DOOM ETERNAL
DOOM ETERNAL DEMANDS SHARP SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
James Davenport: I could fill a bathtub with the palm sweat Doom Eternal milked from me this year. It is easily the most intense shooter of 2020, and not just because it throws dozens of demons at you at once.
Arenas are filled with hazards and demon compositions designed to test FPS habits, old and new. The most hated enemy of 2020 might be the Marauder, who inverts your embedded Doom habits with melee duels. The expansion continues the trend: The Spirit possesses and buffs fellow demons, while the giant tentacle pancakes whole arenas while the ants (you and co) below duke it out. Pointing and clicking alone won’t cut the cake. Eternal demands sharp situational awareness at 1,000 mph.
All the while you’re treading water, topping up resources with glory kills, fire, and chainsaws. Doom Eternal is a violent give-and-take that tests endurance, reflex, and wit in equal measure.
Evan Lahti: One of the interesting criticisms of Doom Eternal is that it’s ‘overdesigned’. Id scattered piles of stuff to collect across Eternal’s hellscarred worlds: Sentinel Crystals, Sentinel Batteries, Slayer Keys, Runes, one-ups, Doomfish, character and weapon skins, weapon mods… you can’t walk 50 feet without stumbling into some kind of floating, glowing pickup. I did feel like the overemphasis on these resources took some of the purity out of the action, but the bigger point remains: Doom Eternal is one of the only singleplayer FPSes that draws out that rare, electric feeling of genuine improvization. Every other major FPS campaign of the last few years, pleasant as they might’ve been, doesn’t produce spur-of-the-moment reactions as a baseline.
And despite that very modern progression system, Eternal achieves this the old-fashioned way: By empowering you with progressively more agility and throwing stupid amounts of evil at you. Whatever cocktail of bad guys Eternal spills into the environment, mindlessly spamming your favorite weapon isn’t going to cut them down. You’re going to have to move continuously, juggle your weapons to preserve ammo, and find the right moment to refill your armor and health. When you pull it off, you feel like your motor skills are driving Doomguy faster than you can make sense of what’s happening, and it’s glorious.