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.
