Doom: The Dark Ages Review (Patreon)

Doom: The Dark Ages is very good. It takes things in a fun new direction without tossing out the stuff that made that first remake so cool. The “puzzle” aspects of the combat feel way less rigid than they did in Doom Eternal, and unlike that game, Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t waste time with annoying jumping puzzles. It does, however, throw in a few new vehicle-like levels, and those are more flash than substance. The dragon levels, in particular, overstay their welcome a little bit.

The core combat is still built around the same sense of intelligent aggression from the previous games. Here, your tools have changed a bit, as you now have a shield with a sawblade around its outside edge with you at all times. This creates a viable melee and parry system. Though melee attacks are limited, somewhat like the chainsaw in the previous game, you earn more by picking up charges, waiting for them to refill, or successfully parrying an enemy attack by hitting the block button (right mouse) just before an attack strikes you.

The shield effectively lets you stand your ground for a brief period of time, but blocking too many attacks in a row will result in a guard crush, leaving you unable to block until a shield meter refills. The more pressing issue with this sort of passive play is that it’s liable to get you surrounded by a bunch of demons who are looking to do some ripping and tearing of their own.

You can also throw the shield or perform a shield bash, which boosts you forward (and up, if necessary) to get you in your enemy’s face. The shield toss will take out small fodder enemies instantly, but if you throw it into a larger enemy, it’ll stick and the saw blade around its edge will spin, stunning the enemy for a brief period. You also create a huge shockwave when jumping down to lower ground, which just causes these little fodder guys to explode immediately. The game is very good at making the Slayer feel like a bad motherfucker at all times. All of this, mixed with traditional gunplay, of course, gives you a lot of reasons to keep moving and plenty of options for dealing damage along the way.

Parrying enemy projectiles is a lot of fun, and some of them have little bullet hell-like setups that fly your way. Only specific projectiles can be parried, so this leaves you strafing back and forth, trying to line up with the big flaming ball of energy that you can send back into someone’s face. It’s also worth noting that the game allows you to set the parriable attacks to whatever color you like, which is a huge improvement over the previous games’ colorblindness options. It’s literally the difference between me telling you how great this game is as opposed to saying “yeah, can’t play it, couldn’t see the green or yellow or whatever it is.”

While you can turn up the difficulty and tweak individual settings within each difficulty, the default setting here is much more forgiving than Doom Eternal was when it comes to resource management. Eternal was overly rigid, making it occasionally feel like there was exactly one “right” way to attack most scenarios since you needed to do attack X to get resource Y, which you’d then use to perform attack Z, and so on. Falling out of that loop felt overly punishing in the game’s more intense sequences, like you were holding the right in a Sonic the Hedgehog game only to suddenly hit a wall and have to build up all your momentum again.

The same basic idea is present in The Dark Ages, but the system feels more additive than punative. Certain attacks will cause enemies to drop specifc things—like right now when I land an attack from my flail, armor pickups pop out. And performing glory kills causes a lot of health to pop out of the dying foe. But if you miss the glory kill, you’ll still get somehealth out of it. And if you find yourself consistently low on something—ammo, for example—there are weapon upgrades that will specifically cause enemies to drop certain types of item. So you can land a few shotgun shots and get what you need, then keep going. Your health is constantly bobbing up and down as you’re rushing in for melee attacks, backing off to parry, popping off some plasma rounds, and so on. But as long as you’re thinking a little bit about what you’re doing, the game is very manageable on its default difficulty. If you want to suck some of that freedom out, well, it has a lot of higher difficulty options for you to mess with.

Much like the previous games, Doom: The Dark Ages fills its levels with secrets, and I spent my first several hours with the game constantly popping open the map to get a sense of where the secret items were and how I might get them. This, as you might imagine, slows the game way, way down, but the upside to this is that I found all of the gold in the game’s first seven or eight (of 22, in all) levels, allowing me to buy quite a few upgrades. You’ll upgrade your melee attacks, each individual weapon, and your shield over the course of the game. You’ll also find toy action figures, gun skins, lore pages, and so on. It’s a little funny that the game has skins for the Slayer, considering it’s a first person game, but hey, it has cutscenes.

I’ve been playing on PC, and Doom: The Dark Ages looks fantastic. Great up-close texture work but also the game’s larger levels give you great, long vistas onto huge, sprawling battlefields. Sometimes you’ll run around a level while two giant demons fight in the background, somewhere off in the distance. The game has a very cool visual style and world design that has to allow for a lot. It’s got a bunch of demons out of Hell, but the Dark Ages signifies a certain “dark age” quality, meaning the Slayer wears a fur cape, carries a flail, and many of the levels look like medieval castles and fortresses. All the way, spaceships and troop transports fly overhead. That sounds like a lot of disperate visual elements, but the blend of magic and technology works very well here. It’s also worth noting that over here on this SSD, the game has little-to-no load times after the initial menu screen. Even returning to your last checkpoint (I missed some gold, OK?) was practically instant. I’m curious to know if the console versions are like this, because it’s about as close to that Ratchet & Clank no-loading stuff as I’ve seen in awhile.

Less impressive are the game’s big “vehicle” levels. Occasionally you’ll get to pilot a big mech suit, which can punch and dodge, turning encounters into slow-motion games of Punch-Out!! until you find a giant gun and just start mowing them all down, instead. The dragon levels, well, also have a Punch-Out!!-like quality to them in that you’re always finding shielded targets that can’t be broken until you time a perfect dodge of one of their attacks, which supercharges your gun for a counterattack. The game lets you fly around the level as you see fit, but there’s never enough to do to make that exciting. It’s a decent enough diversion, at least.

I wish I could say the story worked as well as the setting. However, the game occasionally feels a little disjointed. Some of the game’s chapters will end with a cutscene and sometimes the following level opens without any real indication as to where you are or why. The basic gist of the story—the Slayer is kept under lock and key on a satellite by the Makyrs, who loan him out to the humanoids on the planet below when the forces of Hell become too strong—works well enough. Alliances are strained, then broken by demons, who in turn get broken by you, and so on. There’s enough here to keep it moving and that’s fine.

While technically a prequel, Doom: The Dark Ages makes me think that id could very readily get away with creating a bunch of one-off Doom games like this, where the setting is wildly different from game to game but the core pieces—there’s a Slayer who protects people from Hell’s forces with a rocket launcher, a shotgun, and more—remain in place. Regardless of Doom’s future or its past, Doom: The Dark Ages is a hell of a game with supremely satisfying combat that looks great 100% of the time. Even if the last game left you feeling a little cold, this one is most definitely worth your time.

4/5