Doom Eternal Review

 Rip and Tear

In 2016 Id Software took their resurrection powers towards one of the most iconic 'Boomer Shooters' of the gaming industry and brought it back to startling vitalisation through one of the most intense, visceral, intuitive and flowing First Person Shooters of all time. DOOM totally rewrote the book on how to capture and conceptualise level design, enemy encounters, battlefield tactics and enemy design. It was a masterpiece of several distinctions, excelling in some many new areas that even the original Doom games had become dated examples of, once again putting the DOOM franchise on top of the pack in terms of quality gaming shooting majesty. And I totally loved that original 'New DOOM' experience in that special sort of way that clings to you more than just any old good game does.

That DOOM came to me at a time where everything in my life felt disorganised and spiralling out of control, and provided me with the perfect encapsulation of the 'power fantasy shooter' to help set my heart back in rhythm whilst in life I worked on everything else. Tight challenge that demands as much for you to put in as you want to get out of it, a cavalier 'screw the story let's just kill demons' attitude that felt like a breath of fresh air in an industry that was starting to drown in it's overbaked over-elaborate narratives for games that don't need them and a light replay value softly calling towards the allure of 'mastery' that kept me hooked long enough to become actually pretty good at the game. Clear the thing on Nightmare, boss through the timetrials and even get a decent way through the game on a few Ultra-Nightmare runs. (essential one life playthroughs were you have to restart the entire game if you fail.) That's not the type of dedication I devote to any old game which turns up.

Which is probably why I didn't feel the need to run out and immediately scoop up the new DOOM Eternal when it hit store shelves back in 2020- not least of all for everything else that was going on that year. 2016 DOOM was pretty much everything I need out of a game like that, the ultimate evolution of arcade-like shooters, elegant in it's apparent 'pick up and play' simplicity and enthralling in it's inherent high skill-ceiling mastery. I scoped out a bit of the new ideas that DOOM Eternal played around with and found myself mildly interested, but that part of my gamer stomach was still truly satisfied with what I had- by the time I finally came around on Eternal it was 2023 on a whim as I was merely collecting titles that would show off the power of my new Current gen console. But be that as it may, this year has been my catching up to where DOOM currently rests. So how has it held up?

Firstly when I describe DOOM 2016 I call it an 'arcade shooter', and I want to describe why I evoke that label. Despite it's grit and gore, DOOM 2016 revolves not around crouching beneath waist high objects, pulling off pot-shots and clenching onto whatever slivers of health you can, but rushing the forces of your enemy, jumping and weaving around projectiles, and damaging and 'glory killing' enemies in visceral hand-to-hand finishers in order to replenish your health and keep the pace of the game going. It mimics the 'constant flow of action' approach that arcade machines would demand in order to keep the attention of a consumer that might have other options around them to draw their attention- that game boasted an experience that never let itself sag, provided everything you needed to push through every fight and demanded your constant attention to keep moving so you don't have an opportunity to cast your eye towards the next game cabinet being installed right next to this one. DOOM Eternal has not lost this heart at all, rather it's solidified and redefined what it means to be an arcade-style shooter in visual style as well as gameplay.

Visually, DOOM Eternal speaks a language much less gritty than it's direct predecessor and much more in line with the colourful floating icons and geographically unorthodox level layouts of yesteryear. 2016 had it's floating shields and green pick-ups strewn about it's levels too, but they were designed in such a manner as to blend into the dark hallways of the Mars Colony or the twisted membrane walls of Hell, they fit the colours and lighting, almost in shame of their video game-like reality. Eternal, on the otherhand, embraces these video-game pick-up items, rendering them in bright colours and luminescence to garishly stand out in any environment they're placed in. New floating platforms adorn these levels with light platforming puzzles, and they'll be covered with spinning fire wheels and procedurally firing turrets with absolutely no sensible narrative context for their existence beyond 'it's a game and this is a game thing'. In some ways DOOM Eternal feels like a whole other art team went to work on it.

