Parry and stagger until it's done.
If you're taken to complain about Doom (2016) and Eternal being too modernized with their weapon upgrades and combat challenges, you should give The Dark Ages a shot. Watching Doom Slayer jump off a drop ship to issue an 8-chain perfect parry to a Cyberdemon will give you perspective, if nothing else, and it doesn't get more heretical than a Doom game where turtling is the most effective playstyle. This time I'm on your side, they fucked up Doom!
Three games in, I understand the desire to do something different, but Id's apparent approach to shaking up the formula was to crack off at the joint everything that worked about the last two games, opting instead for something uncharacteristically sterile. We've gone from two games that felt like a modern leap for boomer shooters to something that chases the most tired of popular design trends, and which fails to introduce any flavor to them at all. While I understand that's been some people's assessment of the reboot series in general, I'm really feeling it now.
Having the Slayer parry green orbs and side-step slow moving orange orbs like he's in some lethargic riff of Returnal isn't where I saw this series going, but worse than that it's a stripping back of Eternal's complexities. Frantic weapon swapping and verticiality are gone, traded in for something decidedly more flat, more dull, where defensive tactics are favored over aggression and where the majority of your arsenal is inspired yet functionally useless compared to the shotgun, plasma rifle, and shield. I'm not sure how you take an idea like a gun that chews up skulls for ammo and make it feel bad to use, but the visionary designers at Id have truly found a way to make the most fundamentally rancid Doom possible.
What does Id think people want out of a Doom? Lair-style aerial combat levels where, you guessed it, you take down enemy ships by parrying green orbs and dodging orange orbs, apparently. Also, have them take like, a hour to beat or something and be sure to completely burn every bridge you can with one of the best composers in games so I get so bored playing it that I throw YouTube videos up on my laptop. Listening to some guy's review of Bee Movie while fighting a spider-demon-thing should be the biggest condemnation against the soundtrack of this game, but also the gameplay, as it's so repetitive I needed something else in the background to keep myself mentally stimulated.
There's a few different types of levels in The Dark Ages. Including the aforementioned Lair sequences, you also have mecha combat that feels profoundly underbaked, levels that are linear and involve key card collecting and puzzle solving, and more open environments littered with optional side-paths and challenges.
Regardless, almost every mission in the game boils down to "collect/trigger x of x things." I started to dread the open levels in particular because they usually assign you the most number of Things to go collect and frequently put you in combat encounters against a sub-boss who is invulnerable until you clear enough waves of high powered enemies to deplete his shield meter (which then becomes a stagger meter because of course it does.) All of this gets so routine that the Slayer starts to feel like less an unstoppable force of nature and more like an errand boy. Any feeling of empowerment you might get from the grim fantasy of ripping and tearing demons apart vanishes when you see the number tick up. I have three more gates to shut down but the Bee Movie review is over! Shit!!
Even quasi-open environments and checklist driven progression feels like a lazy capitulation to modern trends. Funny then that I just got done writing a very complimentary review for Expedition 33, which itself modernizes turn-based RPGs by working in similar mechanics at a baseline level, but it gets away with it by actually incorporating them in a manner that's enjoyable to engage with. It's hard to imagine Expedition 33 being more fun or feeling as fresh without things like parrying, and I think that speaks to the strengths of its design to get something so predictable and worn standing as a central pillar. Doom: The Dark Ages, meanwhile, feels patently by-the-numbers, and god is that the last thing I ever wanted to say about a new Doom.
The Dark Ages is also saddled with a lot of capital-P Plot, and I think if you're trying to parse all the lore here by first asking "where in the timeline does this take place," then you've gone too far. The Slayer is impervious to growth. He hates demons and wants to kill them in increasingly bombastic and grotesque ways, that's really all you've got to work with. Apparently lacking confidence he could carry a third game, Id expanded the cast and gambled on insipid lore. The character writing is flat and the story has few twists and turns to hook you, so you're still mostly bound to the Slayer in lieu of anything more worthwhile, and he feels oddly downplayed here. He works as a sort of presence woven into the story of those around him, but his application in The Dark Ages is all wrong, miscasting him as an almost Master Chief-like entity operating at the behest of characters who are so uninteresting that I've completely failed to commit their names to memory, and I just beat the game two hours ago.
The Dark Ages plays like one big joke, but whether it is in fact an incredibly expensive attempt at satire or a sincere pursuit at finding the franchise's place in the flavorless muck of the current generation, I'm left with a Doom that forfeits all its notable qualities and I think that just sucks. I asked Larry at one point if The Dark Ages would make more sense as a reboot of Quake, and now on the other side of it I can say that while it might be less offensive, the problems this game has are problems regardless of the name on the box. It's a slow and predictable first person shooter that tries to find its identity in the most pervasive mechanical tropes of the 2020s, and I cannot emphasize enough how much of a mistake that is on a foundational level. Utterly misguided, poorly executed, and really depressing.
To put it another way: uhh, didn't anyone tell Id that shields engender passivity???
that's a really thought-provoking thing i said, i think this review should get 100 likes
