Man was I ever dreading a return to the DOOM series.
My last memories of the series were riddled with feelings of exhaustion, being unable to enjoy the game because I couldn’t simply bring myself to play it for long stretches of time. Since then this has expanded to other games as well with more and more titles failing to capture my attention for more than an hour at best. I know that this is a fundamental change in me, I seemingly have less patience for most games than I used to, so you can imagine my trepidation with going back to the series that started that habit all those years ago. It seems that I must not be alone in this though as it seems id has made some changes, some suspiciously specific changes, that are focused on lowering the intensity and upping the tacticality of DOOM: The Dark Ages. The result? A game that I still struggled with in the early days, but came full circle on not too long afterwards.
It is a time long before the events that led to the tragedies on Mars and Hell’s invasion of Earth. The Night Sentinels of Argent D’Nur and their allies the Maykrs have been battling the forces of Hell for some time, guarding their secret treasure and source of power: the Heart of Argent. The Makyrs have imbued the Slayer with their power but have also enslaved him, robbing him of all memories save for those that power his bottomless hatred for all demons. So he is deployed where the allies wish, his relentless crusade continuing unabated whilst Hell avoids direct confrontation with him. However the goals of the Makyrs and Sentinels aren’t fully aligned and the rift growing between them threatens the alliance, and the safety of the realm they all inhabit.
New game, new id Tech engine now at the ripe old version of 8. Reading about the improvements it’s interesting to see some of the choices they made, like being one of the only game engines I know of that requires dedicated raytracing hardware in order for it to function, not for added raytraced effects but as an underpin to most of the engine’s functions. Now this isn’t as crazy today as it might’ve been just a few years ago with the oldest cards supported being the very first RTX20 series cards that are positively ancient by today’s standards. Suffice to say though that the improvements are worth the asking price with the whole visual experience being second to none. I guess this is what you can get when you have a full engineering team dedicated to producing a world leading game engine for a single game.
Dark Ages follows the core DOOM gameplay loop closely with the changes coming from the progression system and, of course, the inclusion of the shield. Now instead of the entire game being a never-ending run and gun battle you’re now in a slightly more tactical FPS game; one where you’re now on the lookout for attacks to block and projectiles to parry. This does mean that the game slows down slightly from its predecessors, especially when it comes to the larger enemies that require multiple parries or strategic use of certain weapons before you can actually land any damage on them. The upgrade then, of course, has multiple branches dedicated to both your shield and melee attacks but has also been radically simplified, removing the perk system completely. Now you just upgrade weapons directly and upgrades to things like health, armor and ammo reserves come from defeating specific leader-type enemies in the game. In all honesty I was surprised to see that just this simple handful of changes was enough to take me from dreading every minute to something where I sought out the challenge, even if that meant multiple rounds of failure before I got it.
The base combat remains as fast pace and frenetic as ever though, keeping the same multiple-wave format and health systems that the previous two games mostly perfected. The standard trope for seemingly every game apples to Dark Ages as well: in the beginning you’ll have limited guns in your arsenal and thus limited ways to deal with the game’s various challenges. You’ll gradually unlock more weapons, and their variants, as the game goes on and it’s somewhere on that journey where you’ll settle on your preferred array of weapons. That also unfortunately has the issue of making most encounters pretty repetitive because there’s only so many enemy types in the game and dealing with wave after wave of them doesn’t really hold it’s appeal for long.
.For me it was hard to go past the fully upgraded super shotgun and the cycler, coupled with the shield shockwave and shocking fist upgrades. The super shotgun rips through anything you put in front of it, able to kill/stun most stronger enemies in a single shot with the larger ones usually requiring only a few more hits. The upgraded cycler applying shock, which increases damage, is a godsend when you can’t get close. I only swapped that out for the chainshot for larger armored enemies that had required parries to damage them. I’m sure the rest of the guns are viable, indeed I think the rocket self-healing thing could be super interesting, but once I’d gotten into the rhythm of this build I didn’t feel the need to deviate too much.
I do have one gripe that isn’t mentioned anywhere and that’s with the life sigils. They function as intended but once they are spent, they are spent. Like if you run out of them during a particularly hard encounter you’re then sweet out of luck, you’ll have to do that entire encounter without them. This does inherently make them more valuable but also makes for a lot more checkpoint restarts than I’d like. I usually ended up relenting and using one when I was facing a leader enemy or was 10+ minutes through an encounter and simply didn’t want to do it again. I guess that’s the intended use but it still feels somewhat antithetical to how checkpoint systems typically work.
Upgrades come thick and fast, should you take the extra time to seek out a good number of the secrets and challenges scattered around the map. These are, once again, thankfully easy to find thanks to the map and there’s likely enough materials around to upgrade everything to its max level if that’s something you want to do. At the end though I was floating 1K+ gold, almost a dozen rubies and 3 wraith stones because I simply couldn’t be arsed upgrading anything else. For the last 4 chapters or so I deliberately didn’t go back and clear out the secrets either as the repetitive combat encounters were starting to get to me at that point. Suffice to say, once you’re in the thick of it, you shouldn’t be wanting for upgrades for long.
Dark Ages does an absolutely terrible job of framing when the hell the game is set in relation to the rest of the games in the reboot even though you’d probably know it was a prequel to the 2016 reboot by way of the marketing campaign. Now it’s been a real hot minute since I’ve played any of the other DOOM games so all the Sentinels and Makyrs are, effectively, unknown to me at this point so I really have no idea what the stakes are here. To be sure the self contained narrative is straightforward enough and, like all my other DOOM reviews before this one, you’re not really playing DOOM for the plot. But it was clear that the game was trying to have a number of moments with me that just simply sailed by. I’m not sure how they’d fix this without resulting to a bunch of exposition (which I’m sure is in the codex entries I simply did not read) but the narrative definitely felt like one of the works parts of Dark Ages.
The times have wrought changes on both of us it seems and both DOOM: The Dark Ages and I are better for it. The slightly slower, less intense combat lends itself much more ready to boomer shooter veterans like myself whilst still keeping up a good level of intensity. DOOM has never looked better than it does on id Tech 8 which is saying something given how glass smooth it is throughout every level and encounter it puts you through. The streamlined progression system is a highlight, even if you’ll likely tap out on it long before you upgrade most of your weapons. The repetitive combat encounters and the narrative are DOOM’s weakest points, both of which are challenges I’m not sure how the series could really overcome. All this being said I feel redeemed going back to a series I had dreaded for so long, something I did not expect to say when I first sat down to play it.
Rating: 8.75/10
DOOM: The Dark Ages is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $119.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 15.2 hours playtime and 85% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also included in Xbox Gamepass.
