Summary

Doom Eternal is an FPS released in 2020. It was developed by id Software and published by Bethesda Softworks. In it, you play as our favorite little marine Doomguy, who must continue battling the forces of Hell after certain nincompoops were real certain they had everything under control.

This one went way up my list of things to play after having played 2016's Doom and really loving it. Fully expect to continue having a great time with the series.

Review

Doom Eternal is good, I think there's just a bit to much of it. We inevitably must compare ourselves to DOOM (2016). And the problem there is that Doom 2016 is exceedingly svelte. It's fun. The core gameplay loop becomes clear very quickly and the joy of the game is simply iterating on it over and over as we throw various groups of demons at you. Doom Eternal is the sequel. Naturally, things are bigger and badder. You've got more tools in your belt and your enemies all have their own little gameplay hooks. They complement each other more. You've got some that are purely playing defense. You tend to also have much larger battles. They do give you all the tools you need to deal with said issues. The problem is that it's just a bit too much.

When I first started playing the game, I went with hard mode. This was wrong. The game is more fun on the normal difficulty. The issue is that even then, there were so many times where I found myself with seven demons in my face gnawing on my broken and battered body. There's so much shit going on and you've got so many tools you need to be thinking about. It's...fun. But it's just slightly too much for me. I think 2016 is so much tighter as a whole experience. I suspect the people who are totally on board for Eternal, who say that 2016 is too easy and they can't go back, are the same sort of folks who say the earlier Soulsbornes are too easy and we should only be playing Sekiro and Elden Ring. Just a suspicion.

None of the additional gameplay elements are in themselves bad to me. It just requires me to pay that much more attention all the time. These new Doom games are not ones where you can turn off your brain and do lines. And it gets a little exhausting. It's a wonderfully crafted game. Making it so that you're not given nearly as many resources in the arenas themselves but have to take them with your own hands from the demons (using your various implements) is all well put-together. I just don't enter quite the same stage of euphoria that I did in 2016.

I do greatly enjoy how video-gamey everything is. It was one of my biggest praises of the previous game. It knew that it was a video game and it flaunted it. We've only increased that sense of artificiality to everything. The silly traps everywhere. The additional parkouring going on. But it's a good sense of artificiality where it's made clear that this world is one made to Doomguy's liking. It is his playground and zoo. To be enjoyed like an evening stroll. And Doomguy himself is a lovable sort. I move that we have him added to the list of platonic solids. The elemental shapes that make up our universe. He is as iconic and as I said, elemental, as the triangle, the square, and so on.

I don't know why we continue having this silly story shit. There was more of it in this one and every time it was on my screen, I could but sneer. I know we technically have a couple moments where he does the same thing he did in 2016. Pushes past the bureaucracy in-cutscene to make it clear that you and Doomguy are one and you both know that this nonsense is to be ignored. But it feels like there's a bit less of that going on in Eternal. I swear to god, there's some contingent of nerds in id who desperately, with heaving breaths of self-praise, want to smuggle in their shitty lore. I feel that in 2016 they were a clear and obvious minority. But it does feel like they're building up an army and intend to march on our capital.

I think Doom Eternal succeeds at everything it intends to do. It is a good and tight experience. I enjoyed it generally. I think it just demands way too much from me. And so if you asked me which I liked better, I would affirmatively say 2016. I will also mention that I ran into no issues tech-wise with 2016. I ran into several with Eternal. Firstly, it has some bug with regards to certain bluetooth headphones. Every time I start the game, it tries to put my headphones into a headset mode. Even though I have fully disabled that mode in my computer's device manager so that it should not be possible to do that. In order to fix this, I have to open up the control panel and toggle one of the stupid little Microsoft enhancements (bass boost for example). Doesn't matter what setting it's on. The toggling itself makes the audio become crisp and clear. I don't know why. That is the fix that I found for that issue, however. The second issue that I frequently ran into is with the level loading screens. They often go to a black screen and don't actually load. I have found no fix for this. The fix is to go into the task manager to kill the game and then try again. (Doing the steps to fix the audio every time.) Sucks. Didn't happen with 2016. Just some things that I came to associate with the overall experience of Eternal. It is what it is.

The Ancient Gods

No. It's just too much. I'm tired of the "bigger, harder, and more". The DLCs very much are the Elden Ring of Doom. In particular, I can't stand the proliferation of enemies where there is one and only one option that works for them. That is so against the core design philosophy of the other games. I know why they did it. They wanted the DLCs to be harder than the main game. And the only way of doing that in any sort of way that is not just spamming enemies is to start locking away options. But that's so shit, because one of the defining philosophies of Doom 2016 and much of Doom Eternal is that anything works. Absolutely, things have weaknesses. Weaknesses that you're expected to take advantage of if you want to get through things in a reasonable timeframe. Particularly, on higher difficulties. BUT, you are still able to get through it with other weapons that do not specifically target a weakness. And that's important because there are many a time where there's twenty assholes in your face and your brain is overloaded. So all these demons start to look like nails that your trusty hammer (literally whatever you've got equipped at that moment) can take care of.

This guiding philosophy of allowing most weapons to deal with most problems is great because it allows you to find your niche. Your favorite weapons, your favorite mods. But that is not so in Ancient Gods. You must use certain weapons against a number of enemies. And what's worse is you must use specific mods on those weapons. The everything proof shields are garbage and I can't stand it. It means you've gotta play the way the designers demand you play. Because straying outside that paradigm is either not possible. Or it will hamstring you to the extent that you're just going to have an objectively bad time. Do not fucking like at all. Please for the love of god go back. Things do not fucking have to get harder over time. Kill this goddamn mind virus in the video game industry.

The final boss is the capstone of shit in this turd pyramid we've created for no reason. Why do the marauders suck as enemies? They suck because they fundamentally go against Doomguy's raison d'être, which is move fast and break shit. The gameplay of these new Doom games is you moving quickly, snapping necks and blowing out brains. Doomguy is a verb. He is an event that happens to people. So being told "sit and wait" (for an opening) shows that you fundamentally do not understand the core loop that this character is meant for. It was already shit that we made marauders normal enemies. It was already shit that we started to throw two marauders at you at once. But of course...the final boss. What if we made the final boss a marauder that won't shut the fuck up, heals whenever you make a mistake, summons bullshit like he's also an archvile. Unconscionable. Detestable. Not cool, not fun. Shockingly poor taste from a game design point of view.

Also the plot is shit. I have no fucking idea why Doomguy gives a toss what any of these people are saying. Why is he not showing open disdain for any of these morons like he used to? I cannot conceive of the mindset that gives a single shit about this stupid lore. It's nonsensical. Do you remember when Doomguy, my Doomguy, punched the screen Sam was talking through because he was tired of hearing Sam's shit and was ready to kill demons? The devs sure don't. It's really bad. And I cannot understand how we have swung so far in this direction. There are bad people in id who really care about this lore and they must be stopped. They are shackling my boy and demanding he sit down and play their stupid DnD with them and it fucking sucks.

So this experience really soured me. Dark Ages was on my list of "looking forward to playing". Not anymore. I might get to it at some point, though I wouldn't put it at 100% likelihood. Ancient Gods has made me fundamentally mistrust id. I know what they are capable of, and they are capable of making an A+ experience. But I would not put the DLCs above like a D letter grade. It did not fail entirely by sheer virtue of being a Doom game.

Links

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXbBIoFOxaQsFNxVUBWS_Q9Ce1r_RtiIU