I was having a pretty good time with Doom: The Dark Ages. Then I rolled credits, reinstalled Doom Eternal, loaded up Mars Core, and realised how much Id have lost their sense of playfulness. Less grounded than landlocked, less weighty than weighed down, this is the slightest, least essential, and least creatively vibrant of the modern trilogy. It’s also a sinuous, gurning, intoxicating beast of an FPS. I like it. I’m disappointed. I can’t wait for DLC to round it out. I don’t think Id are capable of making bad games. I really hope the next one is better.
Game director Hugo Martin trotted out a fair amount of investor speak in the run up to release, and now I can’t get the phrase “core pillars of engagement” out of my head. It made me feel like a cocainated lab rat every time I started enjoying myself. Not for nothing, either. Eternal’s dance had signature moves, but gave space to freestyle. The Dark Ages – between its call-and-response enemy design and Simon Says traffic light parries – wants you to dance to its tune. A campaign this long needs fresher riffs.
Cards on the table, I’d comfortably call Doom Eternal a masterpiece. I hated it for about one and a half playthroughs, baffled to why Id saw fit to gum up Doom 2016’s flawlessly oiled murder machinery with oodles of unnecessary faff. Then it clicked, and I actually find 2016 unplayable now. Eternal, for me, is the FPS. I’ll return to it at least once a year, its capacity for freeform Cacodemon eye surgery and Mancubus mashing ensuring I’ll never step in the same Super Gore Nest twice.
Conversely, at its worst, The Dark Ages feels prescriptive to the point of restriction. Its combat sandbox never stops offering meaty thrills, but it starts to show its creative limits before the end of a single playthrough. Its skill ceiling might even be a little bit higher than Eternal, but the edges of its space for self-expression feel comparatively stifling. It’s didactic and honestly a little patronising, barking commands and doling out audio-visual synaptic tugjobs and paws full of armour shards from a treat-laden conveyor belt like Werther’s Original day at the grandad factory.
The problems start with Id’s stated and oddly gleeful philosophy of simplification. And sure, Martin’s “less strings on the guitar” sounds great, unless you want the full range of notes. Most gun upgrades are downgraded from active, switchable alt-fire modes to passive buffs. You can buy a perk for your plasma rifle that shocks enemies, another for bonus damage to those shocked, and a third to spread the stun jolt when you shoot a shocked demon. Your shield has a similar ability that activates when you parry. Combine them, and watch hell-blasted battlefields light up with convulsing, immobile hellspawn. Aim. Shoot. Parry. Enjoy the fireworks. Except, I didn’t light those fireworks myself: they’re the passive effect of skills I slotted in a menu. Purchase and equip, until it is done.
This is all done in service of letting you focus on your shield. Hurl it at a group of chaff zombies to power it, rocket across the field into the face of an Arachnotron to shatter its armour. Parry a projectile to make it falter. Use that opening to whack it with your flail, lighting it on fire for some bonus armour shards. Throw your shield again to buzzsaw its brain into stunned submission. Mop it up with the super shotgun. As worthy a star of the show as the shield may be, it also hogs the spotlight, ripping solos and leaving the guns to play second fiddle.
Efficient patterns of play make themselves clear early on, and weapon switching is so slow I felt punished for experimenting. Specific enemy weaknesses and reactions meant arena fights in Eternal had the capacity to become strings of rehearsed combos, but these strings feel more tightly wound here; heavy and manacle-thick. I hope you liked Eternal’s marauders, because The Dark Ages expects you to rat-ta-tap your feet to similar pied piping for at least a third of the demons here.
“A Doom sandbox full of war and riches” was one of the marketing lines for this one. And… no. No, it’s not. Eternal was a Doom sandbox, because Doom is combat and Eternal’s combat was electric with combos and calculations, weak spots and weapon skills. The ‘sandboxes’ here are a few massive maps – maybe five of 22 levels – that let you pick e.g which of three portals you want to close first, with a few optional arenas where you’ll fight waves to whittle a shield off a meaty ‘leader’ variant of an elite enemy type you’ve already fought, to be rewarded by a shard that gives you ten percent extra health or armour. There’s also lots of gold to collect – mostly in increments of a single piece, upgrades cost hundreds – because nothing is more Doom than bringing up the map every five minutes to make sure you haven’t missed a solitary good boy nugget.