Not least of all for the environments you travel through  . Eternal pays a little lip service to the flickering lights and grimy industrial tech corners that 2016 loved so much, but for the most part you'll be dancing around sci-fantasy gleaming silvery towers set in fantastical alien mountaintops or bizarre scarlet forests. There's a distinct drift off into the whimsy of high science fantasy with the direction of Eternal that turns the game into something of a high budget sight-seeing trip in it's later levels rather a grim and foreboding broach into the deepest recesses of hell à la DOOM 2016. Id Software are absolute masters of visual design at this point so each location is a glittering beauty to behold, but whether or not you prefer this approach or the more thematically dire hints of the last game is going to be down to taste rather than objective quality. I felt the consequence of 2016 building in my heart more, but the grandeur of Eternal soundly surpasses it. 

That shift in tone is not exclusive to the visual pick-ups either, DOOM boasted a plethora of killing implements with special alternate firing modes built for the sole purpose of ripping the various demons to shreds- every weapon could theoretically kill anything if you used it enough and situational preference ruled the roost. Of course, that would mean some weapons or power-ups for weapons would see preference over others, but gameplay variety is rarely a detriment to the gameplay cycle. Eternal, naturally, boasts a little more variety in it's guns and a lot more in it's ancillary tools, but the way the game approaches them is distinctly different. I've seem many in the community refer to this as a 'Chess combat' system or 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'. Basically, with the vast variety of Heavy Demons the game throws at you, the player will be specifically told which Demon is weak to which tool and expect you to juggle that knowledge throughout the game. Complex fights can resort to players dancing around the battlefield whilst switching to the correct counter weapon for the confronting demon, leading to a more direct 'answer/response' approach to encounters.

Of course there is still a some sense of freedom to combat encounters in the standard slate of Demons and how you take them down. 2016 introduced the vampire-like mechanic of whittling down an enemy and then Glory Killing them to burst health pick-ups out of them, and Eternal has expanded that into a whole cornucopia of abilities. Your shoulder mounted 'flame blech' flamethrower sets enemies ablaze causing them to drop armour when damaged and your slow recharge chainsaw allows you to quick-execute enemies but shoot out ammunition. There's also cluster grenades and freeze grenades, and certain abilities like the burning hook-shot of the Super Shotgun that allows you to pull yourself towards an enemy whilst setting them on fire with a double barrel surprise waiting for them giving a quick burst of armour. Essentially you have all the tools to pull yourself from the brink of disaster and back to full ammo and health if only you master all the synergies and buffs available to you- it's quite the menagerie of gameplay possibilities.

But it's also a lot. You might hear that quick run through of all the different gameplay options you have and wonder how you're supposed to juggle all that in every encounter, and the honest truth is that in the first two or three levels of the game it is honestly overwhelming. Remembering what buttons correspond to what ability, on top of where you need to flick on the weapon wheel to snap to an energy weapon against shields or a rocket launcher for the big heavies- it's stops feeding into that sense of intuitive flow of DOOM 2016 and begins to feel more like a tense management game. God knows I wasn't expecting to get 'Paper's Please' vibes from my DOOM game! It doesn't help that the game presents no natural solution for introducing these gameplay systems beyond feeding them to you one by and one and dumping a user manual text box everytime you get a new item. There's actually too many new tools for the game to leave you to learn them naturally.

There are a few universal design rules that speak to the player in the base game. Glowing blue shields are best killed by energy weapons and an enemy that glows green before their swing can be interrupted with a shotgun blast- but the game relies on Textboxes more and more as the number of enemy variations and weapon specialties balloons to an unreasonable size. Cacodemons are weak to the Ballista gun. Why? I dunno. Does the game translate this to you in any way intuitively? Not really. Certain Demons can have their mechanical weapons blown off their body with a precision shot, but not the mini-gun toting Tyrant Demon for some reason. For Mancubus enemies you are literally told to destroy their two artillery arms before closing in for the kill, but for the Cybermancubus those appendages are indestructible. There's just a breakdown in tutorial and visual language cohesion that turns combat into more of a memory game as it stretches out.

