Date Released: 20 March 2020
Date Played: 7 April 2022
Introduction:
As I was playing Doom Eternal, I kept thinking something was wrong with me. After playing Doom reboot back when it released in 2016, I was thrilled to play this sequel. This enthusiasm was only bolstered when I saw the rave reviews upon the game's release. Not only was it pretty much universally acclaimed by critics and the public alike, it made many top 10 games of the year list and even has a loyal group of followers that hail it as the best first person shooter of all time. Needless to say, I felt like I was doing something wrong while I was playing. I kept dying repeatedly when I would dive into the fray against Hell's legions, I found myself constantly out of ammo, the story was convoluted and full of too much terminology, there were long platforming segments that felt out of place, and there was a sort of resentment and distain building up inside of me as I played. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, and would find myself playing for an hour and then being thankful when I could find a stopping spot so I could go play a different game. It took me months to work my way through Doom Eternal and in the meantime I completed 11 other games.
In a moment of frustration, I decided to do an internet search to see if there was anyone out there that felt the same as me, and unsurprisingly, there is a significant selection of gamers that felt exactly the same as I do. After watching several video reviews and essays detailing the flaws of this game, it finally came together in my mind why this game fails to live up to the standards of 2016 Doom and falls rather flat in terms of game design.
Gameplay:
Doom 2016 was a fast-paced slaughter fest where you played as a god-like superhuman called the Doom Slayer who wants nothing more than to annihilate the denizens of Hell. You would enter these mini-combat arenas that were filled with waves of enemies and you just went to town having your way with them. After dealing enough damage to an enemy, it would flash and allow you to perform a glory kill. This would allow you to refill some of your health while you strung together kill after kill after kill. The enemies stood no chance and you were a literal killing machine. It felt almost liberating being so overpowered in that game that you were essentially untouchable. All along the way you find these bits of lore that the demons have written detailing how you are their coming apocalypse and how much they fear you. It was an amazing power trip and I had a really good time with it.
This time around, you play as the same character with basically the same premise. Like all of the other Doom games, Eternal is a first-person shooter where you explore different environments while searching for collectables and upgrades until you enter a combat arena where you square off against waves of demons. The gory and gruesome glory kills from Doom 2016 return that will allow you to refill your health while you battle. You still have your array of weapons like the shotgun, chain-gun, BFG, rocket launcher, etc., and they all have multiple upgradeable firing modes and secondary abilities. You can jump, grapple, and use launching pads to bounce all around the combat arenas that are more designed as a fun playground for combat. At first, it seems like a continuation of Doom 2016 with more of a good thing. However, everything isn't exactly as it seems this time around. This leads me to my first issue with Doom Eternal.
1) Doom 2016 was so good and well thought out that the developers, ID software, didn't know what to do to improve upon it so they just started adding a bunch of new abilities.
Not only do you have to glory kill enemies to refill health, now you also have to chainsaw them to refill your limited ammo. The chainsaw uses gasoline that you can find scattered around the levels. In order to kill larger enemies, you need a full gas tank of fuel to saw them apart, but lesser enemies will have to be killed constantly to keep your other weapons loaded with ammunition. Luckily, the chainsaw always has a minimum amount of fuel that will replenish over time, but you'll need to keep an eye on its timer. You also have a flamethrower that also works on a timer that you use to make enemies drop armor. There's the super punch that allows you to instantly melee kill enemies if it's charged up.... There's the grappling hook that pulls you toward enemies, multiple shot modes for every weapon, multiple type of grenades you can cycle through that are also on a timer, a sword that you can collect charges for to instantly kill enemies, and probably several more that I'm forgetting.
Overwhelmed? Me too. This is a whole lot of mechanics at your disposal that you would think would be really fun to use after you get the hang of things, but they honestly feel like they get in the way of what would make the game fun. This leads me to my second issue with the game.
2) Doom Eternal wants you to play it the way IT wants. Not the way you want.
In Doom 2016, you got thrown into these awesome combat arenas where you felt like this overpowered machine that could just mow over waves of enemies in the most awesome ways possible. You were constantly trying out new weapons, getting in close and killing enemies, and stringing together these awesome kill chains. In Eternal you're constantly low on resources to the point where you spend a lot of your time running AWAY from enemies instead of running TOWARD them. You run out of ammo, so you can't kill anything. So you have to run around until your fuel for your chainsaw recharges. Then, you chainsaw an enemy, get some ammo and dive back in. But you take a few hits and your health is low, so you try to glory kill an enemy to get more health, but you get swarmed in the mean time so you run away. You use your flamethrower to get some armor to stay in the fight, but now you're low on ammo again, but your fuel hasn't recharged. You get low on health, but you can't damage the enemy because you have no way to deal damage with no bullets, so you run away from them waiting for your fuel to recharge so you can get some ammo... so you can shoot them... so you can glory kill them to get more health... rinse... repeat... It starts to feel more like a puzzle game where you need to figure out the correct order to use your skills and which optimal weapons to use in every fight if you want success. This leads you to dying a lot where you're thrown into situations that seem overwhelming unless you already know what's coming. This leads me to the 3rd fault of the game.
3) The game feels like you need to memorize the combat encounters rather than improvise your way through them.
