GAMING REVIEWS
One of the most intense shooters ever made.
High-performance playtime
I just finished Doom Eternal and I’m feeling anxious and exhausted. I’ve kneed the underside of my desk too many times to count from tensing up. My hands are soft from sweating and my knuckles crack when I try to make a fist. A computer game actually managed to hurt me. Doom Eternal is a celebration of excess. Excess in sin, in violence, scale, speed, and volume. I’ve never played a shooter this intense and demanding.
Doom Eternal also runs beautifully on a wide range of hardware and feels designed for a mouse and keyboard first. It’s a modern classic, with a few caveats. Cheap deaths from getting stuck on geometry happen too often. There are six or seven layers of unnecessary progression. Doom’s dark humour has mostly been traded in for deep lore and a highfantasy cosmology.
The moment-to-moment combat is distilled panic rather than empowerment. I live for the fleeting moments my head gets above water within the hurricane of light and noise and violence, and I pull off a feat of accuracy and reflex I never thought I was capable of. Doom Eternal is a tough teacher. A few hours in I’m getting by just fine, juggling half a dozen weapons, belching fire on the hordes to spawn armour, tossing grenades at every opportunity to stun and soften up the crowd. I’m dashing in and out of the action for the occasional Glory Kill to keep my health topped up, dodging projectiles and managing the arena, deciding, between breaths (if I remember to breathe) which demons to attack based on who’s currently kicking my arse the most.
There is a lot of new stuff to digest: a lot of progression systems. Weapon points, runes, secrets, sentinel batteries, suit upgrades, challenges, weapon mods, skins, weapon mod upgrades, weapon mastery upgrades – it’s a lot. Too much, really, because Eternal places the bulk of these upgrades along the critical path. By the end I had almost every upgrade and without trying too hard to find them all, as if it’s all an elaborate front built to make players feel good while ensuring they stay at pace with the steep difficulty curve.
The ability to climb certain walls, dash in midair, and swing from monkey bars makes for some challenging navigation sequences, but I wanted to spend more time soaking in Eternal’s incredible settings rather than dashing my way through them.
Doom Eternal is one of the most demanding arena shooters I’ve ever played, a game that hones every muscle memory committed to my right forearm and left hand fingertips since they graced a mouse and keyboard. It’s bright and loud, hyper violent yet tastefully refined, and absolutely draining. I can’t recall playing a shooter where sensory overload was one of the most common reasons for death.
“The moment-tomoment combat is distilled panic rather than empowerment. ”