One of the issues that the team specifically strove to repair for this sequel was the way in which half-way through DOOM 2016 the game kind of runs out of new tricks to throw your way. There's new locales, enemy density ramps up, some bosses litter the final few levels- but there's nothing wholly fresh added to the battlefield. DOOM Eternal, on the otherhand, is constantly throwing new enemies at you every level or so- or new items that require new powerups or just more content that breaks that general gameplay rhythm you were settling into by shoving something new to consider. Personally I never found the 'lack of new tricks' for late game 2016 to be a bother, because that late game was really more about mastery of the challanges you had met and testing your playstyle on increasingly large groups of enemy mobs. DOOM Eternal makes you feel like you're constantly a novice throughout your entire first playthrough and refuses to let you off the hook and give you that space to start becoming a master- you have to wait for the DLC to start that journey.

One of the more controversial changes to the layout of each level has been the structure of how enemies are presented. Before they would largely be scattered around levels in various locations, sometimes ambushing the player when they least suspect it, sometimes blocking progression until you've wiped out a 'gore nest' arena battle. DOOM Eternal bases it's entire game around those arena-style battles and it presents them as ineloquently as possible. Whereas in 2016 you would at least be fed the fiction that 'Unsafe demonic corruption' levels were locking down certain parts of the facility, in Eternal you'll just find giant sod-off energy walls forcing you to jump around the battle arena taking out waves of enemies to progress.

In theory this isn't so much an issue; Gore Nests were some of the best snippets of gameplay in DOOM 2016- highlights of all the skills you had built surviving the level in tense dances driven by flowing instinct and punctuated with splashes of skilful violence. In Eternal it feels like every room is a gore nest, which drag on longer and longer as the game becomes more confidant in throwing enemies at you. By the final levels the arenas you clear are genuinely exhausting as wave after wave of enemies assault you at every turn, dragging out that narrative climax as long as humanely possible. When the DLC starts up these arenas become just frankly too long. I'm talking ten to twenty minute affairs to clear every room in decently large levels, all the while requiring more effort to juggle the games dozens of combat systems and expectations in a depreciating scale of benefit. By DLC 1 I was no longer really enjoying the feeling of clearing a room, but rather basking in the frustration that it took so long and weighing that against how long the game is going to keep me in the proceeding forced areas.

In fact, DOOM Eternal's DLC seems predicated on the ideal that 'challenge and fun are perfectly linked'. I'm a lover of challenging experiences, mind you, The FromSoft games are my catnip, my typical DOOM difficulty level is Nightmare- I understand how challenge can be exciting and rewarding: I just don't see that equation bore out to it's fullest in 'The Ancient Gods' DLC. These levels are sadistically long and packed with endless rooms filthy with enemy waves and deeply frustrating enemy buffing hazards and heavy demon combinations to the point where every fight is resplendent with constant weapon switching to meet every demon with it's exact weakness. It's a strong spine for gameplay pushed beyond it's threshold into a repetitive chore, like what you would expect from a mod developer who is so deeply religiously devoted to a single game they can't understand how other people might find a single hour long boss fight with the same core mechanic flooded with nothing interesting except for 'trash mob' spam tedious because they just love doing the same thing over and over and why wouldn't anyone else? (That may or may not be directed at the final boss of The Ancient Gods.)

One honest surprise I had going into DOOM Eternal was how seriously is actually took itself from a story standpoint, especially considering how 2016 seemed to spurn the face of unwelcome narrative exposition with gusto. You start Eternal with a giant flying space fortress you've gained out of nowhere, embarking on a war against hell priests you never knew existed until just now and fighting through the deluges of broken sci-fi medieval societies illustrated with vomits of operatic speech. At first I was so assaulted by the haphazardly flung narrative and lore content that I instinctively assumed this was another sly jab at overstuffed narratives from the development team, but as the game carried on and objectives weren't getting any simpler or more neatly explained I realised that "No, DOOM Eternal has just adopted one of the most overstuffed narratives a title like this could hope for."

