Last year I really enjoyed playing DOOM Eternal despite it’s numerous annoyances. Yes, it was as likely to be enjoyable as it was to be stressful, if not more the latter. Yes Marauders were terribly designed enemies. Yes, the story was weird and couldn’t really be enjoyed seriously or ironically. And yes, despite the really cool huge levels and awesome platforming abilities, the exploration was always limited via invisible walls and death planes. But despite all of that, it was really really fun, inventive and had an awesome soundtrack by Mick Gordon.
A year later a few things have been tweaked, numerous “live service” crap elements are still being fed into the game, Mick Gordon cut all ties with the publisher and the game leading to a disappointing official soundtrack release, and he is, of course, also absent from The Ancient Gods DLCs, the two-parter DLC/expansion that finishes the Doom Slayer story started in 2016. And it’s not enjoyable.
It feels as if id software spent the past year aggressively defending their design choices over actually considering the feedback they were receiving seriously. Because two things you need to know about the DLCs is: 1. They’re infuriatingly hard and are almost non-stop action and 2. Almost every new addition is yet another example of “this enemy is immune to everything but X”. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Ancient Gods – Part One is not particularly enjoyable overall. It is far far more linear than the main game, despite having some really huge and beautiful looking levels. It sends hordes of enemies at you every couple of steps, almost never letting off. And it introduces some new wonderful ways to frustrate the players. There’s a new enemy type that possesses other enemies and buffs them. And once the possessed enemy is dead, you have to kill the spirt using a specific alt. attack of a specific weapon, so I hope you have enough ammo for that at that exact moment. If you don’t, it will possess a new enemy and you’ll repeat the whole process again. Oh and if you thought this wasn’t frustrating enough on it’s own, the DLC also has possessed and buffed Marauders, maybe even attacking you in pairs.
So even though the levels looked nice and some of the music tracks were cool, overall Part One wasn’t particularly fun until the end. And the final boss fight basically combined all of the annoying additions of the DLC into one fight, also sprinkling it with lots of constant aerial dodging.
The Ancient Gods – Part Two starts off in a more promising manner. The action is not non-stop, there’s some fun exploration with slightly less linear levels and new traversal options. Even the first new additions to the enemies feel dumb, but not absolutely infuriating. I mean, sure adding invulnerability armour on enemies that already have tons of health is annoying, but at least they don’t seem to appear that often at first and you get additional counter for them when you get a new super weapon-tool. This new hammer is a really nice addition that feels far more useful than the sword from the main game or even the BFG, especially since everyone can be affected by it.
But then the DLC starts dropping more and more “but why” enemy designs. “This one is immune to all but X”, “This one is like the one from the main game, except without a fun counter that makes you feel cool when pulling it off so it’s just tedious to fight it now!” Oh and of course the “this one disables all your dodging abilities until you find and punch it, because we hate our player base”. And this all culminates with the final boss that I, honestly, didn’t beat. Because it’s a really tedious unfun fight against a, you guessed it, Marauder. Except he has more abilities, several health bars and if he hits you, he heals. Have fun in this horrible war of attrition!
To say that I didn’t enjoy The Ancient Gods in the slightest is an understatement. It lacked the fun that carried DOOM Eternal through the stressful and annoying moments and turned gameplay into complete almost non-stop frustration and bafflement. The story took an even more dramatic tone which, frankly, I don’t know who could seriously care about. The soundtrack was, overall, so forgettable that I don’t remember a single tune. Including the new main menu tune that was, for some reason, added, possibly as a continuation of distancing of the company and Mick Gordon. Unless you liked the most stressful moments from DOOM Eternal and dreamt about 7-8 hours of almost non-stop stressful action like that, but with even more annoyance and “gotcha” design decisions, I don’t think you will enjoy The Ancient Gods DLCs in the slightest.