Doom: The Dark Ages Review

 

While Dark Ages continues Doom’s legacy of ripping and tearing, it does so with dull teeth

In 1996, Marvel released a promotional comic based on the 1993 video game Doom. In the comic, the main protagonist, ‘Doom Guy,’ in a fit of barely controlled rage, claims he wants to ‘rip and tear’ a Cyberdemon’s huge guts. This comic was often mocked and ridiculed in the Doom community as completely ridiculous… until Doom (2016) was released, where ‘rip and tear’ was introduced as the tagline for the whole series. You might have thought it was stupid to pin your franchise on something your fans mocked you for literally decades, but after playing 2016, most people looked at ‘rip and tear’ and thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly what this game is about”.

 

All shooters should make me feel like this

What Doom (2016) and its sequel Doom Eternal did was use this stupid tagline as an ethos for its first-person shooter design. Most shooters often focus on the spectacle of what the player was doing. For example, Call of Duty has many different set pieces and scenes where you're having a shootout in a crashing airplane or charging the White House, but the player's actions are exactly the same in every scenario. You point, you shoot. It doesn’t matter what weapon you’re using, your position, or who your enemies are; it is all the same from start to finish. The Doom games instead focus on the player's actions and reactions. It does matter what weapon you’re using, where you are in the space of the arena, and who the enemies you’re shooting at are. All this while emphaising aggressive and speed makes those newer Doom games some of the best action games ever made. ‘Rip and Tear’ is a stupid tagline from a silly comic, but it matches the games perfectly: you genuinely feel like you are ripping and tearing into these demons.

 

A screenshot from Doom Eternal showing Doom Slayer glory killing Jeffrey Epstein

Doom: The Dark Ages has all the fundamentals of the prior games: the weapons, the enemies, the aggression, and the speed. However, it lacks the ripping and tearing feel that made the prior games so enjoyable. That’s probably why I didn’t enjoy Dark Ages as much as I wanted to: it felt toothless, and in a series that prides itself on giving you an adrenaline rush while chainsawing a demon in half, that is a massive problem.

 

Of course Doom Slayer has a gun that uses skulls for ammo

I don’t know if anyone asked for a Doom prequel, but that’s what we got. Dark Ages takes place after Doom 64 but before Doom (2016), as the newly empowered Doom Slayer defends the Night Sentinels of Argent D'Nur from the forces of Hell. Feels a bit weird critizising the story of a Doom game, a series started by John Carmack who once famously said ‘Story in a game is like story in a porno, it’s expected to be there but it’s not that important’ but that’s what I am doing. The story here is not exactly Shakespeare, but I’m sure people who are really into the Doom lore got excited for the additional details for the Night Sentinels, but it was just filler for me. What really gets me about this story is that Doom (2016) had the Doom Slayer actively hostile towards the story of that game. He didn’t really care about what was happening, which seemed to me was the developers admitting that no one cares about the story of a Doom game, which was quite amusing. But two games later, suddenly, we care about the story of a Doom game to the point where there are several scenes of exposition about how this macguffin is the key to the god’s power that will bore you to tears. I suggest you skip the cutscenes and ignore the lore collectibles.

 

This demon is about to be turned into demonic Lego

But no one is coming to Doom: The Dark Ages to get an exploration of the motivations of the Doom Slayer; they want to shoot a demon into pieces. The general gameplay of running and gunning is intact in Dark Ages. The core part of Doom’s DNA is still here: you must select the right weapon for the right enemy, all while dodging projectiles and going super fast. Dark Ages introduces a few new mechanics. The biggest one is the new shield and blocking mechanic. Doom Slayer is now outfitted with a shield at all times. You have your shield in one hand and your weapon of choice in the other. One of the shield's functions is to block enemy attacks to reduce damage taken, but the primary function of the shield is the parry system. Most enemies will shoot green orbs or glow green when attacking, which can be parried if timed correctly. Not only will this negate all incoming damage, but it will also stun the enemies briefly for a counterattack. The entire gameplay loop is built around this parrying mechanic, so if you want to play Dark Ages like the prior games, you will have a bad time. The parrying system is one of the few new features I actually enjoy in Dark Ages. It focuses more on aggression, and since damage can be negated, you can stay in the fight much longer than in prior games. The shield is also a chainsaw (because, of course, it is), so that allows it to be thrown like Captain America’s shield to either kill a group of fodder enemies or stun lock a large monster for extra damage as well as charge into distant enemies, which I must admit is fantastic.

 

The *audacity* to try and make me care about characters in a Doom game

Doom: The Dark Ages arsenal is inconsistent. It has some standard Doom weaponry, such as the Plasma Gun, Rocket Launcher and my beloved Super Shotgun, but some new guns don’t tickle me in the fashion I like. Because the visual theme of the Dark Ages is somewhat medieval, many of the weapons have that steel aesthetic to them. One new weapon is the Chainshot, which is basically a gun that shoots a spiked ball on a chain, does decent damage, but doesn’t have a unique purpose like the weapons in 2016 and especially Eternal. Multiple guns fulfil the role of ‘long range automatic’, there are two explosive weapons that practically do the same thing, most of the guns are completely interchangeable in function and visually. Throughout most of my playthrough, I stuck with the Super Shotgun and Plasma Gun, with the occasional Rocket Launcher and was completely fine. That was one of the more disappointing aspects of Dark Ages is that I felt no need to switch weapons in really any scenario. One of my favourite things about Eternal was that you had to know intimately about all weapons to succeed, especially on Ultra-Violence. Dark Ages is just picking two of your favourites, and you’ll be fine.

