DOOM (2016) was a game that took the “old” formula of FPS games and reinvented it for a new era.
DOOM Eternal takes all of what DOOM did, and builds on it – for better and for worse.
The core combat is excellent – you are encouraged to be constantly mobile, with a broad variety of enemies rewarding you for taking a variety of different approaches and using different tools in your arsenal. You are encouraged to both fight at a distance, to fight at midrange, and to fight up close by various different enemy types, which helps to mix up combat encounters and keep them fresh and interesting. You have a chainsaw and a flamethrower, the former of which lets you instant-kill enemies for more ammo and some health and the latter of which gives you armor, as well as your glory kills – badly injured enemies start flashing, and you can rush in and do a special kill on them for a bunch of extra health (and if they’re on fire, armor as well).
But at the same time, many enemies can do a lot of damage up close, so you are rewarded for moving in, taking out some foes, then moving back out again, using cover to absorb ranged attacks, before moving to a new position to lay down more damage.
You also have a pair of grenades – a frag grenade that does damage, and a freeze grenade that freezes enemies in a large area – along with a “blood punch”, another upgraded melee attack that you get by glory killing enemies, resulting in a powerful attack that can severely injure or kill demons and give you a bunch of health drops.
In the endgame, you also get a sword, that instantly cuts any non-boss demon in half (and even some miniboss demons), though it has severely limited ammunition.
It can all be a bit much to keep track of sometimes, but it ends up rewarding the player for mixing up their gameplay, and not just falling into the trap of doing the same thing over and over again.
You have eight weapons, each of which has two alternate fire modes, and almost all of them are very useful against particular foes, rewarding players for using all their weapons – something I really like seeing. The eighth weapon, the BFG, has a second “mode” that is actually a separate weapon in the same slot, both of which use the BFG ammo – a rare drop, but it makes sense, as the BFG can wipe out most enemies in a single shot, while the other weapon can lay down heavy damage very rapidly as well.
The only downside of the combat system is that the higher difficulty levels mostly function by making the enemies more bullet spongey and making you take more damage. While not the end of the world, it can make enemies a little on the annoyingly damage soaky side in Ultra-violence mode, the second highest difficulty level, and you can die pretty fast. That said, the combat is pretty well-balanced even on that mode, and I made it through the entire campaign without changing the difficulty level or using the optional temporary powerup sentinel armor, which serves as a means of helping players who get stuck. Still, there were some encounters (particularly optional ones) that killed me repeatedly, and some of the bosses were a bit frustrating.
Indeed, the second to last boss was a low point of the game – while cool visually, the boss primarily functioned by making the ground do damage. While “stay out of the bad” is a classic boss tactic, it is less fun in a FPS, where you have a restricted field of view – doubly so given that the boss flew overhead, so the “bad” was not visible from your FOV on the ground while shooting up at her.
However, apart from a few niggles, the combat was pretty good. The same cannot be said about the rest of it.
The game has a story, but the story is confusing, as it does not pick up where DOOM 2016 left off, but some time later. Moreover, it just isn’t very good – the DOOM Slayer is not much of a character, having no dialogue, and mostly just seeming rather angry. Other characters talk AT you, but it isn’t very interesting. Moreover, what plot IS there isn’t particularly interesting even apart from the main character – it feels a bit generic fantasy, which is doubly weird given it is a sci-fi setting. The DOOM Slayer brushing off the story in the first game was funny, but it didn’t work nearly as well here, because they were more intimately involved with the goings on, the plot being more important but also more confusing and mediocre.
It is even more awkward considering one of the levels is pretty much entirely story content, and while it finally makes the story make more sense, it doesn’t actually make the story GOOD.
The game also brings back collectibles, something I’ve always found to be a questionable decision in FPS games. The problem is that these games have pacing built up around them, but what ends up happening is that instead of moving smoothly from encounter to encounter, you spend a bunch of time looking around for secrets. DOOM (2016) was particularly egregious in this regard. DOOM Eternal is better – the secrets aren’t as time consuming – but they still interrupt the pacing of the game, and some of them are very much of the “find a cracked spot in the ruins that you can break” variety, which can be annoying. Very few of them really felt like they were interesting to find, which made them something of a waste – why put the effort into hiding these things when they mostly just slow down the game and don’t have good payoff?
There’s also a stat/levelling system of sorts, where you find certain special collectibles to power up your suit, and you get arsenal points from beating combat encounters, including some special optional ones to upgrade your weapons. These didn’t really feel like they had amazing payoff, and I wasn’t really overly enamored with them – it wasn’t a bad thing, but some of them felt like things that already should have been included, as they’re kind of core to how they work and what makes them special. It wasn’t actively detrimental, but had they just been upgrades you got over time or included with the weapons, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
As a result, I’m left feeling like this was a pretty good game, but it was far from perfect. It improved on DOOM (2016) in a number of ways, but also took a step backwards in others.
4.0