Doom Eternal
DOOM ETERNAL is one of the most intense shooters ever made.
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 humor 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 armor, 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.
Late into the fight, a Marauder appears. This guy has an axe, a shield, and only opens up to damage if you counter a specific attack with a precisely timed gunshot. Blasting it with a rocket barrage does nothing. With this enemy design, Doom is asking me to stop shooting and moving so much. It’s playing with the comfort zone I’ve built over decades of playing arena shooters. Now I have to let up on the trigger, to circle-strafe and assume the calm restraint of a Dark Souls duel. I hate this enemy at first, but then I get the hang of it after a dozen or so attempts.
I’ve been playing these shooters since I was a teen. But Eternal isn’t just asking me to just get intimate with my keyboard’s number row, it’s challenging me to change playstyles in the middle of a classic Doom arena fight, to stop doing boxing and start doing judo. Managing resources, switching weapons, staying on the move, prioritizing demons based on the arena shape and current threat is plenty to juggle for most people, but Doom Eternal makes you change age-old habits too.
BULLET HELL
Doom’s guns aren’t as subject to this complexity. 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 underutilized 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
Updated viewmodels reinforce each weapon’s heft and sheen