Doom: The Dark Ages Review
“Ye Olde Ripp and Tear” Written by: Hunter (@ReaperHunter23)
It has been over five years since Doom fans ripped and tore their way through Doom: Eternal. Early in 2024 there were mutterings over what the next chapter in the Doom Slayer’s rampage would be. Before long our questions were answered when Doom: The Dark Ages was revealed during the Xbox Summer showcase. The Doom Slayer was now dressed in a spiffy fur mantle and wielding a new arsenal of weapons. Id would clue us in to new details on the game as time went on. Such as the new weapons the Doom Slayer would be using and the game’s “Stand and Fight” design philosophy. Let’s take a look to see if Doom: The Dark Ages was worth the wait.
Image Credit: ID Software, Bethesda
Doom: The Dark Ages takes place several years before the events of Doom 2016 and Eternal. It seems like it starts just a short time after the Doom Slayer’s titanic clash against The Dreadnaught that you hear about in the lore logs of the previous two games. This means the events of Dark Ages happen right at the height of the Doom Slayer’s mythical demon slaying rampage. The way the story presents the Doom Slayer in this game really reinforces the whole “Demonic boogeyman” aura that he has.
The tagline on the game before you launch it is “You are a super weapon in a medieval war” and oh boy, this game does everything in its power to make you feel like it. When the Slayer is not on the battlefield, he is kept in a containment room on a satellite base. When he is called into battle it is treated with the same level of gravity as someone calling in a strike from an orbital laser. Almost nothing slows him down, and anything that does is treated as a minor inconvenience.
The story of the game is exactly what it needs to be. Every mission is bookended with a set of cutscenes that set up what cool thing the Doom Slayer will be doing for that chapter. The Doom Slayer is a fun character to follow and the story gives him plenty of cool scenarios to engage in. The secondary characters aren’t anything special, but they don’t do anything to get in the way. I did think that Prince Ahzrak was pretty effective as a villain. Having an antagonist that goes beyond the nebulous concept of Demons or The Maykhrs helped provide a more solid sense of direction.
Image Credit: ID Software, Bethesda
The gameplay of Doom: The Dark Ages does everything to back up the feeling that the Doom Slayer is an unstoppable force. The core gameplay philosophy this time around is “Stand And Fight”. One major way they achieve this is just by the sheer number of enemies on the screen. Granted, a lot of these enemies are fodder that just crumble in the wake of the Doom Slayer. Each combat encounter still contains a comparable number of meaningful enemies to contend with. This makes the extra mooks more like icing on the cake rather than the primary point of the fights.
One of the new primary mechanics is the snazzy shield that Doom Guy is armed with. The shield has a myriad of uses. The simplest move is throwing the shield. This is great for taking out fodder enemies without expending any ammo. Throwing the shield at a larger enemy stuns them in place for a moment while it grinds into them. The shield also allows the Doom Slayer to parry specific types of attacks. A successful parry results in a charged up counter attack for whatever weapon you are using. The last move in the shield’s arsenal is a high impact rush maneuver that is good for closing the distance between you and an enemy. Whenever you crash into an enemy with a charge, it causes a shockwave that destroys a fair number of any fodder enemies nearby. A little bit later on in the game, you start unlocking shield runes that have various effects when performing a parry. The shield throw and charge moves are integrated pretty deftly into the game's traversal as well.
I quite enjoyed this game’s selection of guns as well. The game does a solid job of giving you a wide variety of weapons to play with while still making it very digestible. There are six different weapon classes in the game. Each weapon class has two different guns. Both guns use the same type of ammo but the individual weapons have different use cases. A good example of this would be the difference between the Shredder and the Impaler. The shredder fires a load of tiny spikes into an enemy in rapid succession. The Impaler is the closest thing the game has to a sniper rifle with high powered headshots being the go to strategy when using it. The Chainshot was a fun and unique weapon that for some reason did not have a companion gun. It is effectively a ball and chain being fired out of a launcher. I had a lot of fun using it on the bigger enemies that I had to parry a lot.
