I played through Doom 2016 a few years back, and up till recently, remembered fondly the
game’s razor-sharp gameplay and hard-as-balls combat. That game starts hard, then rapidly
gets more so with every mission until each engagement is a deadly, frantic mixture of
projectile-dodging ballet and ultra-violent skull crushing. It was an EXCELLENT game,
reminding us of what made the original Doom games so special, and at how far the genre
had gone astray since then. I was expecting to be comparing Doom Eternal to this game
at every turn, deciding whether or not each change was an improvement.
But I struggled with this, as Doom Eternal appears to have over-written all of my memories
of Doom 2016! Doom Eternal is still Doom, yet the gameplay mechanics have been reinvented,
and the difficulty level ramped up to even higher levels. By the time I finished Eternal’s
campaign I felt unstoppable. Put it simply, both games are arena shooters.
You get put in a confined space against an assortment of different enemies, each with
their own strengths and weaknesses, and you must beat them all! The beauty of Doom 2016
was that it encouraged you to aggressively hunt enemies down by rewarding you health
from melee finisher moves. To stay alive in Doom, you had to ignore every gaming instinct
you had. No more camping in a corner, or sniping them from afar. Doom made you risk life and
limb by tearing life from limb in order to save your life and limb.
And in that respect, Doom Eternal’s more of the same. But ramped up to the next level.
A lot about the experience has been changed, and I would say most of it has been for the
better. But not everybody feels this way. Reviews
say it’s more confused about what it wants to be. People have issues about certain gameplay
decisions, like the limited ammunition, and how the chainsaw’s been demoted to being
just a way of killing easy enemies to get more ammunition whenever you’re low.
But I’ve actually found these changes in particular to make it feel like an amped up
version of the 2016 game! Gone is the crouch button- because there are better uses for
that key in this game. Your walk button has been replaced with a ‘dash’. Again, far
more handy. And rather than starting the game with a pistol, you immediately get given a
shotgun. Because it’s BETTER. And so on. All these small changes really became apparent
when I booted up Doom 2016 again. Back in the older game, you could melee enemies
for extra health, but this time around you several ways to kill enemies, depending on
which resources you need the most. If you need health, you punch them in the face. But
if you need ammo, you chainsaw them. OR, if you’d prefer to have armour, you set enemies
on fire and shoot the hell out of them. It doesn’t make any sense, but why should it.
At the beginning all this is overwhelming, and your route through the battlefield, confused.
Surely there’s no way you’re able to juggle all of your stats and cool-downs?! Yet by
the end, you’re confidently stringing kills together in clever ways to maximise what you
get out of them. And with it, the combat of Doom feels even more like a deadly dance than
ever before. This game puts more emphasis on movement.
You can double-jump, but you can also double-dash, and the combination of these things enables
you to pretty much go wherever you want to. Between the combat rooms are platform segments,
which require you to swing on bars, dodge flaming spikes and to scuttle around on climbable
surfaces. It’s an odd mix, it feels more like a parody of old games than to be a serious
aspect of a new one. Yet it serves as a brief, but welcome respite from the arenas of enemies,
and also lets you hone your agility in preparation for the next combat segment.
Because the last thing you want is to be jammed in a corner by a slobbery, sweaty mancubus,
or pounded by a big burly Baron. A well-timed jump or dash is often the difference between
life and death. Thanks to the dash feature, you can launch yourself off a ledge to punch
a cacodemon, and still have enough moves left to avoid plummeting to your DOOM. Eternal.
When a game requires this level of precision, it’s important that you can trust the controls
and I’m happy to say the Doom guy seldom let me down. Me, I let him down a lot but
let’s not talk about that. It may look like a mindless gore-fest, but
there is depth to the experience, and mastery is attainable, somewhere amidst the shower
of giblets. I can’t claim to have achieved this just yet. I still sometimes get confused
by which button is for which weapon. The game giveth, and the game taketh. The
chainsaw is no longer the same overpowered melee weapon it once was, but we get an overpowered
sword in its place. We are more agile than ever, but so are the demons. And while we
regularly get extra lives to get us through the more difficult battles, the game is more
willing than ever to get you killed. And I’ll shoehorn my thoughts about the
graphics in here because I couldn’t find another opportunity in this video to do so:
the graphics in this game are a joy to behold. They’re miraculously well optimised and
wonderfully visceral and detailed, while conveying a sense of scale that few games can match.
The enemies have a more cartoonish look to them than in the previous game. When I see
comparison videos I realise I prefer the older style. But when you’re playing Doom Eternal
it all looks good and gels together well. Where the game really shines is with the environments.
Doom 2016 was mostly red. Missions blended into one another, so for each mission of Eternal
to be a different theme and colour palette comes as a welcome change. And this suits
Doom as well, since it’s just like those older games where it was normal for every
level to be set somewhere completely different. Back before games got so complex that developers
could only justify a handful of themes and enemy types. Doom Eternal feels exactly like
a sequel should- bigger, and better in almost every way.
…but not all of what’s been added is good. I don’t like the home hub that you return
to between missions. It seems unnecessary, it’s filled with annoying travel around
identical corridors and boring animations as you plug batteries into things. And I don’t
like the story and cut-scenes, either. Doom 2016 managed to tell so much with so little.
