id Software, often hailed as the parents of the FPS, has a habit of reinventing the wheel every time they step into the arena. Doom, Quake, Quake 3, Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, and now they are trying once again to drag the genre back into the “Dark Ages” with a slightly different take on their own genre. Ladies, gentlemen, demons, and devils, we are going back to the past with Doom: The Dark Ages.
We Will Send Unto Them….Only You
Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to Doom 2016 and technically a sequel to Doom 64. It might just serve a little better to ignore that id tried to connect every Doom title that wasn’t RPG or 3 into one very untidy timeline and just think of this as the “beginning” of the Doom Slayer saga.
The game covers the Doom Slayer’s early days as a weapon for the Maykrs, a race of aliens that you should be very familiar with if you’ve played Doom Eternal. Doom: The Dark Ages sees the Slayer dropped into battle to help a race of humans once again on planet Argent D’Nur. The forces of Hell are hounding the planet, and it just so happens that the Maykrs have offered to help them out by sending one of their strongest weapons with absolutely no ulterior motive.
The story follows this skirmish of Argent vs Hell, with King Novak leading the humans and new antagonist Prince Ahzrak leading Doom Slayer’s favorite faction in the hordes of Hell. Ahzrak wants a power called the Heart of Argent while King Novak wants nothing more than to send the Prince home with his tail between his legs. And the Doom Slayer? Well, he does what he does best: staying mute while going about his business ripping and tearing until it is done.
The story does a good job of fleshing out some of the factions and events that cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in Doom Eternal and to a lesser extent Doom 2016. What it doesn’t do is have much focus on Mr. Slayer until the latter chapters of the game, where it becomes a much more personal story and more thematically matches the tone and magnitude of the previous games. You get a real “Doom Slayer” moment or three in this one, and blowing a hole in Mars pales in comparison to what he pulls off in this title.
While I did enjoy the story, it felt like Doom Slayer was just there for the most part. He’s almost treated like the weapon he said he was before the game, until it completely shifts gears several hours in and remembers that it’s also an “Origin” story about him. Much like Doom Eternal, the game kind of thrusts you into a situation that doesn’t get explained until much later on. The key difference between these two is there is much more of a focus on telling this tale of Argent vs Hell, and it feels at odds with the marine character who goes around bullying demons.
Doom Slayer’s About To Make You His B***h
Doom: The Dark Ages has been touted as a return to the more grounded style of gameplay following the rather acrobatic Doom Eternal. You’ll still be doing plenty of jumping, but it’s more like “Hulk bounding” as you jump onto the legions of Hell and introduce them to the bottom of your boots, with less mountain scaling and wall running.
If you haven’t tackled any of the new Doom games, while they have a lot in common with the FPS genre and the affectionately termed “boomer shooter” in particular, they have a rather unique spin on things. Ammo, health, and armor management are all dealt with via enemy kills, and the weapon or way you kill enemies spawn your health or ammo. It’s a little more visceral and in your face than Doom Eternal with stuff like melee and the Slayer’s new favorite toy, which is a shield that doubles as a chainsaw (as he doesn’t do things by halves).
The main new mechanic keeping Mr. Slayer grounded in this game is his shield. Like an ultraviolent Captain America simulator, you’ll be throwing the shield at demons to either split the smaller ones in half or stun the bigger ones as it rips at their flesh. As it is a shield, it also acts as your main source of defense. You’ll be dodging and blocking attacks at a level that would make any shmup blush. Then you’ll notice some of those attacks are green, so naturally you hit the block button at the last minute. Wouldn’t you know it, Doom Slayer can parry attacks, and you will certainly need to learn this in order to slap up the forces of Hell.
Whereas the previous games focused more on avoiding attacks, Doom: The Dark Ages excels when you jump guts-deep into the barrage of attacks, parrying and whittling down the forces. If you stand back and take cover, the game will take great pleasure in destroying you. Later on in the game, you get attributes for the shield that also allow you to unleash a lightning bolt or a mini turret. It’s metal as all hell, and as soon as this feature kicked in the game ramped up.
Your Affinity For Guns Is Apparent
Weaponry in Doom: The Dark Ages is about what you would expect from a “medieval-inspired” Doom game. While you still have Rocket and Grenade Launchers, Shotguns, and the weirdly out-of-place laser rifle, you also have the more on-theme weapons. These include a spread shot that fires out chunks of a skull as it slowly gets ground up, a launcher for a cannonball on a chain that was easily my favorite and most used in the game, a gun that fires out small spikes or giant impaling ones, and of course, the iconic BFG is now a room clearing crossbow. It’s a decent and fun mix of weapons where once again there is a use for each of them.
