I played Doom: The Dark Ages and appreciate that it won't be a safe sequel
I had a chance to spend a few hours with the Doom, and after seeing what I've seen, I can say that, with all its pros and cons, The Dark Ages won't be a safe sequel. Like Eternal, it will try hard to stir up the FPS formula. I have my doubts, but Doom Slayer rips boredom as efficiently as he tears demons.
The Dark Ages, on one side, takes us to the well-known lands of lightning-fast clashes, where the key to success is proper movement around the arena and the strategic distribution of ammunition to each demon according to its individual needs. However, the rules of combat have changed a bit, as well as the player's capabilities and the approach of the demons. Some habits need to be adjusted a bit, but you can still distinctly feel that you're playing Doom or at least a version of it.
Captain America: Gore Edition
The biggest new feature of the The Dark Ages appears to be the shield, and it's likely best to begin with it. It wouldn't be a proper Doom if the Slayer held in his hand a piece of indestructible material used only for defense. The shield is at the same time a pleasantly humming, round power saw, and the saw within the shield presents a clear chance to redefine what a "buzz saw" truly is.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
The shield changes the dynamics of battles with demons - it can absorb some projectiles, as they whiz past our heads with even greater density than in Eternal, and at times I felt like I was in a first-person bullet hell. Of course, we can't constantly hide behind the shield; besides, it will only block projectiles that we face head-on. However, under the fire, not only can we dash forward, but sometimes it's even worth doing so. Green-colored bullets can be deflected, so if we use the shield at the right moment, the laser, plasma, or other deadly projectiles will return to the sender in priority mode.
The system of getting armor from enemies has been slightly changed, as now we can heat enemy armors and metal shields to a white-hot state with precise fire control, and a swift throw of a saw shield will lat us to kill the primary target and nearby foes with a heat explosion, rewarding us with recycled armor from the unfortunate victims. Such an efficient throw also pierces through minor opponents like cotton candy, effectively penetrating energy barriers as well.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
However, this is not the end. The second type of throw can cause the target to be paralyzed for a brief moment, allowing us to more easily hit its weak points or deal with other devils.
We can also use a lightning-fast charge, which in practice means throwing the shield along with the protagonist. This not only provides another opportunity to make demons suffer but also serves as an effective way to move around the battlefield, and movement is key to survival.
The shield immediately becomes our key defensive-offensive tool, but that's not all!
Doom sandbox
During the fun, I also came across a few environmental puzzles, in which our defensive tool proves useful once again. Similar to Kratos' Leviathan, the shield allows us to interact with various types of objects in the game: breaking certain walls (which replace the gauntlets from Eternal), destroying heated metal elements, serving as a cogwheel to trigger mechanisms, or acting as a kind of anchor, to which we can be drawn from a distance. I have mixed feelings about these solutions, as the temporary changes in pace can help catch a breath, but the puzzle elements were quite unclear to me. In my view (also backed by the narrative of this and previous games), Doom Slayer seems like someone who would rather tear the gate apart with his bare hands than search for a hidden mechanism and jump around like a rabbit.
Nevertheless, much depends on how mandatory these puzzles will be (the ones I faced in the demo were necessary to solve) and how they will be distributed across the levels, as opposed to the highly intense and time-constrained demo version. I know too little about it at the moment to draw any further conclusions.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
I am also looking with equal interest, though with a pinch of concern, at the idea of turning several locations into small sandboxes. Doom levels have traditionally been quite complex, and in The Dark Ages, this style of deg locations as labyrinths with many hidden corridors with loot to find makes a comeback. However, sometimes, we have the chance to play on a bigger, more non-linear map. The devs themselves used the term "sandbox" here, but fortunately, it is not synonymous with doing quests and collecting pigeon feathers. The gameplay reminded me more of the open locations that we could explore in, for instance, Uncharted 4 or Modern Warfare 2. We still face a danse macabre at almost every corner, and we can simply decide in what order we visit the objectives to check off and how much time we devote to optional confrontations and discoveries. I had the opportunity to explore one of these locations for a while, and despite my aversion to combining the words "Doom" and "sandbox," I didn't feel it had any particularly negative impact on the gameplay. More classic Doom levels always involved intense wall licking in search of secrets and breaking through to the next arena. The only difference here is that we have greater control over the sequence in which we go through particular locations.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
One small "but": at some moments in this small sandbox, the backtracking seemed a bit monotonous to me, and neither sprinting nor breaking through some minor devil hordes were able to diversify the journey itself. This is something that could potentially become tiresome in the full game, especially if we care about finding stuff that can significantly and long-term strengthen our character. It's too early to make a final verdict here, but this is yet another thing that slightly confuses me about the pace of the game.
