Hell hath plenty of fury…
When Doom saw a reboot back in 2016, it was a fast-paced ballet of bloodshed that never quit. It was paced almost perfectly and saw the return of the Slayer doing what he does best; ripping and tearing demons apart in the most violent ways possible. The game featured plenty of difficulty options to make your slaughter more fitting to your own personal skill level, but Doom: Eternal makes most of those settings feel like child’s play as this latest entry into the gory franchise is bigger, better, and insanely more difficult at every turn.
Doom Eternal sees the Slayer on a single-minded path of decimating any and all demons that are currently invading earth. His focus is to eliminate a series of three Hell Priests as they plot to consume the human populace during their time to pay sacrifice to their beliefs. It’s not a narrative that really has much more going for it than that, apart from digging into the lore, but is rather a means to an end for the Doom Guy to tear it up and slaughter every last thing in his wake. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the cutscene moments and much of the dialogue, and seeing the remaining human lives react to this towering man walking through their facilities, gunning down and face-punching the demons nipping at their heels, is another feather in this game’s blood-soaked cap.
If I had to summarize Doom: Eternal into one singular word, it would be “aggressive” as not only are you prodded to seek out enemies more viscously than before, but almost every demon is laser-focused on rushing you or boxing you in to cut you down extremely fast. This causes Doom: Eternal to play very differently than its predecessor, opting for a more faster-paced series of combat encounters that keeps you on the run. About the only breathing room you’ll have is through exploring for secrets or taking part in the new platforming aspects that I’ll detail later on because I certainly have issues with them.
Doom’s biggest selling point has always been the endless carnage that awaits you in almost every room. Demons of all shapes and sizes, not to mention drastically different threat levels, will be awaiting your arrival, sometimes boosted with a buff totem that makes them not only stronger but more aggressive in nature. While Doom 2016 had glory kills, they often didn’t contribute to being the sole reason for your survival. Here, even a single glory kill can often mean the difference between life or death. As you grab onto the almost dying demonic threats around you, their flashing bodies indicating that you can reach out and tear them apart, you can shove their arms down their throat, snap their neck like a piece of uncooked spaghetti, or pound them into submission.
These brilliant animations, which vary on the angle you reach them from, cause enemies to drop health and ammo, and should you douse them in flames from your shoulder-mounted flame thrower, you can earn armor shards as well. This reliance on glory kills forces you to dive into a crowded mess of enemies, and analyze the battlefield in ways that weren’t as required in the previous game. Your chainsaw is also needed more so than ever as using fuel, with the amount varying from enemy to enemy, is how you'll earn back health in most cases. The reliance on using your tools to stay alive creates a very different feel in Eternal than 2016’s Doom, and makes each encounter more frantic and enjoyable in all the right ways.
In fact, because of how aggressive enemies are, combat feels much faster, causing even the slightest stop to put you in incredible danger. To assist in moving around each environment, you will have a series of traversal elements to keep you on the move. Launchpads will boost you through the air, extended pipes or poles will let you continue your jump, and your dash can often bridge the gap when paired with your double jump. There is also the meat hook, a bladed hook that extends out from your double-barrel shotgun, that can reach out to distanced enemies to pull you towards them, or as a useful tool in one of the more frustrating boss encounters.
Weapons are truly the star of the show and each of them has alternative fire modes that can also be a weakness for several foes you’ll encounter. Revenants, for example, can be sorted out with a few precision shots with the upgrade to the Heavy Cannon, whereas a properly tossed frag or sticky bomb can put a Cacodemon in a glory kill state right away, making short work of these once challenging foes. A rampaging Pinky can be dealt with easily with a blood punch, a devastating strike that is built up when you’ve unleashed a few glory kills, and this punch is also useful in destroying the armor of a Cyber Mancubus. One of my favorites is completely decimating the shield of the Carcasses with a punishing splatter of rounds from my plasma rifle, and then going in with my combat shotgun to finish them off. Nearly every enemy has some sort of weakness or area of the body to target with a certain rifle that it can have you swapping to your whole arsenal in a single encounter, instead of most shooters where you’ll often just settle down with a small handful of your entire collection. It’s a smart play that lets you toy around with the assortment of deadly weapons offered to you, providing you with new favorites along the way.
