Developer(s): id Software
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platform: Playstation 4, Xbox One. PC, Nintendo Switch (as of yet not released)
Hours played: 13
I think I reflect the opinion of a lot of people who have played DOOM Eternal when I say that I was surprised – surprised by how fresh it felt to play even after blasting through DOOM (2016)’s campaign multiple times; surprised by how involved its lore was despite 2016 having an unexpected amount of depth tucked away in its logbooks; surprised by how much more id Software managed to build on the formula established by its predecessor. Finishing DOOM (2016) with its torturous cliffhanger, the way forward seemed obvious: just move the Doom Slayer from Mars to Earth, give us more levels, things to kill, and methods of killing, and be done with it. Instead, it feels as if id threw everything and the kitchen sink at this thing and the product is equal parts amazing and baffling, thrilling and downright bizarre. Some of its additions are so intuitive, while others leave me asking what value they add at all. It’s a textbook case of a sequel responding to criticism of the original while maybe going overboard in some areas. The result is a first-person shooter that rivals the original but rarely surpasses it in many areas.
Making Hell on Earth
So how does DOOM Eternal deliver on the expectations set by the ending of its predecessor? As the Doom Slayer crashes onto Earth’s surface and breaks up hordes of demons in dilapidated office blocks, I think it’s safe to say that this game is kinda badass. Rather than launching head-first into the bloodshed, though, I frequently found myself stopping to take in the atmosphere of these levels, particularly on the Cultist Base in Antarctica and on the ARC station overlooking Mars. The environmental design is exquisite all around, chaotic but vibrant. Remnants of fallen titans and the humans’ attempts to defend their home litter the surroundings. Seeing visible damage on enemies, patches of their limbs melting away under the hammering of your bullets, is extremely satisfying. Jumping between continents, planets, and even dimensions from the Fortress of DOOM spaceship gives DOOM Eternal an Avengers: Endgame-esque scope that hypes you up for every battle.
id must have taken the criticism of DOOM (2016)’s lack of environmental variety to heart because Eternal throws new worlds at you all the time, each with their own architecture and unique hazards. Personally, I’m in two minds over this. I never really wearied of DOOM (2016)’s locales, but here comes Eternal chewing through levels like it’s nothing, blaring music in my ears to nudge me on when I’m just trying to enjoy the view. The lighting overall seems to be brighter and in some cases can make demons look a bit more… plasticky, overpolished? I sometimes miss the previous title’s sombre isolation and pacing, its sense of a long, continuous journey to the heart of the UAC facility, staring out over a Martian vista with only a sandstorm and a few beats for background noise, but I would be lying if I said that Eternal’s levels are not a joy to blast through.
Overall responses to the increased emphasis on platforming here have been mixed, with some reviewers expressing ire at the ‘Super Mario’ obstacles filling their DOOM game. Predictably, as a platformer guy, I loved it. I loved the dumb rotating fire pillars and crusher traps. I loved the scale and number of ways you can traverse the jungle gym battle arenas. I loved how there are so many stage hazards sprinkled in and out of scripted fights, some of which can be used against your foes. One of my favourite levels, the Arc Complex, has you swinging from pole to pole around the outside of a skyscraper before crashing in like a one-man SWAT team. Another, Mars Core, has you using jump-pads to low-gravity fling yourself between pieces of debris. It’s silly, beyond superhuman, and I love it. In many ways, vaulting through these alien obstacle courses in first-person reminded me a lot of Metroid Prime, a comparison that can only be favourable, coming from me. I understand that this view may contradict my statement about missing the more measured level design of DOOM (2016), but scaling the inside of giant reactors or the outside of stoic ruins will never get old for me. It’s different, but not necessarily better. I’m less enamoured with the swimming sections, though. You can get those out of my DOOM game.
I’ve alluded to the soundtrack already, but I will give Mick Gordon his dues: just like 2016 before it, this is one Hell of an album. Once again, Gordon captures the sensation and rhythm of tearing through legions of hellspawn so effectively that it’s kinda worrying – has anyone checked up on him recently? I’m a big fan of the greater emphasis on techno here, echoing the advanced technology of the Maykrs and the space-age aesthetic. When I hear ‘Meathook’, I need to constantly check that I didn’t leave any summoning circles in my room – at least, I would if I were not too focused on not dying in those special missions. There’s a great video online demonstrating how Gordon assembled a heavy metal choir when recording some of the tracks. Just seeing the passion that these heavy metal singers pour into a series they grew up playing brings a tear to my eye and makes DOOM Eternal feel transcendental as a piece of media. It’s a shame that Bethesda’s meddling with the mixing of the official soundtrack has caused such controversy, meaning that Eternal will likely be the last game that Gordon composes in the series, but that cannot detract from the amazing work he has done to resurrect and refresh this classic series. Again, I miss the more atmospheric pieces of (2016) during exploration but to call Eternal’s soundtrack anything less than incredible would be a crime.