My favorite guns to use were the Super Shotgun, the Pulverizer, and the Ravager. The Super shotgun was great for just melting the larger enemies. They made it a lever action gun this time around. It made the operating cycle a little different but it still provided a level of satisfaction that is best described as primal. The Pulverizer and the Ravager are the two Skull-shrapnel weapons. I was absolutely captivated by these from the first trailer and they did not disappoint. They are as metal as they look. The Pulverizer grinds up skulls and sprays the shrapnel in a wide arc, making it great for crowd control. The Ravager has a more narrow area of effect but an exponentially higher rate of fire. I found it to be really effective at dealing with the spiders.
I found every weapon to be enjoyable in some respect. The upgrades for certain guns really helped bolster their use cases later on. I wasn’t really using the plasma guns for much more than disrupting the energy shields until I upgraded the Accelerator. Suddenly it went from being a decent plasma gun to generating arc lightning to spread from enemy to enemy after you build up so much damage.
The level design was a lot more open ended this time around. The game managed to approach making the levels explorable in a way that I really respect. Your map would essentially just tell you where all of the extra goodies are. I think this is helpful for this game because it lets you engage with it on your own terms. If you just want to beeline it through the main objectives you can. If you want the gems for weapon upgrades, but don’t feel like scouring the whole level for them, the map has you covered as well. I also found the game to be pretty good at leading me to secret areas organically anyway. The map was just something I’d check near the end to see if I was missing anything.
In general, I found that my time playing Doom: The Dark Ages was much more free flowing than when I played Eternal. Eternal’s gameplay loop was essentially a massive juggling act between your three resources: Ammo, armor, and health. In Dark Ages, I found that a lot of what I was doing would just kind of passively lead to gaining armor or health. For example: the game loves to throw walls of shield grunts at you. If you shoot them for a minute and throw your shield at them, the whole line dies and drops armor for you. And naturally, performing finishers on enemies will yield more health. And ammo also seemed to drop either via melee attacks or passively from a fair number of weapon upgrades.
Image Credit: ID Software, Bethesda
Doom: The Dark Ages nailed its vision for the visual design. For starters, I think this is my favorite design for the Doom Slayer. The fur cape is an awesome design flourish. The Doom series has always had the aesthetic of being a heavy metal album cover given playable form. Doom: The Dark Ages takes that aesthetic and puts it in a cool medieval backdrop. There are a lot of cool details as a result of this direction. One of my favorite examples of this is that the skull guns I enjoy so much are like inverted versions of the classic medieval torture racks. The environments in this game look great as well. I was really impressed with just how good the village in the opening chapter looked. There was a healthy amount of visual variety too. Levels would take place in all manner of locations, dark forests, open fields, some murky plane of the great beyond, nothing ever felt like it got too samey from a visual standpoint.
The audio direction in this game is a bit more hit and miss. I’ll get started with the big one: the music. There’s nothing about the soundtrack that is outwardly bad, but there was never anything that really stood out to me either. So it's a bit of a let down after the prior two games had such excellent tunes to accompany your rampage. The other thing I noticed that was kind of off about the sound was how inconsistent the audio mixing was. Case in point: acquiring armor in high quantities had the same level of volume as the old THX intro sounds. Acquiring health or ammo would be balanced properly so that made it all the more jarring. The audio had its high points as well. I think one of my favorite noises in the game was the sound of Doom Guy’s massive footsteps when you are sprinting. The sound effects on all the guns and glory kill animations were appropriately crunchy and satisfying as well.
Image Credit: ID Software, Bethesda
Summary
Doom: The Dark Ages is a must play if you like action games. It very well might be my new favorite in the series. There are so many encounters I had where I was on the razor's edge of being at max power, to almost dead, and back again. It provides a level of adrenaline that few other games can deliver on. I find it so impressive that Id Software has been able to take each of their past three games and approach them all with a totally different gameplay philosophy. Doom: The Dark Ages is just as good as its predecessors. It delivers the same pulse pounding action that I’ve come to love but in its own new and unique flavor.