The weapon assortment between 2016 and now is pretty minimal in its changes. The Gauss Cannon, sidearm, and Heavy Assault Rifle are out, replaced with the Heavy Cannon, which does in some ways mimic the Assault Rifle, and the Ballista, a powerhouse energy blaster that feels almost like a futuristic crossbow in many ways. Otherwise, that’s pretty much it with the change to weapon variety, leaving the combat shotgun, chaingun, chainsaw, rocket launcher, plasma rifle, super shotgun, and the BFG-9000 to fill out the rest of the gun roster. Several of the upgrades to each gun can often make each weapon feel drastically different from its default state. Each weapon has two upgrades to explore, with only one mod being able to be active at any given time. Each mod then has upgrades and mastery enhancements as well, such as increasing the speed of your chaingun’s mobile turret or eventually gaining a second lock-on sensor for your rocket launcher. Personally, for my money, the combat shotgun was easily my weapon of choice as the sticky bombs just created so many fun and bombastic moments that I couldn’t get enough of it. There are also a few more late game and unlockable weapons that I’ll leave for you to discover their truly destructive power on your own as they are insanely impressive to use.
Apart from those weapons, the Doom Slayer also has a new ability as well, Ice Bombs. Via a shoulder-mounted grenade launcher that can not just toss a regular ol’ frag grenade, but you can shoot out a regenerating Ice Bomb as well, leaving a small area of demons frozen in their tracks. Now, there are some enemies they don’t work on, but for the most part, you can truly take advantage of your frozen prey and even upgrade your frozen bombs through your Praetor suit upgrades, allowing you to reduce the cooldown of the Ice Bomb recharge, to having enemies drop health if killed while frozen. The remainder of the suit upgrades vary in several categories, such as grabbing ledges faster, tracking down collectibles more efficiently, to boosting the effectiveness of your frag grenade or RAD suit, should you tend to take a while during its radioactive swimming sections. You’ll also look to equip Runes to the Slayer as well, which lets you reach glory kills from farther away, increase the time they stay ready for a glory kill, or having your blood punch drop some health from defeated foes. There is a lot here to customize, but I felt that the Praetor suit upgrades were far too streamlined and linear, with only a few Runes being really effective, given you can only equip three of them at a time. I would have preferred to see a system set up that allowed you to construct very distinct builds to tailor-make the Slayer to your own personal needs, rather than a system where you can more or less equip almost everything.
I’ve mentioned a few enemies so far, but there is only one that really forces you to really take everything you’ve learned or equipped and adapt it to a very intense one-on-one encounter. The Marauders, as seen below, are a group of renegade Night Sentinels who are aligned with the Khan Makyr, the entity that orchestrated the Hell invasion of Earth. These powerhouse brutes have varying attacks based on the distance from him and the Doom Marine, making him a threat at almost any distance. Get too close and he’ll unload from his super shotgun, but get too far away and he will fire a projectile from his axe. He also has an orange ghost wolf who can slow you down as you’re trying to run away. These encounters are always against just one of them, but often you’ll have digestible fodder nearby to keep you alive. While there is a strategy to the fights, he can certainly be a frustrating encounter due to not just his mechanics, but how aggressive and almost bulletproof he is. He’s certainly an interesting foe and can give even the toughest players a real challenge on the higher difficulties.
The game is also loaded with a few bosses, one of which becomes a regular enemy later on. I love the level design of the lead up to the fight as you are literally seeing him built before you as you tour the facility. The fight, and the one that immediately follows, is still one of my favorite moments in the game. While I still feel somewhat let down from the final encounter, the second to last one I found to be very lacking in its design. I like the way you attack and strike at this boss, but the fight is almost always about looking up than anywhere else, making it feel somewhat clunky and easy to have the ground forces, as well as when fire is just everywhere, to drastically deplete your health when your attention is focused in a direction that the game hasn’t really used enough to warrant the drastic change in gameplay. That said, I don’t think any encounter in the game is bad in any way as I had a great time pushing through them, but felt that they could have just been designed a bit better overall.
I mentioned at the start of this review that Doom: Eternal has a solid amount of platforming, which is somewhat of a new addition to the Doom series. You can leap to certain textured walls, pushing in the right analog stick to latch onto them, as well a series of pipe hopping, double jumps, dashes, and mantling up ledges that you need to ascend up to, or those that you just barely make during a long jump. For the most part, the platforming is ok, sometimes decent, but rarely great as there isn’t a lot of forgiveness when you’re leaping great distances and then are trying to quickly grab onto a wall. There are a handful of these jumping sections where you’re leaping from wall to wall that didn’t really sit well with me. I welcome the new addition and think it can certainly be used effectively to pace and create a fun sense of exploration, but some levels, such as the second to last one, is overloaded with these leaping sections to the point where I probably won’t ever dive back into that specific level again. Had the Slayer auto-latched on to each wall instead of manually having us grab the wall, then maybe I wouldn’t mind it, but I had way too many deaths due to pixel-width fails that it became something of frustration than fun. Apart from the platforming, the radioactive swimming sections also weren’t terribly engaging, but thankfully, there is such a small use of them here that it really didn’t bother me that much, but man you swim up and down far too slow.