DOOM’s New Groove
Let’s tear into the meat of this game: tearing into meat. The planning, which then gives way to on-the-fly decision-making and resource management, has been jacked up to a dizzying degree from the first game. On top of recovering more health from glory kills and ammo by chainsawing your foes, now you can also get armour pieces with the Slayer’s flamethrower. Spraying a group of mooks with fire then blowing them up to see armour spurt out of them makes me experience chemical processes in my body. There’s even an upgrade to the super shotgun that sets its grappling hook (and any enemy it latches onto) alight. It’s the most unflinchingly gamey thing ever, but there are also comically floating one-ups in this game so leave all semblances of realism at the door and embrace the madness. I played through the game first on Ultra-Violence difficulty and got my ass handed to me a fair bit, to the point that I needed to fall into a rhythm of routinely topping up ammo, health, and armour if I wanted to stay alive. Maximum ammo capacities have been noticeably reduced from 2016, even when fully upgraded, but this has the effect of encouraging you to make more effective use of sub-weapons, the new blood punch move, and the chainsaw, mechanics that I might have ignored if I could just spray bullets with grim abandon.
The crowning addition to this combat system, however, is the dash – there are few games I can think of that aren’t improved by the ability to dash. For a shooter that focuses so much on momentum and constant movement, the implementation of a dash makes perfect sense. I don’t know if I’m imagining it but I feel like your standard ground movement speed has been toned down from 2016 to emphasise using this ability to dip in and out of danger. Calculating how I’m going to string together my jumps and dashes to get out of a corner and find a health pickup is just another factor to juggle in Eternal’s ballet of brutality. Nowhere did this feel more satisfying than when fighting the final boss. Ducking in and out of buildings, topping up my Crucible so I could slice through an enemy and refill my ammo, before reemerging to meet the boss’ rain of hellfire head-on. Truly, DOOM’s combat is as exhilarating as it has ever been.
This is why it’s so frustrating when the odd crappy design decision sneaks its way in, spoiling an otherwise uninterrupted flow state. And what could possibly present more of a brick wall than a tutorial message popping up with the appearance of every single new enemy type telling you exactly what their weakness is? I expect this kind of hand-holding from other mainstream triple-A releases, but DOOM? One of the things that separates DOOM from many military shooters is how deliberate and distinctive the enemy designs are, how much they convey through their features and body language alone. Yes, it’s cool that I can throw a grenade or sticky bomb into a Cacodemon’s mouth to instantly stun it, but imagine how much cooler it would have been to discover that strategy on my own, through sheer curiosity and experimentation! I wouldn’t mind, but the Cacodemon is essentially a floating mouth with one eye: its design intuitively screams “put a bomb in my mouth”. Another egregious instance of this is the Doom Hunter. Up until then, the game has taught you to associate blue shields with your plasma ammo (admittedly via another hamfisted tutorial message). When the Doom Hunter then rolls up donning a spiffy blue jacket, it should be obvious that plasma will dispel it, but that won’t stop the tutorial fairy from coming down and telling you exactly how to defeat it before you even start the fight. If enemy weaknesses couldn’t be instinctively gleaned from their designs, then the developers could have at least hidden them in the log entries. If tutorial prompts won’t let you discover the weaknesses of even bosses for yourself, then something has gone terribly wrong in the design process.
I know why they did it, though. It’s to plaster over the fact that some of these enemies have such obtuse and annoying weaknesses that it would be impossible to know how to approach them otherwise. Let me introduce you to someone:
This is the Marauder, and if you’ve read any other review of DOOM Eternal you will know that every player loves him. By “loves”, I mean “hates”. Everyone hates him. They hate him because he breaks every rule of classic DOOM design philosophy. Who thought that in a shooter emphasising constant movement it would be a good idea to design an enemy that is only vulnerable if you stand at a very specific mid-range and it decides to do a very quickly telegraphed attack, while being chased around by other demons, and then they give it the ability to summon a wolf familiar which then also chases you around? Eating damage from this guy trying to get him to do that one attack is inevitable.
