Warning: spoilers lie ahead, if DOOM lore is your thing for some reason.

I grew up on DOOM. Growing up in the late 90’s, my dad would an old DOS PC in his office to placate me while he did engineering work. Small child me memorized the directories and commands for plenty of games, but I always went back to DOOM and DOOM 2. When the 2016 reboot of the series finally hit shelves after some pretty tumultuous development, I was hyped. 2004’s DOOM 3 was fine, but was made in a different, spookier direction than what I was looking for. I wanted to RIP AND TEAR demons apart, and DOOM (2016) absolutely scratched that itch. The frenetic, fast-paced shooting action was everything I wanted in a DOOM game, and even after the satisfying campaign, there was plenty more game to play, thanks to multiplayer deathmatch and the excellent SnapMap map toolkit. Years later, DOOM Eternal became available, and I picked it up as soon as possible, ready for more fast-paced shooting action. How do I feel about Eternal, now that I’ve completed it? Read on.

The first thing I noticed about DOOM Eternal was how much more of everything there was. Unlike 2016’s largely confined, indoor spaces, Eternal has giant, sprawling vistas to stare at. Levels are giant and filled with places to explore and find secrets. The weapon mod system remained, but was joined by RPG-styled upgrade systems for your armor and special abilities. Your arsenal itself has also grown; the Ballista, the Flame Belch, the Ice Bomb, and more join the usual DOOM cast of Super Shotguns, Chainguns, and BFGs. And on top of those weapons, new and modified systems for resource management change the flow of combat and keep you switching weapons to dispatch demons. In theory, this is great. In practice, I found myself running around trying to chainsaw imps and zombies down for ammo so I could use the guns I actually wanted to, not all of them all the time. There’s a lot of running and strafing in Eternal, and a lot of it is for defensive or resource management reasons. Compared to 2016, that really took me out of the game. All the scrounging made me feel less like the pseudo-divine Doom Slayer of legend, and more like a guy with no pockets trying to carry an adequate amount of ammo.

Speaking of new mechanics, there’s a bunch of platforming introduced in Eternal. I don’t really like first-person platforming; not too many games do it well, and the ones that do are standouts like Mirror’s Edge. DOOM Eternal‘s platforming is largely fine and mostly serviceable (there were many times where the game couldn’t decide if it wanted to magnet to the wall grip or make me use the prompt, so I would often punch a wall that I was supposed to be grabbing and fall into the void). The devs must have known it wasn’t perfect, as falling from cliffs just deals some damage and resets you, rather than killing you outright. That’s a good thing, as not every platforming path makes immediate sense, especially paths that lead to secrets. Quite often, I’d have a couple of trial runs/falls so I could figure out where I was supposed to go. While I never minded jumping around for secrets, I felt the mandatory platforming sections added to the pacing issues I felt throughout the game’s campaign.

Let’s talk combat. id Software knows how to make a shooter, and in that regard, they absolutely succeeded. Guns have excellent audio and feel powerful, even when they’re not really doing much (looking at you, Heavy Cannon). Weapon mods shake things up and allow you to exploit demons’ weaknesses well. This feels the absolute best around the middle sections of the game. The Arc Complex and Super Gore Nest levels are far enough in that you have weapons that both feel and are powerful, while not far enough that the miserable Marauder enemy type rears his head during normal shootouts. Early levels seem too reliant on exploiting gimmicky weaknesses (Having a Cacodemon eat your grenade over and over definitely loses its luster). Later sections are plagued by resource management and some truly nasty enemies that essentially require you to drop everything else and deal with them first. One of those, the Archvile, isn’t the worst; he just needs to be taken down before he can summon more powerful demons to overwhelm you. The other, the Marauder, necessitates a strange, almost Souls-like duel to deal with, as his shield blocks everything you try to do to it until it tries to attack. This pattern makes for a fun boss fight; it makes for an absolutely abysmal normal encounter, as you have to completely change your pace to stay in range of the Marauder so he attacks in the specific way that can be counterattacked. And you have to do this while being chased down by every other Mancubus, Tyrant, and Pain Elemental on the map, as well. The enemy messes with the pace of combat, something that is already hampered by the game’s ammo scarcity and the chainsaw mechanic you’re forced to use to deal with said ammo scarcity.

Throughout my time in DOOM Eternal, I couldn’t help but feel a very start-stop pace to huge parts of it. Whenever a new enemy type showed, the game stopped so the UI could tell me exactly what the enemy was and what it was weak to. It’s cool that I can precision shoot missile launchers off of Revenants, but I’d rather have discovered that for myself. By doing this over and over for each new enemy type, the game both kills the novelty of a new enemy and ruins the excitement of discovering out how best to get rid of it. I can’t figure out why the decision was made to stop the game to teach me about every single new element. It made feel like an idiot who needed his hand held, and messed with the flow of the game. Speaking of the flow, combat was often held up by a need to run around and find a weak demon to chainsaw. The chainsaw mechanic guarantees you a refill on all of your weapons, and the fuel regenerates in a way that you’re often able to kill something weak to get ammo from it. This is a huge difference from 2016’s game, which had the same mechanic, but also let you hold much more ammo. DOOM 2016 doesn’t mind if I want to rely completely on the Super Shotgun and the Gauss Cannon, and is more than happy to give me ammo to accommodate that play style. Eternal sees weapon preference as a sin, and keeps your max ammo count low to force you to switch all the time or chase down zombies with your chainsaw. The combat design forced me to scrounge a lot mid-combat, which doesn’t exactly feel powerful or fun. It bothered me so much that I ended up hastily making a diagram of what I want in a DOOM game vs. what was given to me:

Overall, DOOM Eternal is a game I really wanted to like, but there was too much emphasis on resource management in combat to really get me over the hurdle. I almost fell asleep in the early levels, enjoyed the middle, and absolutely loathed the final two bosses. I liked the final sections so little that I didn’t go back and pick up the secrets, meaning playing the original DOOM while playing DOOM is something I can’t do. I could go back with cheat codes (a type of secret) on to make it easier, but honestly, with my overall not great feeling about the game and its lack of deathmatch multiplayer (something taken out because old things are bad, I guess), I’m probably going to return it. There are too many games on the market for me to throw money at one I don’t like. From what I’ve read, I’m definitely in the minority here, but I think I’ll hang back in DOOM (2016). It was a fast, clean, punishing shooter with two speeds: “Where’s the party?” and “Faster,” and that’s much more interesting to me than having to chainsaw an imp every 30 seconds for the privilege of actually using my Super Shotgun for any length of time.

Next post: an anecdote on the history of Technical Communication. See you then.