At the end of the first level, I was sat in a gun turret, flaying the leg meat from a massive titan, and I couldn’t help feel things had come full circle to the sort of tired setpieces Doom 2016 was a reaction to. I understand why it’s there so early, to give you a ground view of these colossal demons so the later punch-and-dodge mech sections have a sense of scale. But it’s not the only thing here bizarrely redolent of those same mid-2000s cinematic military shooter tropes that 2016’s Slayer would have disdainfully punched to glue without a second’s hesitation.
Missions are often punctuated with too-long third-person cutscenes, in which potentially interesting characters like the sentinel king are utterly wasted, recast as boring chain-of-command dishcloths making war plans, nattering into walkie talkies about the invasion. There’s a speech at one point. There’s at least one level where, after clearing arenas of demons, you get comms like “the enemy troops are being pushed back!”. So much of it feels like a first draft.
Eternal got lost in its lore, for sure, but The Dark Ages feels besotted by its bland storytelling. The Slayer writhes on the floor after getting immobilised whilst villains monologue. A space witch zaps purple glowing light at a damseled sentinel commander’s blue glowing light while guitars try to build tension like I’m supposed to know or care which colour of light does what. The monologues continue. Fuck it, Edge were right. I’d love to be able to talk to these creatures, because then I could ask if they’d kindly stop flapping their gums.
Attempted deliberate pacing becomes a stolid bore. There are multiple sections where you swim very slowly through long stretches of water. The music doesn’t help. There are a few great riffs and some filthy, rattling analogue bass guitar lines, but sometimes it’s just spooky ambience for long stretches. Where’s Mick Gordon when you need him, eh? Oh. The droning ambience is fitting perhaps, for this tale’s apocalyptic sci-fi war, but why go for that tone in the first place? It’s less Army Of Darkness or Tokyo Gore Police, more C-tier Destiny expansion. It’s not as simple as just “no Mick Gordon” either. Eternal’s level design and scenario beats had a cadence and playfulness to them that’s been sacrificed in favour of expository bloat and supposed sandboxes that only feel a touch less curated anyway.
But, look. I did have another reason for mentioning that I changed my mind about Doom Eternal up top, and that reason is this: I do not think I, or honestly anyone, is capable of forming a comprehensive take on modern Id Software’s combat design in the space of week. They’re too good at what they do. Even if I don’t love this incarnation, a failed experiment is far more interesting than stagnation. My gut feeling is that The Dark Ages is not robust enough to last the test of time – I’m getting tired of it already, honestly – but I can’t be certain. Maybe the other shell casing will drop at some point.
Anyway, here’s some stuff I loved. You can quickly switch between weapons in a given category e.g the shotgun and super shotgun. This won’t mean anything to you if you’re not using a controller, but then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever played an FPS so consciously designed for buttons and analogue sticks.
The skull-chipping gun has a perk where it increases your movement speed after firing it for a few seconds, and zipping around spraying skull chunks in a wide arc at groups of groaning hell soldiers is as Doom as Doom ever was.
Having your grapple analogue tied to your permanently-equipped shield rather than the situational super shotgun is a great change. Rocketing across the battlefield into a mess of chaff demons stays brilliant for dozens of hours. You’ll scan the arena and make notes of where the zombies are because they’re basically walking grapple points made of meat. Weaving through projectiles like a 3D bullet hell is great at making you feel like a flash bastard, too, even if the patterns veer simple.
And, despite the abundance of serious third-person cutscenes, the game hasn’t completely abandoned the Slayer’s Spinal-Tap-goofy ultraviolent heroics. There is at least one moment towards the end that is now in my list of best ever videogame things, in a smashing-your-favourite-action-figures-together sort of way. Rocketing out of an hell airship and landing back on your dragon in first-person is great. The cyber dragon itself is basically forgettable (terrible sentence to have to write) but I do think these sequences have their place in terms of giving you a sense of the conflict’s scale. Some of the city skyboxes you’ll zip through are real winners, too. The main antagonist, demon lad Prince Ahzrak, is pretty compelling. And each of the game’s three boss fights are great.
The one thought that kept occurring to me during my first playthrough was this: I can’t wait to collect everything and get all the upgrades so I can stop worrying about sniffing out air vents and puzzles, switch my brain off, and just play some goshdarn Doom. It took me about halfway through my next run before I realised something: all this exploration, all this bloody gold collecting, it’s not something you’re supposed to do once as a fun extra before the real game starts. It’s an integral part of the cadence of a game that veers repetitive and thin without it. There’s just plain less to do here. Less to combat. Less reason to replay levels. This is a solid enough FPS that I don’t regret playing – sometimes, it’s downright captivating – but between the mech, the dragon, and all the medieval armour, something vital has been crushed under all that extra weight.