Doom Eternal
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Round and round it goes: the most literal combat loop ever conceived. You enter an arena – it might be dressed as an open-plan office, or the public square of a gutted American city, or the shore of an underground lava lake at the centre of Mars. But you come to recognise these coliseums wherever you find them by their furniture: multi-layered, adorned with monkey bars and littered with canisters of chainsaw fuel. As the first monsters wink into view, it becomes second nature to start spinning, a constant circle-strafe your only means of survival.
It’s tempting to imagine Id Software as the teenager who, having been left in charge of the teacups at a fairground, falls asleep at the controls; as the ride’s guardian unconsciously nudges the lever forward, the cups get faster and faster, a giddy whirligig at the very edge of control. But that image doesn’t do justice to the intelligence of Doom Eternal’s design. Edge once asked, infamously, whether Doom might be more engrossing if it allowed you to negotiate with the creatures that stalked its halls. Today, of course, many shooter-RPGs fulfil that brief, and Id is happy to leave them to it. The studio has learned, after a painful reboot in the mid ’00s, that Doom doesn’t need dialogue to be smart. It needs an invisible layer of resource management.
You never finish an arena battle in Doom Eternal without running short on the essentials: health, armour and ammo. Thankfully, your enemies bleed all three; finish them off with a glory kill and healing orbs pour from their eye sockets; split them down the middle with a chainsaw and bullets gush from the wound; set them alight with your shoulder-mounted flamer and armour spills from their pores. It’s an ingenious system, only slightly updated since 2016’s triumphant entry, that inspires something like bloodlust – resource retrieval pulling you forward into the fight.
All this free exchange makes an economist of the Doom Slayer. One alt-fire of your shotgun launches bombs which, if landed in the gob of a cacodemon, readies them for an instant glory kill. A perfect kill? Not quite: since dead enemies drop armour quicker than living ones, it’s best to treat the demon to a quick blast of flame before pulling its single eye from its floating head. That way, you’re instantly given a life-saving bath of both blue and green orbs – enough to get you through the next 30 seconds, if you move fast enough.
Since this sequel is far less generous with ammo than its predecessor, the chainsaw has become a key tactical consideration. When fully fueled up with three canisters it can tear through even the largest demons, ridding the battlefield of a particularly nasty opponent and topping up your guns in the process. And yet wouldn’t it be thriftier to save those three canisters for three smaller enemies, ensuring a more even distribution of ammo through the fight?
No corner of your weapon wheel is allowed to gather dust. Some demons now have weak points, lending new importance to the sniper scope of your automatic rifle. Others are susceptible to a Blood Punch, built up with consecutive glory kills. There aren’t playstyles in modern Doom so much as players who use absolutely everything available to them, and players who die. Mick Gordon’s exemplary soundtrack lets you know when it’s finally over; the djent guitars subside, but the industrial soundscape is always throbbing, a pilot light of fury.
There aren’t playstyles in modern Doom so much as players who use absolutely everything, and players who die
Doom Eternal, then, is a thinking person’s shooter. It’s because of this that the arenas form just part of its hefty 20-hour-plus playtime. So taxing are the battles on the mind and the fingers that the breaks built into the campaign are welcome. Where Doom 2016 merely encouraged downtime through the search for secret rooms, the sequel mandates platforming sequences to progress. These lead to the odd double-take: are those spinning flame chains imported from the Mushroom Kingdom? Is Doomguy dashing across Celeste- style chasms, after decades glued to the ground? Purists ought to remember, however, that Doom has always played with vertical space, and platforming suits the series just fine. When those sequences become multipart puzzles to piece together – jump here, shoot this target, cling to that wall – they tickle the same part of the brain as a good LucasArts conundrum.
Traversal mechanics may befit an FPS in the 2020s, but not every contemporisation in Doom Eternal strikes the right distorted note. Like the protagonists of Borderlands 3 and The Outer Worlds, the Doom Slayer now has a hub spaceship from which he launches operations. Perhaps it provides necessary scaffolding, given the sheer length of the campaign, each level of which incentivises return visits to master challenge rooms and uncover missed items. And there are charms to the Slayer’s floating castle, like the literal ramparts, or the demon-punishing prison he’s christened the ‘ripatorium’. But there’s little hidden in its alcoves that couldn’t be relegated to an upgrade screen, and the idea of the Slayer planning beyond the next punch seems perverse. More successful is the singular Battlemode that constitutes Doom Eternal’s multiplayer. Playing as a demon, you develop a kind of cunning: summoning lesser meat puppets to occupy the Doom Slayer, then trapping him in pools of lava and toxic sludge.
It’s the strangest thing, to see the Slayer from the outside. To realise how much time he spends airborne nowadays; to see how relentless his onslaught becomes once he locks on. The Slayer is the one thing the demons fear, and as one of them, you feel that fear too. But more than anything, you want to be back behind his visor – to orbit another battlefield, and think through the problem of mass monster murder again.