During your exploration of each environment, you’ll encounter a wide range of secret paths, hidden doors and numerous challenge rooms that will keep you coming back and using the fast travel locations within each level to maximize your collecting of every secret item and collectible. There are cheat codes to track down, which allow you to unleash hell upon repeating a level, to nabbing vinyl records of classic doom songs. You’ll also want to track down Sentinel Batteries as you can unlock costumes, praetor coins, and more when you return your floating fortress, a massive hub location that has its own share of secrets. Apart from those secrets, Doom: Eternal has a fantastic map system that made exploration not just easy, but vastly more fun. You can also take part in Master Level challenges that shake-up several encounters for a much more intense series of challenges. At the time of review, there were only two available: Arc Complex, which is unlocked when playing the game close to launch, and Cultist Base, which was a pre-order bonus. Additional levels will be released during the lifespan of the game, to further keep your skills as sharp as ever.
Battlemode, a 2v1 multiplayer mode for Doom Eternal sounded great on paper. Two demons; choosing from the Arch-Vile, Mancubus, Marauder, Pain Elemental, and Revenant, hunting down the Doom Slayer should be fun, but it’s only that half of the time. Playing as the demons is vastly enjoyable, summoning lesser assistance in the forms of more digestible demon helpers, and using your wealth of different demonic abilities to hunt the slayer is a solid time. However; playing as the Slayer is an exercise in frustration as the game doesn’t feel balanced for non-AI combatants hunting down the titular hero. Any time I would play as the Slayer, and that of seeing the Slayer run around while in the guise of a demon felt futile and short-lived and was rarely every fun. While more skilled players may have a totally different experience, I just couldn’t find enough fun here to keep with the mode, despite how engaging it is playing as the demons. Had Doom: Eternal had a more traditional multiplayer model with a team of Slayers pitted against a full team of demons, then maybe I would have stayed a bit longer.
Doom: Eternal features a lot of different options for your difficulty. While Doom 2016 had its fair share of challenge. Each difficulty option feels harder than its 2016 counterpart, but a lot of that has to do with the different take on enemies being more aggressive here than before. Difficulty does change certain unlocks and XP earnings, but it’s safe to say that a lot of players are probably going to dive into Ultra-Violence or Nightmare, as their default setting, with Ultra-Nightmare being the one death and you’re out mode that only the most skilled players should undertake. One change to each difficulty option is the inclusion of extra lives, which place the Doom Marine right back in the way immediately upon dying, giving you a second chance to turn the tide. For those that don’t want to use these lives, they can be turned off to give you the more pure Doom experience.
With the jump to the new id Tech 7 engine, Doom has never looked better, and the file size is also noticeably smaller as well. This is largely in part to the new engine better utilizing high-resolution textures without the need for massive textures holding back performance. The game on the Xbox One X runs at a silky smooth 60fps, at 1800p, with the PS4 Pro version running at 1440p, with the One X being upscaled to 4k, and the Pro boosted to 2160p. The standard Xbox One and PS4 systems still look decent but run at a much lower resolution across the board. Now, all that said, Doom: Eternal looks stunningly gorgeous and is a visual masterpiece everywhere you look. Demons are far better detailed, and the lighting is much better as well, giving the game very distinct looks across each of its several environments. While they only serve a few minutes of screen-time, the few humans featured in the game look like they belong in a lesser graphical capable game and are not anywhere near as impressive as everything else, otherwise, Doom: Eternal is gorgeous.
Punctuated with a killer metal soundtrack, which almost gives you the confidence to tackle each and every challenge, Doom: Eternal is a bigger and better game in nearly every way. I’m still not crazy about the platforming, or swimming, and felt some boss encounters could have been better designed, but damn if this isn’t a really impressive shooter regardless of any of the issues I have with it. Nothing here is bad in any real way, and a lot of my issues can easily come across as mere nitpicks, but they are issues I did have with the game that I needed to at least have a conversation about. If Doom 2016 whet your appetite for more Doom, then Eternal is the main course with all the blood-soaked trimmings.
Doom: Eternal was purchased by the reviewer and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.