90% of the boss kills is this and it sucks

 

The enemy roster doesn’t do much better. It has all of your standard Doom enemies here and in force: imps, cacodemons, pinkys, mancubus’, revenants and so on. All of the new enemies just replace the position of the old enemies. Vagarys, weird-looking spider things replace the spider masterminds, Acolytes replace archviles and so on. My main issue is that none of these enemies are tiered the way Eternals are. For example, remember the Marauders? Those knights with the red axes and shields? Yeah, those bastards. Whenever one of those showed up, I needed to prioritise him immediately. There are no enemies like that in Doom: The Dark Ages, at least not in that way. Instead of making enemies difficult by design, Dark Ages introduces a new Leader system. One or twice a level, you’ll encounter a Leader enemy, who has more health, does more damage, but upon death will upgrade your health, armour or ammo capacity. However, these aren’t unique bosses or rare enemies but regular enemies that have been supercharged. These are a majority of the bosses and are often repeated, which makes it extremely disappointing, as they all fight like their non-super counterparts. The worst part is that every single one of them, regardless of enemy type, is glory killed in the exact same way: you rip out its heart and crush it. Do you remember how the Spider Mastermind in 2016 was killed? There is nothing nearly that gratifying in Dark Ages.

I'd like to think that Doom Slayer called his dragon 'Daisy II'

 

Level design is a couple of steps down from Eternal, but it has its bright points. One of the new things introduced in Dark Ages is this sort of ‘battlefield’ style maps, where you are given multiple objectives to complete in a large space. These are pretty big for Doom maps and often take awhile to complete, depending on secret hunting. It’s a fine idea in theory, but it falls short in practice. While most of the Dark Ages’ more linear maps have that verticality and hazards most Doom arenas have, these maps are generally pretty flat with the occasional rock thrown in to spice it up. At that point, it becomes less Doom and more Serious Sam, where it's a large open area filled with monsters. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t come to Doom to play Serious Sam. Thankfully, the level design improves significantly in the last third of the game, but you have to get through a lot of mediocrity to get there.

Smashing demons with this giant mace is so good

 

Speaking of levels, one of the new additions to Dark Ages is the introduction of dragon flying and giant mech battles. They’re used to break up the levels a bit to keep it interesting and keep the game from getting stale. The dragon flying is my favourite because it controls quite well for flying in a Doom game. You don’t actually do much in these flying levels; you just chase flying enemies and shoot down turrets on massive ships. It’s not exactly Panzer Dragoon, but it's good enough to entertain you. The mech battles, on the other hand, are more or less pointless. It’s focused on melee as you punch massive demons in the face, but it is incredibly easy, unbelievably slow and doesn’t evolve much further than mash the punch buttons. I understand why it is included, but when you put so little effort into it, I have to ask why even bother?

An example of the colour coded projectiles used for the parry system

Mick Gordon had parted ways with id Software and the Doom franchise after some unpleasantness during Eternal’s development, and you can absolutely hear it in the soundtrack for Dark Ages. It completely lacks any sort of blood-pumping music, which the series is known for, and it is by far the most significant step down from the prior games. Most of the soundtrack is just overdriving metal guitars going ‘dun dudun dun dun’, making it one of the most boring soundtracks I’ve heard in quite some time. Nothing even comes within miles of something like ‘BFG Division’ or ‘The Only Thing They Fear Is You’. Bethesda really needs to give Mick a peace offering for the next Doom game because they need it.

The giant mech battles are... not good

Regardless of how I feel about the design choices made in Dark Ages, if there is one thing id Software nails every time, it’s the tech running its game, and Dark Ages is no exception. The game runs on id Tech 8 and blows everything out of the water regarding optimisations, options and graphical fidelity. I’m currently running a 2070 Super, which is not quite the minimum required GPU but close to it, and even though I’m not running the game at maximum settings, it still looks incredible while running at a silky smooth 60 FPS with no stutters or crashes. While not as outstanding as the tech running it, the art style is quite a looker as id Software uses the medieval-like setting to great effect. The Doom Slayer's chainmail armour looks particularly badass, and the environments are massive and detailed; however, I wish they kept the somewhat colourful palette of Eternal and put less emphasis on greys and browns. Special mention to Hell and other dimensions presented in the game, as they nail the look of an FPS level inside an Iron Maiden album cover.

It's impossible for id Software to make a bad looking game

Honestly, my biggest complaint about Doom: The Dark Ages is that it has zero flair. Everything about it has this ‘bare minimum’ effort regarding the flourishes this series once had. The glory kills have been replaced by just… killing the enemy. No gratuitous animations for every kill anymore, for 80% of kills, you just smash it and it explodes. Those small little animations of Doom Slayer indfifferently smashing equipment or those brief interactions with humans pissing themselves, those are all gone. They took all the flavour out of this, and it is so much worse because of it. Nothing encapsulates this feeling more than at the end of one of the levels. At one point, you get swallowed by a monster and escape by exploding its head from the inside. Sound cool, right? Well, the entire scene is a cutscene, and it has none of the brutality that a scene like this should have. He shoots the thing, and the monster falls over and fades to black, and that is it. It didn’t even play any music.

Worst part about Doom Slayer: he collects Funkos. Ew

 

Doom: The Dark Ages still has the smooth but brutal violence of its predecessors, but lacks the small things that make the game go from homage to its own thing. It's still a great game, and I still enjoyed it immensely, but it felt muted and soulless. This is the first game developed under Microsoft, so I don’t know if that affected it, but whatever happened at id Software that made them take this direction, I hope they revert course because this kind of Doom game isn’t hitting me like it should.