You can unlock modifications for each weapon by buying upgrades with in-game gold. These unlock alternative attacks or add an attribute to a weapon. For example, you can make the combat shotgun set enemies on fire on contact, or you can make your spike-firing gun stack spikes on enemies and turn it into a spike bomb that can be activated with your shield after you’ve pumped enough of them in. This all mixes well with the different shield attributes you can unlock, and the choice of three melee attacks all with their own different playstyle to make this feel like a “design your own Doom Slayer” which really opens up the combat.
It does however take quite a while for the combat to really reach its apex, making the first handful of hours feel like an awkward learning curve and slightly less than what you would have expected from the series. When Doom: The Dark Ages reaches full potential it stands toe to toe and even at some points steps over what came before, but it takes a while to get there.
The Cost Of Progress
Doom: The Dark Ages seems to have been designed at points with PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era shooters in mind, and with that comes what I felt was more bloat than focusing on the core game experience. There are turret sections, albeit only a few, as well as two different “vehicle” sections to break up the stages. These include one where you pilot a slow mech and do almost Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots with other demons, which while impressive to look at, is quite slow even if it doesn’t take too long. There are also the Dragon stages where you fly a Dragon round, taking down turrets and landing at different areas of the stages to take on disjointed combat areas. Neither of these sections was too bad, but I did feel these padded the game out a little too much.
Another more egregious example of a little too much fluff is how the more sprawling levels of the game present you with these giant battlefields which are much more open in terms of how you tackle objectives and where you go. The issue here is that the enemies don’t respawn, so the battlegrounds start to get sparse when you’re secret hunting. You spend so much time just running around these giant, empty stages while wishing you could be instead going through some of the more brilliantly designed linear stages like the series is known for. Points for trying something new here, but these levels really needed a little more time in the cooker.
The Slayer Has Entered The Building
When Doom: The Dark Ages fires on all cylinders it feels absolutely phenomenal. It seems to have taken all the criticism of Doom Eternal and kept it in mind as they designed The Dark Ages, there aren’t painful jumping sections. Brutal kills have calmed down a lot and don’t take you out of the game. The campaign is fairly hefty, with 22 chapters which clocked in at around 20 hours total, something I really wasn’t expecting.
There are the usual difficulty settings ranging from easy to soul-destroying. For this one, there are sliders where you can change how frequently you get attacked or how much of a window you have to parry attacks, making it one of the most accessible (or debilitatingly difficult) FPS on the market. There’s no multiplayer mode this time around, which will upset some. I personally never bothered with Doom Eternal’s multiplayer, but would have enjoyed some traditional id-style deathmatch.
Doom: The Dark Ages is a worthy follow-up to Doom Eternal but it valleys far more than it peaks. I find it to be the weakest of the new trilogy but still one of the market leaders for the genre.
God Rested On The Seventh Day
In terms of visuals, Doom: The Dark Ages really leans into the classic “heavy metal album cover” art style. Doom Slayer riding a dragon around a war-torn battlefield with giant demon carcasses littering the field and a giant castle in the background with a pentagram in the sky is quite the image. For metal heads or Warhammer 40k fans, this will make you think “hell yeah”, but for those less into this over-the-top style, it all will likely feel a little too much.
Graphically the game doesn’t actually look that much better than what came before. Instead, the focus seems to really lean on the lighting which I know is a major point of contention for PC gamers. My laptop runs Doom Eternal on ultra settings just fine, but Doom: The Dark Ages uses RTX (Nvidia’s ray tracing), hardware-intensive lighting-rendering that meant I had to go to PlayStation 5 and play with a controller for this one.
The voice acting in this one is top notch and you can tell id Software really wanted to tell this story through side characters. While not mute, Doom Slayer is a man of few words which just further adds to his mystique. The music is fine for the game. It really leans into the theme, but pales in comparison to the award-winning soundtracks of the previous games. Whereas with previous titles the music leaned into the action and ebbed and flowed with what was going on, these tracks just seemed to play on regardless. Sadly there was nothing here as memorable as Doom 2016’s BFG Division or the many earworms from the original Doom titles.
Verdict
Doom: The Dark Ages was a personally divisive title, and I can imagine some people will not stick with it long enough for it to experience the best of it. It feels completely different from the previous games in both good and bad ways. The game was already released under a dark cloud, but looking back after the credits hit, I had a lot of fun with the game. It just took far too long to show me how fun it could be.
You’ll rip and tear until it’s done, you’ll plod along at some places, and go face-meltingly fast through some combat encounters, but at the end of the day you’ll still be playing one of the best modern boomer shooters to date. It seems every third Doom is born to be controversial but Doom: The Dark Ages just grabs the devil by the horns and kicks all kinds of ass…eventually.
DOOM: THE DARK AGES IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another FPS, you may enjoy Metal: Hellsinger VR.
Many thanks go to Bethesda for a PlayStation 5 review code for Doom: The Dark Ages.
Pride of utopia & greatest thing ever, I found the One Piece, Collected the Dragon Balls & won the Mortal Kombat Tournament in one night, it was quiet for me that night! Follow me on Twitter @powahdunk
