The Doom reboot in 2016 was not the most complicated game in the world but it was everything it needed to be. A straightforward gameplay loop and a story that matters as little to the player as it does to the protagonist is basically all you can ask for from Doom, where it’s all about killing demons as priorities one, two, three, four and five. Doom Eternal did what all overly-ambitious sequels do and muddied the waters with more emphasis on the story and a ridiculous amount of options in combat. These options led many players to either suffer from choice paralysis or just hit every button on their keyboard at once, and by the end felt more like you were answering multiple-choice questions rather than playing a video game. Now we have Doom: The Dark Ages, which has decided to go the “third game prequel” route while burdened by the expectations of a popular franchise that took a few wrong steps in its second title.
On paper Doom: The Dark Ages is exactly like the previous games. Gameplay is focused around constant movement to fight swarms of demons, killing them in various ways to recover heath, armor, and ammo while the music blasts along with you in the background. In practice Dark Ages gameplay is warped by its newest, most prominent addition: the Shield Saw, which is exactly what it sounds like. You are never without your shield and it serves many different functions throughout the game, with the most obvious being the most prominent as you now have defensive options in Doom beyond “don’t stop moving.” The Shield Saw can block most attacks, parry certain others, kill weaker enemies by throwing it or charging into them with it, and stun stronger enemies, along with other unlocks. It is your all-around weapon and is inevitably part of your answer to many of the game’s problems, but unfortunately its omnipresence leads to its own issues.
The key takeaway from the Shield Saw’s presence is that the overall gameplay in Dark Ages feels more weighted and methodical than more recent Doom titles. The shield’s ability to block or parry attacks means you can stand still and let enemies come to you, and you can force stronger enemies themselves to stand still by stunning them with your thrown shield. Enemies are more likely to be armored in Dark Ages and thus immune to damage until you hit them a few times with weapons before, you guessed it, breaking their armor with your shield. So you have the player being in some ways encouraged to be slower by letting the enemy attack you for blocks/parries, enemies being stunned in place by a Shield Saw embedded in their chests, and the need to hit bigger enemies with certain attacks to first to break their armor before you can actually hurt them, all of which can hurt the tempo of combat. And of course something had to be sacrificed to make this new cool feature always available so weapons no longer have secondary fire options, with the Shield Saw replacing that button instead. No more staples from the previous titles like “automatic with a big blast secondary” or creative weapons like a shotgun with a harpoon on the end, instead you’ve just got “shield charge” and the ability to enhance your parry with some highly powerful counterattacks. Said counterattacks are fun but are clearly over-tuned just to encourage you to use the shield more.
Fortunately this weightiness in the gameplay appears to have been by design as most everything in Dark Ages contributes to it. The Doom Slayer seems wider and heavier thanks to his cape and shield giving him a larger profile. In cutscenes he always moves with a deliberate, menacing slowness that at times doesn’t seem fitting at all but adds to the feeling of this massive armored warrior. Enemy armor shatters explosively when you break it and there’s nothing the game likes more than having you drop from any given height only to land with such titanic force that you burst any nearby minor demons on impact. The latter being only slightly undermined by the fact that you rarely leave craters in the ground from such a feat.
With all of this emphasis on the heavy, earth-shattering nature of the Doom Slayer you’d probably expect that the franchises iconic Glory Kills would receive a similar treatment. Unfortunately it’s actually the exact opposite as outside of bosses the majority of Glory Kill animations are just generic punches or kicks, which feels very deflating to me. You can’t even Glory Kill weaker enemies as the majority of them die in one hit from everything. There are still Glory Kills to be had but you’ve got to actively attempt to do them by jumping towards an enemy as you press the button. This naturally makes the animations even more redundant than they were in previous games as most of your Kills will be “land on their shoulders and either stomp or Shield Saw their head off” and outside of enjoying the gore there’s very little reason to do them at all when the default quick punch will do and the gameplay then isn’t “interrupted” by the more cinematic kills. Who cares that it ruins the scale of the demonic threat or removes the Slayer’s rage from the atmosphere? Just vaguely kick in an enemy’s direction to finish them off and move on.
Speaking of “quick punches” there’s proper melee attacks now! Melee weapons aren’t exactly new in the modern Doom games (there was even a weak stun punch in Eternal) but they were primarily high damage gimmicks with limited uses that you could use to delete troublesome enemies. Dark Ages maintains the limited idea by only giving you three uses of your melee attack at a time, but the charges refresh on their own unlike the chainsaw and Crucible from the previous games that only recharged from ammo pick ups. Admittedly Dark Ages melee attacks are not the super powered “answer to all things” they were before and are just more a traditional “punch a guy close to you” button that can be upgraded to apply debuffs, but it still feels a little weird to be consistently doing melee attacks in a game series that hadn’t made that a core focus before.
With the lack of secondary fire and now a surprise inclusion of melee options you might be worried that the guns in Doom Eternal are lacking. Fortunately they still feel good to use, though the rebooted franchise has been around for so long that there’s very little in the arsenal you haven’t seen before, and the removal of secondary fire has hampered the addition of any cute little quirks. The newest and most creative addition is the Pulverizer, a low-damage large-spread weapon that uses skulls for ammo and is good at clearing large hordes of weak enemies and not too much else. It’s still a relatively unique weapon visually… until you get the Ravager about ten missions later that looks almost exactly the same only it fires in a tighter spread and makes you move slower.
