Doom: Eternal Rips and Tears the Competition

The other week I picked up my pre-order of Doom: Eternal and ran through the campaign at a leisurely pace. Needless to say, my opinions were rather mixed, and still are.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The story is relatively straightforward in that you are the Doom Slayer and your mission is to save Earth and kill anything that stands in your way. Throughout the game, you travel from location to location as you track down the Hell Priests that are leading the armies of Hell in their ravaging of Earth. Once you’ve killed them all, the Khan Makyr, who’s basically the angelic voice of the heavens (but NOT God), decides that you’ve interfered enough and Earth will be destroyed by the Icon of Sin. Things go about how you’d expect. Overall, the campaign is pretty straightforward and enjoyable. The lore is also quite enjoyable and definitely adds a lot to the game. I also really appreciate how the game builds off the original, much like Doom (2016) did, with its treatment of the Icon of Sin.

SPOILERS END

I went in to Doom: Eternal with sky-high expectations, and the game definitely delivered, for the most part. In Doom (2016) you felt incredibly powerful, especially towards the end of the game. However, in Doom: Eternal, you definitely still feel powerful, but so do the demons. Doom: Eternal is a lot harder than Doom. Shortly before Eternal dropped, I finally finished my campaign of Doom on Ultra-Violence (hard mode). I thought that Eternal’s Hurt Me Plenty (normal mode) was easily as difficult, if not more so at times. This isn’t a knock against the game or anything, difficulty can be a good thing, but sometimes I felt that the difficulty felt a bit inflated. You get a massive arsenal in Doom: Eternal, and you have to use it all to succeed. Your ammo is relatively limited, so you need to constantly switch from weapon to weapon, and when you’re completely out of ammo, you need to use your chainsaw. I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with this system, it just felt very jarring for me going from having fifty rounds in my shotgun in Doom to twenty-four in Doom: Eternal. In addition the demons are quite a bit tougher and there are a lot more of them. Doom kept the classic roster of demons, but Eternal adds upon it immensely, which helps to add variety. I will say, by the end of Doom it felt like the game ended every encounter with a Mancubus or two, which did get kind of stale. By the end of Eternal, I never knew what the encounter would throw at me. If I was lucky, I’d just have to deal with a Baron of Hell or two; if I wasn’t I found myself facing an Arch-Vile. And for the most part, I’d say the demons are relatively balanced, with a few exceptions. My biggest gripes come down to the Whiplash, the Carcass, the Arch-Vile, and the Marauder. The Whiplash and the Carcass both have an infuriating wave attack that deals a lot of damage and pushes you back. And they’re targeting is flawless. It was not uncommon for me to be running from demons during combat when all of a sudden a wave would slam into me, taking away half of my health and pushing me right into the Pinky that I was trying to strafe around. But as the game went on, I found these guys to become a bit more manageable. Arch-Viles, on the other hand, can go to Hell. I wouldn’t have an issue with these guys if they didn’t have high health, deal considerable damage at every range, summon constant demons, and buff ever demon in the vicinity’s speed and damage. Remove any aspect of these guys and they’d be fantastic. I remember my first encounter with an Arch-Vile involved me getting cornered multiple time but its endless horde of swole summoned demons as I scoured the arena trying to find him. Luckily every time after that I had a weapon that could one shot him. And therein lies the biggest issue, at least for me. I try to avoid using my OP weapons as crutches, but when faced with an Arch-Vile, there’s nothing I can do. And as for the Marauder, the biggest issue with them is that they slow combat to a crawl. You can’t fight Marauders like any other demon, because they have an indestructible shield that they only lower when they attack you, which again, slows combat to a crawl.

Overall, I found the level design to be great. Every fight was intense and incredible, but let me say, the final level was absolutely perfect. I found the final level to be the perfect balance of chaos, and I was at peak strength with everything upgraded, and I loved it. The final level is everything that I wanted the game to be, and that’s my biggest issue. It saddens me that it isn’t until the very end that it felt like you had truly become an unstoppable force of nature. Still, I’d rather it happen at the end than never before, but that’s not to say that you aren’t powerful early on, because you are.

And don’t get me wrong, I know that it sounds like I’ve just been complaining about the game, but in the grand scheme of things, these are all just nitpicks. I found Doom: Eternal to be one of the most fun games I’ve played in a while. I thoroughly enjoyed Doom: Eternal, and would highly recommend it. The combat, as I’ve mentioned, is incredibly fast paced, even more so than Doom. Similarly, you really are an unstoppable force of nature, and the extra lives system does help to offset the difficulty. Throughout the levels in Eternal, you can collect extra lives that revive you where you stand if your health ever hits zero, and it definitely makes the game easier to play. So if you wanted to, you could play Eternal with reckless abandon.

Now, my biggest issue with Doom: Eternal as a whole is that once you’ve beaten the campaign, there isn’t a whole lot to do. The multiplayer mode is ok, but it feels a little shallow, at least at the moment. It’s a shame that Eternal doesn’t bring back Doom’s snapmap feature, but maybe it’ll get added in the future; I can hope. In addition, I wish that Eternal brought back the standard multiplayer that was present in Doom.

Overall, Doom: Eternal is a great game marred by a handful of issues and changes, some of which aren’t even bad, I’m just not a fan of them. The game is definitely brutal and unrelenting and ridiculously fun. I would say that Doom: Eternal is definitely an 8.5/10.