Doom: The Dark Ages Review

The "rebooted" Doom series has been quite the interesting ride. Doom 2016 revived the FPS from having games being filled with regenerating health, weapons being predominatantly hitscan, weapon limits and brought back fast paced movement and added it's own ideas like mantling and glory kills. It made single player FPS more appealing to people who never really liked it when the genre was filled with what I mentioned earlier. Doom Eternal came along and does the sequel difficulty spike and while alienated certain fans of the 2016 game managed to create a new identity and find it's own audience. It also showed many including me how a game can challenge players to egg you into using it's mechanics and systems. With everything wrapped up in the Ancient Gods Part 2, it seemed like id Software was done with the series but now Doom: The Dark Ages is doing the same thing again but with Doom Eternal instead of 2016. For the most part, I'd say the former succeeds mainly with gameplay however.

This is the weird thing with The Dark Ages. It's so different from past Doom games in terms of emphasis on story, having you know the lore before starting and it's blend of dark and science fantasy that I'm almost convinced id wanted to make a new ip heavily inspired by Warhammer 40K but they couldn't due to new IPs in this day and age not doing so well in terms of making money. It then got repurposed into being an extremely loose prequel to Doom 2016.

Now this transitions to story and well. At first, I thought it was going to be id following the quote John Carmack said back around the release of the older games where story in a game is like story in porn and well...not really. There is more story I ever expected a Doom title to ever have. I didn't mind it in Eternal since the cutscenes never went on for too long. Dark Ages on the other hand has more cutscenes than 2016 and Eternal. It doesn't help that the story does the thing Warhammer games tend to do and expect you to know the lore before starting the games. It's a prequel where it's written like a comic book adaptation where it expects you to know everything beforehand.

Many of the characters the game just expects you to know and understand. It also doesn't help that Doomguy or Slayer doesn't do any of his shoot first antics that he does in 2016. It also never tries to create much attachment towards any of the characters and many of them just drone on in exposition.
Doom Slayer also doesn't have anyone to play off like Samuel Hayden in 2016 either making him more dull. The main villain gets the upper hand on Slayer due to some weird magic that is like Kryptonite. There is also some lovecraftian horror in there.

There are some good moments where the Slayer shoots one gatekeeper in the head in a late game cutscene to end a love. There is also the awesome scene where the main villain kills the Dragon and Slayer gets really angry which works since you've been using the former a lot throughout the game so some bond was at least formed. Moments like this are few and far between.

You are still playing than you are watching but it's still hard not to zone out during cutscenes and while they aren't well written they weren't bad enough to make me want to skip them due to how well rendered and decently composed the cutscenes are.

The gameplay on the other hand is just as good as it always has been. I already knew Dark Ages wasn't going to be Eternal again. I respect id for doing something new with every game they've made thus far. Doom 2016 could be considered too easy once you to keep moving, shoot and glory kill. Doom Eternal could be considered rather challenging for a first time player due to the sheer amount of mechanics and moving parts you have to keep track of when starting the game. Dark Ages on the hand makes a very solid middle ground. You can get down to critical health very quickly like in Eternal but you won't have lots of ammo with you at all times like in 2016 since enemies kills is where the ammo drops come from now. Enemies also drop some health and fodder enemies are also everywhere to get health back. Using the Pulverizer on large fodder hordes can get health back. There's health pickups scattered around the arenas and it sort of has that regen health shooter of retreating but you can get health back much quicker by comparison to those games since there isn't waiting endlessly. There is also Life Sigils now and you can always find one per level if not always stocked up to 3. I found the combat so enjoyable that I rarely if ever used them and chose to restart every enemy wave from the begginning. The combat has a very "agile tank" feeling to it. Everything feels weighty and punchy and every time you smash and enemy, they explode in chunks. Glory kill system is now a combination of a combo in a beat em up, Halo's melee attack and the Blood Punch from Eternal. It's primarily used to get back ammo adding to the "tank" like feeling where you need to recharge your firing rounds. There is also the parry and enemy armor you have to deal with. The parry window on default difficulty is very forgiving which is good since it makes me feel competent and it's mainly there to add some spice to the combat and make fighting tougher enemies easier. It can feel exhilarating to nail the parries, be at a critical health and then be at full again. You also need to destroy armor various enemies have before damaging them and it can be fun to use the various weapons to do it with, maybe use melee or parry them and then destroy it. There's a number of options here and they are valid. Level design is solid. It gives you waypoint markers but it mainly gives you a vague direction on where to go.

Dragon and mech riding sections are okay. They never overly long to the point I really want to get back to shooting. The parry windows for both are forgiving here too.

The only big issue is the upgrade system since there isn't much money throughout the game and so many upgrades it's better to prioritize what you like than experiment and try new options.

Overall, Dark Ages is a blast minus story but it's not too big of a deal since most of the time in Dark Ages is still killing demons.