Much like Half Life 2, the story was there if you wanted it, but it never forced it down
your throat. You WERE the Doom guy in that game. But in Doom Eternal it abruptly tears
you away from the action to tell you the story via cut-scenes- seeing Doom Guy in these in
the third person seems almost sacrilegious! I know why they added them- they wanted to
show how bad-ass Doom Guy looks and to tell some kind of backstory. Yet their inclusion
only serves to weaken the impact he has, and to bore me by getting in the way of the pure
gameplay this series is famous for. In the previous game I could really connect with
Doom Guy whenever he skipped the story by smashing screens and by how he quickly grew
infuriated by the talky bits. Just like the player you could tell he was raring to skip
past it all to hunt out the next action scene instead! But there was one bit of Doom Eternal
where I liked the cutscenes, and that was with the Mars Core mission.
Just so you know, Doom 3 came out in 2004, and was different to the other Doom games
because it was a survival horror. It was more about being scared and shining flashlights
than it was about crushing demons with your bare hands. These new Doom games have tried
to distance themselves from that style, and the Mars Core mission feels like they’re
hammering that home. And doing so with the subtlety of a BFG 10,000. I think it helps
that most of these are in the first person, with your guy just trying to push past the
noobs in order to get on to some Demon Slaying. This BRILLIANT mission takes place in a setting
very similar to the one Doom 3 is set in. The Control rooms are full of panicking people,
screaming about how the demons are overrunning the lower levels! …and then enters the Doom
Guy. One by one they turn and notice you and it’s made clear they seem just as terrified
of him as they are of the demons. The heavy metal soundtrack complements the scene perfectly
as the Doom guy pushes past the guards and leaps straight into the gates of hell. This
whole mission, its objectives, and the cutscenes, are so stupidly over the top that I can’t
help but love them. I see this mission as being not actually what happened, but rather
how Doom Guy’s tale is told by one of the survivors of that ship who’s bigging up
what happened to impress his mates down the pub. Yes, he used a railgun as a mode of transport!
Yes, he blew a hole through the planet just because. And so on.
So that was a highlight for me. I normally hate heavy metal, yet it is THE perfect soundtrack
to accompany THIS game. I love it, and wouldn’t dream of playing the game without it! At this
point I had gone through a fair portion of the game and was thoroughly enjoing it. I
had got the hang of the gameplay, and was beginning to feel like I was the Doom guy.
In the back of my mind though, I was worried. For I had read the forums posts about this
game where everybody seemed to be united in hating the Marauder. This terrifying creature
shows up about half way through the game, and utterly breaks the combat by being INVINCIBLE.
Everything else in the room can be killed with enough damage… but this thing brings
everything to a stop, working against every gameplay aspect the rest of the game seems
so geared around! And sure enough, my first encounter with him
was horrible. I lost all of my spare lives and ragequit the game, deciding there and
then that the fun was over and that I wouldn’t enjoy the rest of the game if I had to keep
fighting this particular demon. But my abusive relationship with Doom Eternal
wasn’t to be ended so easily, and within just hours I felt inclined to give it another
go. And another. And another. And guess what. Doom worked its magic, forced
me to get better, and even the Marauder became something to celebrate! And fear. There’s
always fear with these guys as well. But every encounter I had with one after that got easier,
and by the end of the game I would say that my battles with these were a highlight of
the game for me! I’d clear the arena of other tough threats, then we’d circle one
another, waiting for the right moment to strike. With most games, you get better as you play
through them. But few make your progression so obvious as Doom Eternal’s. The Marauder
starts out as a boss, but ends the game as being just another creature it’s happy to
throw at you. After you’ve mastered these guys, returning to the earlier missions again
feels like a walk in the park. I understand the hatred for the Marauder, because he is
out of place next to the other enemies. But boy, does he let you flex your skills, long
after the rest of the enemy types have become simple cannon-fodder.
The bit of the game that really broke me was Taras Nabad. It felt like the difficulty level
spiked for that one particular level. That first arena and everything within it repeatedly
destroyed me and forced me to limp through the rest of the level with 0 spare lives,
feeling frustrated I was suddenly so bad and mortified the game was only going to get harder.
Google search was my best friend here and I regularly typed frustrated stuff into it
about this game only to find support groups for gamers who shared similar sentiments about
it. Thanks guys, you reassured me the problem was the game, and not me!
That level in particular was so hard, in fact, that after it was over, I refused to go any
further for a while. I instead revisited some of the earlier levels again to feel better
about myself. I used this time to unlock some of the weapon abilities and to try and 100%
complete a few of the missions. And I actually really enjoyed doing this. The map overview
generously shows the secrets. In most games I don’t bother with this because I assume
it takes somebody more patient than I to find them all. But in this game, once you’ve
unlocked a few perks, you’ll be told where everything is, even before you get there-
all you have to do is to figure out how to get there, which could involve some fancy
acrobatics, or locating a cracked wall somewhere. Most of the stuff you collect is pretty pointless
from a gameplay perspective, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and I guess it must have helped
me since when I eventually carried on with the campaign and pushed through to the end
of the story, I found it all to be rather manageable and fun compared with that damned
Taras Nabad segment.
So no, despite initial reservations, and a few blips along the way, when I look back
at my time with Doom Eternal I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I may not agree with everything
the developers have done, but I can see their vision of what they wanted with this game,
and for the most-part I think it’s been a massive success. It changes things that
I wouldn’t have thought of changing, yet now they have I can’t imagine returning
to how they were before. And it’s nice to see a sequel that expands on everything, too:
it throws more monster types, more weapons, more mechanics and more settings at you than
its predecessor did. It dares to try new things, and it IS unforgiving of mistakes that other
games may let you get away with. This is what got me into PC gaming in the first place.