Eternal wants you to actively engage with it's narrative but does not quite know how to present to you a world wherein the typically hands-off story of DOOM is suddenly a lot more tied to the core experience. Eternal just throws you into the middle of a vast invasion of earth, on what feels like chapter 10 of a 30 chapter novel, expecting you to make up the difference by reading the dozens of lore text pages scattered haphazardly around each level and constructed to drip-feed the setting, characters, factions and lore as though extracted from a wikia article. Seriously, the way DOOM presents it's narrative is by literally telling you everything in small chunks from level to level in giant walls of (optional) text that are full of just enough overly verbose 'in universe poetry talk' that by level five I was basically scanning them quickly for pertinent snippets and then jumping back to the actually important action.

You can just skip past them, but the narrative cutscenes you'll be subjected to across your adventure clearly lie very heavily on the belief you're going to study all the text to figure out who everyone is, why they're talking to each other like that and why that big weapon they just announced is significant and you should care about stopping it. It's as if Dark Souls presented it's narrative exactly the way it does, but then peppered cutscenes full of situational characters and events that reference the more esoteric material as though you've already been formally introduced to all of it. Even a basic introduction paragraph at the onset of Eternal explaining where the Fortress of DOOM came from would have worked to set players in the mindset they needed to be in more.

By the time you've reached the Ancient Gods DLC you might be quite surprised to discover how the big invasion plotline of the main game has been soundly trumped in scope by what appears to be the actual finale to the DOOM narrative, for seemingly good. Whereas most franchises build themselves up for a trilogy, it appears that Id honestly looked at what they did with DOOM Eternal and realised they threw absolutely every single errant idea the team ever had at the wall with this one and there was nowhere new to push the franchise further. It almost feels intrinsically abrupt for Eternal's DLC to suddenly introduce the universe's God and Devil and place you against them in a final climatic showdown- like if Wolfenstein: New Colossus just dropped a 'Let's kill Hitler!' DLC in lieu of the third conclusion game they're presumably mid brain storming.

Then again, I guess the promise of a climatic finale is the only thing pushing people through the utterly painful DLC missions that feel constructed by one of those people who min-max overpowered builds they use to steamroll endgame content in MMOs and then turns around and demands the game produces new content specially to challenge their build because that mathematically constructed uber class they no-lifed had an easy time with the content- all other players be damned. Ancient Gods has that level of almost experimental-feeling challenge, wherein you're on minute twenty five of a single combat encounter thinking 'did any real thought go into this encounter beyond: what's the biggest mob I can fit into this arena'? The amount of waves that end in Tyrant + 'Doom Hunter' would suggest otherwise. 

Summary

DOOM Eternal is the culmination of all of Id Software's talents in bringing DOOM back from the dead and on a technical standpoint, both in ambition and achievement, the game rules supreme. It looks gorgeous, it plays brilliantly and there's more combat freedom than ever before. But in the actual meat of the meal, the composition of the canvass- so to speak, Eternal lacks that dignified elegance of it's simpler yet more focused predecessor. Eternal troubles itself so much trying to throw new gadgets in the players hands, new enemies demanding different approaches and a newly centrally imperative plot at you that somewhere along the line that intrinsic pleasure of being the whirlwind of beautiful carnage that is the DOOM Slayer becomes muddied. Not lost, at all. More tarnished and rough, resulting in an ambitious sequel that seems to have piled on too many plates and feels a little clumsy and less masterful than it's father. The DLC, on the otherhand, is just a messy challenge gauntlet of endless ramping difficult lacking a satisfying finale. I enjoyed 'The Ancient Gods' to the degree that I'm glad I beat it, but I would never bring myself to play it again on future Eternal playthroughs. There was achievement in the DLC, but little genuine fun. Overall I guess that leaves me giving DOOM Eternal a respectable B + grade on my arbitrary review scale, which would have been closer to an A- before I played that DLC, which admittedly left a soul taste in my mouth. Still, I absolutely recommend the game for being a prime First Person Shooter with a great flow that many other games could learn from, and a cautionary tale about why sometimes just a little less can mean so much more.