Why is it like this? Every other demon has multiple methods of killing them. Some may be less effective than others, sure, but if you’re in a pinch and really just want to wipe a demon giving you trouble off the face of the Earth, you can expend precious ammo to do so. Not so with this guy. When one of these guys rolls up to the party, you’re forced to take out every demon in the room so you can face the Marauder 1-on-1 in peace (well, relative peace). DOOM’s tight order of priority and the player’s careful planning go out the window as they are forced to dance to the Marauder’s tune. I respect that id wanted to give us a cool 1-on-1 enemy to duel – and had he remained a one-time boss in level 6 I wouldn’t have nearly this many problems with him – but in breaking so many of the rules that set DOOM apart from the majority of slow-paced spectacle shooters, the Marauder makes me inclined to agree with VICE’s Doc Burford: “The Marauder is Doom Eternal’s biggest indulgence and its greatest failing”. As it stands, this baffling inclusion is the only thing stopping me from diving straight into a new playthrough on Nightmare permadeath mode.
Well, at least upgrades have been streamlined from 2016. Again, however, these tweaks are a mixed bag. Rather than drowning us in new weapons, DOOM Eternal opts into increasing the utility of the weapons from its predecessor. DOOM (2016)’s arsenal already felt balanced to give you options for every situation, but I did find myself neglecting a couple of them, such as the mod that spins your chaingun barrel without shooting (yaaaaaay) or the remote detonation mod for the rocket launcher. In Eternal, the chaingun instead gets a plasma shield that lets you hunker down in a corner and shred your foes. Fully master it, and you can launch that shield as a projectile after it absorbs enough damage. Fully upgrade the remote detonation mod and each rocket can release three extra explosives with careful timing, way more useful than its 2016 counterparts. I also applaud the mastery coins introduced in the later levels of the game that reduce the busywork of the mastery challenges. The challenges force you to play in a very specific way and hit arbitrary targets with only limited demons to practise on throughout a playthrough, so rewarding exploration with tokens to bypass challenges that look annoying or that you are far from completing is a welcome change.
On the other hand, I’m not sure what happened to the runes. Being able to see all the runes’ abilities from the very beginning and acquire them in any order meant that I kept the same three equipped for my whole runthrough and picked up the others simply for completion’s sake. That and unlike DOOM (2016) there’s no way to upgrade them. I get the impression that id got some flack for the challenges tied to acquiring them and that’s fair. Waiting half a minute to load into a different area and do a silly timed mission did kinda suck but completing them felt like more of an achievement than just stumbling upon a rune you know you will never use in Eternal. With a little refinement, the rune challenges might have been a good way to nudge players towards discovering enemy weaknesses themselves. As it stands, they become just another thing to collect, a mechanic simplified to the point of obsolescence.
Getting to know DOOM
The most common critical complaint I hear levelled at Eternal, however, is its increased emphasis on lore and story. Now, I do not think that the sheer presence of more cutscenes instantly scrapes a black mark against Eternal, and I would guess that the number of people whose experience with the game was severely hampered by that presence is minimal, but it definitely reflects a change in focus. Functionally, the lore exists primarily to justify the planet-hopping and wide variety of environments, a clear response to criticism of DOOM (2016)’s lack of variety. In practice, it brings the pacing to a screeching halt. I will be the first to hold my hands up and say that perusing DOOM lore is a guilty pleasure of mine. The writing is just so metal that despite most of it being nonsense it’s a delight to revel in. I liked reading about the political intrigue between the godlike Maykrs and the Argenta, both races that were aware – and terrified – of their finite existence and resources so sacrificed their freedom for unlimited Hell energy and ended up bringing the demons upon their worlds (fossil fuels and climate change anyone?). In this way, they make a nice parallel to the humans experimenting with Hell energy in (2016) and whose world is overrun now. The difference, of course, is that the humans have Doomguy. There’s plenty of questioning as to whether he is doing the right thing, especially because it’s implied that his slaughter of demons since the 1993 game brings the demons wherever he goes, but it’s empowering to play a character whose sheer rage is so infinite that he will face any consequences of his actions head-on.
