Thoughts on: DOOM: The Dark Ages

Doom is, of course, an extremely important and influential franchise. Not just for First Person Shooters, but all games in general. Every game was a technical marvel in some way, every game has a fanbase… Yet, as for me, as of today I still genuinely love only Doom and Doom 64, with the rest of the titles evoking a range of emotions from mostly positive appreciation to outright annoyance. The “modern run” of the series, started 10 years ago with Doom (2016) has a pretty huge and vocal fanbase that I rarely agreed with. I liked the first of these well enough, and I feel like my opinion on it grew with time, but I didn’t really care for its arena/encounter-based approach to FPS. Doom Eternal I liked a lot at launch, despite it’s numerous issues, and was hoping that it would be tweaked to be a better game. Yet, instead it was made worse and The Ancient Gods (both parts) were absolutely atrocious DLCs that have laid bare all of the issues with the game’s systems.

And now I’ve decided to finally play Doom: The Dark Ages. Which is… an acceptable product? A functioning FPS? What I’m getting at is that this game is certainly not bad, but it’s so lifeless, I’m surprised this got made.

As are all “modern” Doom titles, The Dark Ages is based around arenas/encounters and has a lot of the stylish action (classic God of War, Devil May Cry) characteristics. Yet, this time the idea is approached very differently. The Dark Ages has gigantic levels with huge arenas that are mostly focused on blocking and counter-attacking. This is basically if Serious Sam had a parry button with some elements of musou games (think Dynasty Warriors). A lot of the enemy types, that were more or less “real” enemies even in the most recent titles, are just fodder that dies in one hit. The rest of the enemies are buffed to take more punishment and sometimes have armor, which is a thing that needs to be removed before health can be damaged. All of these enemies have attacks that, if they glow green, can be parried. And some of the ranged attacks of this kind even follow the basic bullet hell visual language.

The exploration, given the size of the levels, is quite prominent and many of the levels feature several goals available from the start that can be done in any order. Though the movement is far more limited and platforming is much simpler than what was in Eternal. The weapons now fall into several distinct types, different by the ammo they use, and, of course, the dreaded light RPG mechanics with upgrades and all of that kind of stuff also return. And become, basically, the main motivator for the optional exploration and completion of special level-exclusive “challenges”.

On paper, even if it sounds more like Serious Sam than Doom, it looks solid enough. Different from any previous Doom game, but potentially solid. Yet, in execution, the title simply feels shallow. All encounters feel the same. Most of the levels feel the same, despite looking different. The levels that utilize unique gameplay feel like elaborate QTEs. The story is now even more prominent than it was in Eternal and it is even more uninteresting than it was before, and it was stupid and uninteresting every time a Doom game came out. Except, this time it is told with such a serious tone it’s hard to ignore the delusion id Software had that people would care about this. The music is solid, but ultimately forgettable and with very few instances of a personality to it. And the longer the game goes, and it is far longer than it has any right to be, the more it feels like the developers themselves were giving up. Map challenges become more of a throwaway thing, encounters and levels just fill the space…

It has a few bright spots, though. The beginning of the final third of the game, for example, starts out very promising. It has a curious premise, takes Doom in a direction more reminiscent of a different id Software game, has a few genuinely interesting looking and feeling levels with unique ideas and mechanics. Even the music gets more inventive. But then, as if the game was made by Ubisoft, things go back to how they were and game becomes uninteresting again. Shockingly buggy too. The amount of odd bugs with collisions or the progress tracking for secrets and such is unexpected for such an otherwise technically polished game.

Doom: The Dark Ages is not bad, especially if you’re in a mood for something more Serious Sam than Doom. It’s just that, the more you play it, the more you go on auto-pilot and sleepwalk through the game. Not in a good way of being so immersed, mind you. But rather like eating snacks while doing something mindless and not noticing you’re doing either, because your mind is blanking out. There’s nothing very frustrating about it, nothing exciting about it. It’s just fine. Which, in my opinion, is simply not worth the time and money you need to spend on it.