That's what made Doom 2016 so fun. All the mindless killing and the awesome flow state you get into when you're in the thick of the battle. Now, there are enemies that appear half-way through combat encounters that summon infinite baddies (the Archvile for you old school fans) until they're eliminated and there are totems that buff all the enemies that are hidden around the arena. Both of these you'll have to search for in a frenzy to destroy them before things get too out of hand. Almost every time one of these archviles appeared, I died because I had no idea they were coming and flooded the area with too many enemies. I got tired of repeating the same combat scenarios over and over again until I slowly memorized where everything was and the correct order to kill everything. It was exhausting. It artificially adds a lot more difficulty to the game that's rather off-putting. A lot of people will say the game is "harder." It's not really much harder, it's just a lot less forgiving if you don't play each scenario in it's most optimal way.
I guess the developers realized how demoralizing these combat encounters were because they decided to book end them with a ton of platforming segments. These were the worst part of the game and almost made me quit several times. They often require the use of swinging from suspended poles, dashing through the air, hitting air currents, and wall grappling and climbing. Many times, I would waste several of my extra lives during these platforming segments that were supposed to be easy... but I never felt like the controls were good enough. This is the next issue.
4) Precision platforming in first person needs better controls than Doom Eternal provides.
Having to swing from bar to bar, dash to a crumbling wall, jump off it and dash through the air a number of times before going through a ring to replenish your dashes, etc., feels like a parkour obstacle course and would be better suited for a 3rd person action game rather than Eternal. It just never feels like it works and I'm shocked that such a large portion of the game is devoted to it. Not only that, but there are some swimming segments in the game that evoked an audible groan and eyeroll from me. I like exploring in Doom. In fact, that's one of the big draws of the franchise. But, I don't want to Ninja Warrior my way over giant bottomless pits in every level.
The last issue I have with the game doesn't involve gameplay. The game requires a day one patch to add a bunch of content and Bethesda, the publishers, require you to make a Bethesda account before they'll let you play the game (even in single player) unless you completely disconnect your console from the internet.
5) Don't add DRM to single-player games.
Some of us gamers go back and replay their games 5, 10, even 20 years later. You don't need to add online components to prevent players from accessing the single player content years down the road. Bethesda's recent practices with requiring you to be online to play single player games has been so bad that it's actually deterring me from buying anymore of their games. What are you supposed to do when the online servers go down a few years from now. At least you can still access the game by turning off your internet connection, but you shouldn't even have to do that.
In general, the game isn't as much fun as Doom 2016 and feels very tedious and like a chore to play. When I play Doom, I want to charge into the fight and wreck some demons. I don't want to run away from combat waiting for abilities to recharge and looking for weak enemies to kill to heal myself or to get ammo.
Story:
Like I mentioned, you once again play as the Doom Slayer. After the events of the reboot, you find yourself on a space station and realize that Earth is being consumed by Hell. You have to find all of the Hell Priests that are hidden not only on Earth, but also in other dimensions and kill them to prevent all of this from happening. It's a serviceable story and does a good enough job of carrying the action forward. But, unlike the reboot, this time you're inundated with a ton of lore that's full of zany terminology that recounts the history of the Earth, the demons, the Doom Slayer, space exploration, and alien race, energy consumption, and a whole bevy of ideas that ID software have decided to include to try to fill in every nook and cranny of all the cracks in their story.
6) Show me the story, don't tell me.
There must be over 100 pages of text that you can collect in the game that recount all of this complicated information about what's going on and how everything came to be. Now, don't get me wrong, I like lore in games. The Dark Souls games don't tell much of a story but do some fantastic world building with the lore you gain from the clues you find around the world. Even Doom 2016 did a great job building the mystique of the Doom Slayer by leaving fragments of information hidden around the maps. But, this time ID software jumped the shark with the amount of information they dumped on us. It feels like all of this should have been compiled into some sort of fictional history of DOOM and published as a novel (a la Tolkien's The Simarillion) or something similar. Most reviews I read and watched said they stopped paying attention to the story after a while. I'm no exception.
Presentation:
There's not much to find fault with in this case. Doom Eternal is probably the best looking of all of the PS4 games. I was playing this game at the same time I was playing some PS5 games, and Doom Eternal holds up against them and even looks better in a lot of cases. The graphics and textures are sharp and clean and the game runs at a pretty steady framerate. Some of the areas like the hub area between levels and Exultia are beautiful and a nice departure from the heaviness of the rest of the game.
The music is industrial with a bit of a Djent flair and is right in line from what you would expect from a Doom game. It serves its purpose, but I didn't especially find it memorable or catchy. This is coming from a life-long metal fan, but I found the riffs and chord progressions to be banal and almost intentionally pedestrian. At times the music lifted the experience, but mostly it felt phoned in.
Conclusion:
Doom Eternal is a great looking game that is bloated and inferior to the game that came before it. The combat isn't as fun and has a really repetitive gameplay loop that sucks all the enjoyment and enthusiasm right out of me. I could rarely play more than an hour at a time without getting frustrated or bored and it took me many sessions over several months to finish the experience. While the game did start to pick up in the second half as I became more experienced with the mechanics and reconciled myself to play the way the game wanted me to, it never reached the grand highs that the critics lauded in their reviews. It's still a decent game and there is some fun to be found there, but it doesn't hold a candle to Doom 2016.
Final Status: Beaten
Final Score: 7/10 (disappointing)
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