sense. Here, you’re engaging in rhythm-gaming and parry timing that feels far more methodical and measured – battles are no longer a sprint to the exit, but a consistent and evened-out journey to the end.
The thing is, it’s still so much fun. Parrying is satisfying with generous timings on standard difficulties, while and your gun options are more varied than ever, letting you mix and match tools for every encounter in almost any way you’d wish, though with key attacks attuned to each enemy. As you get deeper into the game and encounter larger hordes of enemies, that marathon of calculated parrying and pummelling becomes bliss. And while your tools of destruction are more measured in use, they are also the sickest tools ever – you’ll constantly sling your chainsaw-covered shield at opponents, then spraying projectiles into them from a gun that crushes skulls to use bone shards as ammo.
You have to applaud the reinvention, even if this change of pace never comes close to hitting the same hectic, exhilarating highs as the last game for me. It isfair to say that for a pretty vocal part of the fandom, that exhilaration I felt with Eternal registered more like exhaustion. Since this is a prequel, you don’t need to play Eternal at all to hop into Doom: The Dark Ages, and the massively improved accessibility options and weaponry make it easier than ever to get into the series. Each enemy has a particular weakness, but you’re never penalised for sticking to your two favorite guns beyond the constant need for ammo. Plus, alongside the usual string of colorfully-titled difficulty options, you can tinker with an array of meters that let you fine-tune everything from damage taken, to parry-windows and even the overall speed of the entire game. If Doom Eternal was a game for a specific kind of freak, this latest entry aims to welcome as many kinds of freaks as possible with open arms.
Now, on top of the experimental new boots-on-the-ground gameplay, there are also missions in Doom: The Dark Ages that go for more of a boots-in-the-mech or boots-riding-a-giant-cyber-dragon route. A major crowd will likely groan at the inclusion of non-shooting gameplay in Doom, of all games, and that’s totally valid. At some level, maintaining the integrity of that consistent non-stop shooter mayhem the series is known for is important, and it’s something I was just lamenting about this game lacking.
But, also… you get to pilot a literal mech and fly around on a dragon with armour and laser-wings and shoulder-mounted machine guns! These moments are silly as Hell, yet played so straight and tuned to the extreme that I can’t help but love them. In mech segments, you’ve got a far simpler toolkit of weaponry and a pretty simplified punch-and-dodge combat loop compared to the main gameplay. Mech attacks are intentionally slow, and while it adds to the experience of highlighting how huge these titans are, it’s definitely not as exhilarating as the already slower-paced gun combat.
Dragon segments are more mechanically dense, but also a bit rougher. You can fly at high speeds to track down moving targets and objectives, or you can enter Assault Mode to hover in place and fire your machine guns. You’ll be entering this mode a lot dodge the incoming attacks of enemies, but this locks you into an unnaturally rigid view where you can only dodge up, down, left, or right. It’s genuinely the one function in the entire game where I feel like the animation speed and weight is just entirely off. In comparison to the rest of the game’s gorgeously animated and masterfully paced cutscenes, combat animations, and glory kills, it’s a clear step below.
Another factor that PC gamers in particular will feel is the weight of idTech 8 and ray tracing on their gaming rig. We’ve played the game across two systems, one with a GeForce RTX 3080 and a Radeon RX 6800, and where these were capable of running Doom Eternal at 1440p, maxed settings (without ray tracing) and frame rates well above 200fps, the minimum bar for Doom: The Dark Ages now requires ray tracing support for the game’s core lighting. That puts a huge burden on the game, so that the 6800 is more of a 1080p60 card, and the 3080 wants DLSS upscaling to hit triple digits at 1440p. Obviously there’s newer and much more powerful cards out there now, but the use of DLSS and FSR upscaling with dynamic resolutions is going to be more prevalent here.
