“THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE IS HOW MUCH MORE VARIED THE LEVELS ARE.”
FORMAT PS4 / ETA 20 MAR
PUB BETHESDA SOFTWORKS / DEV ID SOFTWARE
DOOM ETERNAL
We discover that three hours in Hell feel like three minutes in Heaven
The first thing you notice about Doom’s fiery new Hell on Earth is how much more varied the levels are, and how much bigger. The first level has you fighting your way off a creaking wooden Hell barge crammed with lost souls, before jumping off it into the middle of a city crumbling under siege.
Blasting your way through hordes of hellbeasts still tearing Earth apart, dodging past a skyscraper-sized horned demon, and hopping over the ruins of mechs that have fallen trying to protect the city, you (as the ubiquitous Doom Slayer) make your way to a citadel. Within is a Hell Priest, one of three who are using their power to aid the demonic invasion. Once you’ve dispatched him, you must set off to track down those remaining and stop the forces of Hell. That’s all in the first level of the game.
HELL YEAH
The biggest mistake you could make is thinking that Doom Eternal is just more of the same. Far from it. It’s slicker than ever thanks to Id’s nextgen IdTech7 engine, and the environments only continue to evolve in ever more surprising ways in the opening hours. In our hands-on we leap around the ruined battlements of the Asgard-like Night Sentinel homeworld, battle through a hellish domain, and invade a Hell-cult base atop snowy mountains on Earth. In between we chill out in our Fortress Of Doom, where we can unlock upgrades such as ice
“WHEN YOU DIE, YOU SHOULD FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID WRONG, THAT YOU MESSED UP.”
bombs, fight waves of baddies in the Prison Of Doom, and replay missions.
“We feel like the visual pacing in this game is much stronger,” says creative director Hugo Martin, when we ask about the way each level evolves. “The levels sort of have three-act visual structures, where you begin in one place, you go somewhere, and you end in another.” That’s reflected in the fast-travel system that activates near the end of each level, enabling you to hop back to areas you’ve passed so you can mop up missed secrets or optional fights.
“Not all of them have three acts – I would say some of them have two acts – but over the course of each level [it changes],” says Martin. “While we have secrets and the levels certainly at times are mazey, it is a linear campaign experience, unlike an openworld experience. And so we really wanted to take advantage of what a linear campaign can give the player, which is a well-paced, controlled experience, where we control where we want to take you and what we want you to see.” The levels might be larger, taking longer to beat than their 2016 counterparts, but it always feels like Doom Eternal is showing you something different.
Aiding this is a very calculated move away from being what could be branded a ‘corridor shooter’. “The arena spaces are the tried-and-true part of Doom,” says Marty Stratton, the executive producer. “But the kind of the in-between ancillary spaces between the arenas have really got a major push in a number of ways. And you felt some of that in, in like, the kind of heroic jumping-between-meteor sections and climbing up walls, some of the hazards that are there.”
FEELING JUMPY
The jumping and climbing might initially be controversial as in practice it’s enabled the devs to add what are essentially more platforming sections to Doom. There are platforms hovering above lava, special walls you can clamber up by tapping , and buttons that open timer gates you have to jump through. But these make the large levels feel more like real, twisting spaces and break up the frantic action with traversal puzzles that legitimately require some thought.
When this fast-paced platforming meets the fastpaced shooting arenas things get really special: arenas have monkey bars you can swing from to reach much-needed armour or gaps you can just about air-dash through to ambush a staggered demon. “The AI will challenge you, but the level design of Doom Eternal will challenge you just as much,” says Martin. “Oftentimes we combine those two challenges where you’re dealing with the combat and what the level is presenting you at the same time.”
It might get tough – the legions of demons had us committing many sins with our lips at times – but never without cause. “When you die, you should feel like you know what you did wrong, that you messed up, it wasn’t the game that screwed you over,” says Martin. “[If] I know that it’s something that I did wrong, that motivates me to want to play again because I feel like I haven’t mastered the systems yet. So once you master them that’s the real joy of the game because you feel like then you can totally dominate the experience.”
Fine, pass the controller back. Turn up the heat.