Similar weapons that use the same ammo type is nothing new in Doom, such as the Combat Shotgun versus the Super Shotgun, but much like the simplified Glory Kills in Dark Ages they attempted to simplify the guns too with “weapon classes.” Through weapon classes you have eleven different guns that are spread across six different categories of weapons (two for five categories and one unique) and on PC to access different weapons in the same class you just equip one of the weapons and then press that weapon’s key again to bring up the other one. This is a positive for two reasons, primarily being that no one has time to reach all the way over to “8” on your keyboard in the previous Doom titles to equip the late game weapons in a firefight. Now you just have to hit “6”! Second it’s much easier to maintain ammo economy in your head if every weapon with a certain ammo type is in the same category. No more accidentally equipping the Super Shotgun after you’ve spent all the default shotgun’s ammo because they’re both in the same keybind.
If these sound like minor positives it’s because they are but I’m using them to delay talking about the actual issue with weapon classes: boring weapon design. Clearly the developers felt mandated by the inclusion of the weapon classes to make two weapons for almost every category, and as such at least a third of the weapons feel redundant, unnecessary, and that they would have been better as a secondary fire option on a different gun. Shame we don’t have secondary fire any more! I already mentioned the Pulverizer and the Ravager being nearly identical just with different spreads and movement speeds, then there’s an assault rifle paired with a DMR equivalent for headshots (which was just an alternate fire option in Doom) and two different plasma rifles where the only difference is one when upgraded does AOE shock damage and the other… gets more accurate when you fire it. That’s without even mentioning that you get a grenade launcher weapon and not two missions later it is immediately forgotten when the game gives you a proper rocket launcher. That’s half the weapons in the game that are just redundant or simply worse versions of another, and without alternate fire modes the weapons never truly grow beyond what they say on the tin. There’s a brief moment with the starting shotgun where it seems like they were going to go the Eternal route of giving each weapon a resource farm outlet, as the shotgun when upgraded lights enemies on fire so they drop armor when damaged, but weapons with that upgrade path are few and far between.
Much like Doom Eternal, Doom: The Dark Ages also cares a lot more about the story than the first game of the reboot did. It starts off interestingly enough, with the Doom Slayer as a mind-controlled puppet of the Maykrs (the “angels” equivalent in the Doom universe) for use against demonic incursions. Inevitably he breaks free but he continues to just keep doing what he was doing already (killing demons) without much change in behavior or mechanics, which is a bit of a loss from a story perspective. Not that I’m expecting him to start writing poetry or something but I would have liked some change in demeanor, though I suppose it’s kind of hard when brainwashing makes you a silent protagonist but that’s also your default state of being. The story is also far less “personal” than Doom or even Doom Eternal, with most cutscenes from a third person or more cinematic perspective than the “in the helmet” cutscenes that you had primarily in Doom, and feels more generic because of it.
Beyond the overall quality of the plot itself there’s also an underlying current of illogical jumps in time and characters from one scene to another that makes me feel like some levels may have been left on the cutting room floor. Or we could blame AI like we do for every other bad writing decision these days. A particular sticking point is how some characters just appear or disappear without any sort of explanation or even context. The Doom Slayer saves a character who runs to safety but is later described as “still on the run” while the Slayer himself is just hanging out with the other humans. The Maykr that brainwashed the Slayer randomly appears side by side with the humans with no explanation for when/how he got there, meanwhile there’s several levels early on in Hell that I guess we just walked to off-screen? There’s also a ridiculous scene where a demon just casually pulls the Doom Slayer’s helmet off, which you’d think someone else would have tried by now, never mind the questions it raises about the underwater sections. And no, I don’t actually care that much about the story but if the developers want to expand the Doom mythos then they should do it with a story that makes sense. Or they should be willing to take risks with gameplay mechanics, such as in a level towards the end where you absolutely should have only one weapon at least to start the chapter but god forbid we go ten seconds without the Shield Saw.
I’ve been avoiding talking about game presentation these days because it’s all mostly the same and is so PC build dependent, but I’m going to vent at the end here about Dark Ages technical issues with tracking quests and secrets. Much like the previous games Dark Ages has both secrets to uncover and combat challenges to complete for rewards, and in my experience they’re a lot more straightforward than the ones that came before. This is probably because of the simplified gameplay mechanics but that’s not where I’m going with this. Multiple times throughout my campaign run secrets didn’t register when I found them and combat challenges either had poor stat tracking, were badly explained, or inexplicably were marked as completed before I even started their particular level. Towards the end of the game the stat tracking simply stopped working if I quit the game without starting the next level, so when I loaded up my next campaign mission the next day I’d start it showing a random number of secrets already found. This is confusing, frustrating if you’re trying to 100% the game, an annoying cherry on top of an already mixed experience, and while it’s not going to sour my final opinion on the game it’s something I would have felt incomplete without mentioning.
To summarize we have: an additional emphasis on an inconsistent story that doesn’t take enough risks, occasionally boring weapon designs without alternative fire modes, a sprint button I didn’t get around to mentioning, vehicle sections, simplified Glory Kills, and the overemphasis on the new shield in combat. Added all together Doom: The Dark Ages at times feels like it was made by some other company that saw Doom‘s original success and took nine years to make their own, inferior copy. The combat still has that Doom feel and the music still hits in just the right way regardless of what you’re doing, but the “if it’s green counter it,” “if it’s orange break it,” and “if they’re small just throw your shield” makes many encounters feel like a paint-by-numbers exercise rather than the gory playground that the past two games have given us. Ironically I’d probably still recommend it over Doom Eternal since the weightier combat, more balanced enemy design, and reduced options meant I didn’t feel like I was having an aneurysm in the end game. “Worse than the first one” is really not want you want to hear when talking about the sequels in a franchise, but maybe they’ll hit the target when they get around to a fourth one. If you do feel like picking up Dark Ages I’m sure you’ll find moments where you’re having a good time, but the magic just isn’t there.