No, what grinds my gears more is the disconnect that the way this story is told creates between Doomguy and the player. This was not as pronounced in the limited backstory of DOOM (2016), but now Doomguy is getting worshipped or threatened everywhere he goes because of things he did in his ‘dark past’, having first-person flashbacks like we’re desperately trying to win the Game Awards, and (the real kicker) the camera will periodically leave Doomguy’s helmet in cutscenes to display him in all his third-person glory. Does he have a family and kids we don’t know about, too? Does he like to go fishing on weekends? When Doomguy’s past was more mysterious and less of a focus, he was easier for the player to inhabit, his motivations were simpler, and a lot of DOOM (2016)’s most important lore played in audio logs simultaneously with gameplay. I rolled my eyes at loading screen text telling me that ‘I’ need to revisit a place from ‘my’ past, a past that doesn’t belong to me until I piece it together from log entries. It’s more bearable when another character alludes to Doomguy’s past and he just shrugs it off, but these moments were more effective in DOOM (2016) when the first-person view constituted a kind of tunnel-vision for a protagonist determined to ignore the warnings of others. In that game, when Doomguy meets Samuel Hayden in his office to hear his plan, the player is actually still in control, meaning you can leap around the room, spin around in place, teabag on his desk, everything except shoot him. Thankfully, none of the cutscenes overstay their welcome.
No, DOOM Eternal’s biggest crime in storytelling is that many of these non-playable sequences could have made for some really memorable contextual set-pieces with little effort. Everyone likes to meme Samuel Hayden’s line “You can’t just shoot a hole into the surface of Mars!” before Doomguy does just that, but imagine this: Doomguy hops into the BFG 10,000’s control room, readies the cannon, hovers his thumb over the trigger and then… stillness. Huh? Why is the game frozen like this? Suddenly, you feel this eureka moment wash over you. With a cheeky grin, you hit the shoot button and Doomguy (you) fires the cannon, boring a hole into the Red Planet. Boom, Game of the Year 2020! It’s in the bag. No need to thank me, Id, just hire me now. In all seriousness, this already brazen cinematic moment could have been the most satisfying shit ever if Id had just let the player pull the trigger, not with a quick-time-event or button prompt, but through the player’s intuition. Come on, this is a game where the developers let you take control of a Revenant with its own moveset for five minutes of the entire game, and they can’t let me pull the trigger on Mars?
It is natural after inhabiting this embodiment of rage for so long that we would want to find out more about him, and it’s obvious that the developers fell in love with the dude, too. They’re trying so hard to show him off in cool situations, playing his mute stoicism off the self-serious, blathering bad guys’ postulating. I get the feeling that id were trying to replicate for Doomguy what fellow Bethesda team Machine Games did for B.J. Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein: The New Order, that is take a character from one of the most influential shooter games of all time with a silly premise (and name) and shatter player expectations when we find ourselves strangely empathising with them. In DOOM’s case, however, I don’t think sacrificing the immersion of DOOM (2016)’s fully first-person experience was worth it. The minute details in the Fortress of DOOM show that Id can do fun characterisation while remaining in first-person. Browsing his bookshelves, his guitar and toy collections, and going down to the prison to rough up his demonic captives told me so much more about the person Doomguy was than the lorebooks explaining events that happened long before the scope of this game’s events. I do like reading them and uncovering more about him, but the way in which they are presented leaves a lot to be desired for me.
Judgement
If a lot of this review comes across as nitpicky, it’s because Eternal and 2016 are of such similar quality that choosing between them forces you to analyse the specifics. Free from the development hell and pressure of needing to reboot DOOM, Id had free rein to indulge in their wackiest concepts on a dizzying scale, sometimes to a fault. A sequel that improves on its predecessor in every way is a marvelous thing, but so many first projects have been invalidated by their big number 2’s that it’s refreshing when two games can stand alone with a comparable level of quality. If anything, it makes me appreciate the good differences between them even more. If I’m in the mood to stalk an abandoned facility and let loose with my arsenal in Hell to perhaps the coolest video game soundtrack ever composed, then I will play DOOM (2016). If I want a blockbuster ride through crazy levels with alternating flamethrowing and ‘Super Mario’ platforming, I will play DOOM Eternal. If DOOM (2016) is more like a moody survival horror in space where you are the monster, then DOOM Eternal is a pure action game. Regardless of which flavour of modern DOOM you prefer, it’s hard to deny that id have created two of the seminal first-person shooter campaigns not only of this generation, but of all time.
Wooooooh, shoutouts. This time, I really have to highlight Mark Brown’s work at Game Maker’s Toolkit. His writing style is tight, his analyses fascinating, and he recently did a breakdown of the rhythms of a DOOM fight that lays bare the brilliance of the plans it forces players to make as well as how the game tries to complicate those plans. If there are any shooter campaigns with DOOM’s level of mechanical freshness, please feel free to recommend them to me, particularly innovative indie titles. I’ve got some triple-A heavy hitters still to cover from the beginning of this chaotic 2020, but I would like to highlight independent work, too, when I have the chance.