When the new DOOM came out in 2016 almost everyone was in love with it. Me personally? I thought it was a fun game, but it lacked a lot of things I liked about FPS games. With the classic Doom titles the entire level was the challenge, whereas 2016 had a more arena-based design where each separate encounter was the challenge. At times, I found it boring, at times it had genuinely good moments. But overall it was a solid FPS that got elevated into something more due to its technical elements, its visual design and most importantly its fantastic soundtrack.
DOOM Eternal, right from the first teasers of it, was showing willingness to reintroduce a lot of the exploration and a lot of arcade silliness of the classic FPS titles back into the formula crafted by DOOM (2016). Was the resulting mix successful? Well… More often than not. It’s the “than not” parts that kill the enjoyment with the game.
As with the previous game, you’re almost instantly thrown into the process of ripping and tearing and at the first glance the process is the same. You have guns, you have melee, when the enemy is in the staggered state you can instantly finish them off with a melee fatality and get health. When you use a chainsaw on someone, now just bound to a separate key, you get showered with ammo and a bit of health. Levels have different types of enemies, from fodder that exists so you could refill your resources to mini-boss like enemies. You can jump, you can double jump, you can have alternate firing modes on your guns. Go kill some demons will ya?
But very quickly changes and tweaks start becoming more and more apparent. First level opens up into a huge location after a while and as the game goes on, levels become more and more like those that you’d expect to see in a classic FPS – not lines, but sprawling interconnected locations where secrets can be hidden behind walls or tricky jumps. You get to climb walls and later to dash on the ground or in the air. Your starting weapon is a shotgun and it remains an incredibly useful gun until the end of the game, as do any of the weapons that you find. You get an infinite but recharging supply of grenades and a flamethrower. At the same time, the fodder zombies are constantly spawned when you’re lower on resources and the chainsaw recharges to its minimum amount of usable fuel. Oh and even your basic punch gets upgraded to have a charged version that sends shockwaves and explodes enemies.
Sure, arenas are still there and enemies can still spawn in out of nowhere (and sadly disappear after dying) and some of the levels are far closer to the more linear structure that the previous game had. But playing DOOM Eternal feels different. It’s not really something out of late 90s, not really. Nor is it exactly like God of War or Devil May Cry. Neither it is like the class-based “hero” FPS titles that were all the rage several years ago, even if you do have to manage quite a few different recharging abilities. It’s a weird mix of all of that and something of its own. And when it clicks, it is extremely fun, fast paced and exciting, a far cry from a more mundane feel of the 2016 game.
And yet… and yet… So much in this game feels off. Especially when you start and don’t have different weapons and abilities or all those upgrades that, obviously, a modern game would have. In fact, it does feel as if the game was balanced backwards, with the baseline being the fully upgraded Doom Slayer, abilities of which were then cut and the game rebalanced to be more manageable without them at the start. Poorly rebalanced – the starting hours were actually often infuriating. You constantly, and I do mean constantly – every 10-15 seconds, – run out of ammo because the amounts you have are shockingly limited. You constantly run on low health. Enemies feel too chaotic and agile to manage when they horde onto you. And you don’t have many options of movement, offense or defense.
As you get more options for all of the above, as you resources reserves grow, your arsenal improves, the game becomes far more enjoyable. Sure, it still relies way too much on finishers and management of all those recharging abilities that you must remember. And on the fact that most enemies have some one super efficient way of killing them and not using that way is just a waste of resources so you switch weapons and weapon mods all the time. But it does get better. And levels become better. And everything becomes be– Oh right, and then you start getting completely ridiculously unfun encounters and enemy types. Marauder is one of the absolute worst enemy types I’ve ever encountered in an action title, for example. It tries to be something out of a PlatinumGames title, except even if it did work in an FPS instead of a third person hack and slash, it would still be a terrible and unfun enemy to fight. It reminded me of DmC: Devil May Cry, where the developers tried to so hard to have “varied and balanced challenge” that in the process they created too many things to constantly think about and ruined the flow and the beauty which lay in the simplicity of it all. So by the end of the game I was genuinely just frustrated at moments like this that felt like a wall, stopping all of the momentum of enjoyment I was having.
And then you get lots of minor annoyances or just weird decisions too. For one, despite so much focus on the aerial movement, levels are restricted in shocking ways, with countless “fall” planes boxing you in and not letting you break the “intended path” (unless you break the jumping physics entirely, of course). The story is just weird and you can’t ignore it or all the lore that gets along with it. On one hand, it is a pretty interesting take on, essentially, what Brutal Legend tried to do several years ago – creating a purely heavy metal album cover lore that is equally epic and ridiculously dumb. It led to some cool looking locations and some good moments, but also to a really weird and inconsistent mood of the game – this might be the only Doom title in the main line that doesn’t seem to have any consistent theme to it. But the music is, of course, fantastic. The game doesn’t have a track that is as instantly catchy as BFG Division was, but it feels overall more varied, more clever and interesting than the soundtrack for the previous game. And it still has some amazing catchy bangers anyway, they’d just need a few fractions more to grow on you.
Oh and I mostly ignored all of the crap Bethesda seems really keen to push into the title to make it last longer as some hybrid live service thing. You get some “weekly challenges” crap, a multiplayer mode that I didn’t care about and even a Season pass that is for the “first year of updates”, hinting that they might be planning to milk the game for far longer than that. At least it’s still a fantastic solo game. The Master Levels concept is pretty neat, if simple, though if you’re into the combat of the game a lot. It’s basically the same mission as in the main game, but all of the enemies were remixed to be harder and different.
DOOM Eternal is a really really good game which, perhaps, with some rethinking and updates can become even better. Without that, it does have moments of horrible annoyance and frustration. But hey, it’s never boredom at least. I wish it kept some of the simplicity of the previous title instead of trying to be too complex for its own good, but at least with that complexity we also got more clever and varied approach to levels and encounters. And 1ups in AAA FPS titles, when was the last time that happened? I wish I could like this game more and, perhaps, with time it will become something I will like more. But as of now, I liked it well enough to recommend checking it for anyone who’s into fast paced FPS action. It’s fun.