DOOM ETERNAL

The heaviest metal

Ijust 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 high-fantasy cosmology. And the strain from a heavy focus on resource management is felt at every difficulty level. I worry that for some, it could be Doom: But Too Much.

But ‘too much’ works for me as Eternal’s guiding light. The momentto-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 ass the most.

BULLET HELL

The old gang is back again. Hello, combat shotgun.

Hello, plasma rifle. Hello,

BFG. With more opportunities to refill ammunition and heaps more arenas with ways to get airborne, the previously under-utilised ballista gets heavy use as a railgun stand-in and stylish airborne demon deletion tool.

Updated viewmodels reinforce each weapon’s heft and sheen, and the gun skins rewarded for completing certain milestones are weird but not unwelcome in a singleplayer game. Refined reload and firing animations imbue each with a sense of mechanical realism, especially the alternate firing modes, which have way more utility this time. But the guns haven’t lost the fundamental character they had in Doom 2016. The big changes in Doom Eternal are in how it handles resource management.

Glory Kills still reward health for staggering a demon and finishing them with a special melee kill animation, but chainsaw kills, which drop ammo, are far more important for keeping your guns fed. Burning through every bullet takes little time. Throw in the flame belch, a tool that lights demons on fire to make them puke up armour for a bit, and suddenly half of each fight becomes about juggling resources.

RUNE MATES

Also on the pile 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.

The new forms of mobility do shine in the arena, though, especially with how these fights scale up so quickly. It hits Doom 2016 endgame stuff from pretty early on, and then surpasses that benchmark, adding tougher demons and even more waves and wild configurations of them, and then surpasses that mark again and again. The dash is essential for dodging projectiles, but even more so for map awareness. Dashing out of the fray and to a decent vantage point gets you a split second to see what you’re up against, and any chance to prioritise a target makes a big difference.

SHOOTER HEAVEN

If there was any downtime in Doom Eternal, it was because I stopped between fights to soak in the scale and majesty of its vistas. Demons as tall as skyscrapers carrying hell barges around on their backs, swarms of dozens of cacodemons like gnats in the distance, ancient sentinel castles climbing mossy mountains into the clouds – Doom is a full on high-fantasy world now, pages and pages of optional lore included.

Some of the humour is dulled as a result, but I still laugh every time I hear the pop of a cacodemon’s eye getting ripped from the socket. Besides, Doom taking itself this seriously feels like a joke of its own.

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.

WHAT IS IT?

A shooter obsessed with speed and stress