I came, I saw, I got beaten up
I am stubborn and I spent a significant part of my time with the game on higher difficulty levels (Nightmare and Ultra-Violence; Ultra-Nightmare is for competent Doom players). And I say this with some satisfaction: the new Doom can really kick butt. At higher difficulty levels, so many things are happening on the screen at once, and the enemies are so aggressive, that death can come very quickly and from all sides. Maybe I have a slightly skewed approach to playing (especially with my skill level and reflexes after 3 hours of sleep), but I liked that in previous games we weren't punished too much for deaths, and the satisfaction of figuring out a good strategy and performing a perfect hellish tango was great. I am pleased to note that The Dark Ages, despite changes in basic mechanics, continues to my play style as well. And to all those who prefer to play on "I'm too young to die", I will say that... you have this option and that's perfectly fine too!
Symphony of Destruction
The developers made sure that the sound design also soothed the brain with subtle sounds of electric guitar, war drums, lyrical bass, and dreamlike sounds of crushing metal tissues. The Dark Ages can also look beautiful, and although I didn't notice a clear graphic leap between Eternals, stylistically, the strongly futuristic elements clash this time with the archetypal dark ages. So there are plenty of spikes, iron, Gothic architecture, plate armors (also with spikes) here, and Doom Slayer has a warm fur on his back so he doesn't get cold. The fantastic weapon models deserve particular praise once again; my favorite design is probably the grinder that overwhelms enemies at close range with a hail of fragments from a constantly crushed skull. The new Doom is a spectacle where it is hard to avoid overstimulation, but when I got into the flow of combat, I also had no problem distinguishing individual visual cues.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
It seems that we will also spend more time iring the graphics in slightly calmer moments, because The Dark Ages is supposed to have a surprisingly extensive plot. The developers defined this as the story's transition from the codex (where we got most of the knowledge about the world in previous games) to the game itself. I will withhold judgment here until I know the whole story, because I approach the plot in Doom like the main character in the prologue of the first game (well, the one from 2016), not letting the audiolog playing in the elevator to finish. Neither one of us has time for this. However, I it that setting the action many years before the previous installments allowed for the presentation of an unusual universe, in which gods owe their status simply to a huge technological advantage, and Doom Slayer is a weapon of mass destruction kept on the chain by these very gods, and even people who he often indirectly (perhaps even unintentionally) protects are afraid of him.
Waiter, there's Jaeger floating in my Doom!
In addition to the classic, linear and more open level, the developers also talked about two intriguing novelties, which are supposed to diversify the gameplay. For a moment, we control a fully functional Atlan, a large mech, the remnants of which we encountered in Doom Eternal. In theory, this sounds phenomenal, but the magic of this experience disappeared very quickly in my case. Finally, we can fight with the Titans as equals, but the gameplay seemed very monotonous to me, and the movements of these gargantuan mechs were too fast for my brain to believe in the illusion of controlling a Doom equivalent of a Jaeger from Pacific Rim. We are literally boxing with big demons, we also get a huge gun (roughly the caliber of 1:50 of a football field), which we can then use to fight at a greater distance, and we increase its rate of fire by... doing very quick dodges - I would rather expect these moves from an agile Doom Guy than his skyscraper version. Destruction of the environment - crucial if you want to show the scale of controlling something powerful and heavy - was very symbolic and heavily scripted: the bridge with funny ant-size people and their tanks turns into dust whether we run into it at full speed or with a slight touch.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
Unfortunately, the second gameplay addition also did not impress me, which is some achievement, because during it we ride a jet dragon with cybernetic wings and machine guns. Again - it sounds beautiful on paper. Flying this beautiful monster through narrow corridors indeed gave a very cool, arcade-like sense of speed; I felt like I was piloting a medieval fighter in some spin-off of the Ace Combat or H.A.W.X series (that's how old I am). Unfortunately, from time to time we fight with ground targets and then the dragon hovers above the target and starts a very awkward-looking exchange of fire, in which we have to avoid bullets and after a skillful dodge, massacre the opponent's health bar. In my opinion, it took away all the fun of riding such a grotesque flying monster and this static combat sequence was absolutely without flair.
Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda Softworks, 2025.
The attempt was made
Not all elements of the new Doom appealed to me, some may still be refined, but one thing definitely cannot be accused of The Dark Ages: it does not promise to be a safe sequel, of which we currently have a huge surplus. Within certain genre frames, Doom wants to do something new again and for this courage to experiment it's worth paying attention to it during the May release. Even if not all innovations are met with what the developers' expected (similar to the platforming elements in Eternal, which still provoke heated discussions), Doom will clearly maintain its unique identity. I am genuinely curious about how the game will perform on the release, but I am glad that id Software is not afraid to continue experimenting.
