(Review originally posted on Steam.)

Doom Eternal is the most I've ever been disappointed by a game.

To say the least, I put more effort into trying to find enjoyment out of it than I’ve put into any other game I don’t like. I played the opening levels at least four separate times - twice on Bethesda’s terrible in-house launcher, and twice after said terrible in-house launcher was shut down and the game was moved to Steam. Every single time, I left frustrated, bored, and most of all, let down.

The main problem with Doom Eternal is simply that it’s absurdly bloated. Doom Eternal wants to be everything at once, and because of that it is so much less than the sum of its parts. There’s more enemies, more weapons, more cutscenes, more lore (oh, is there more lore), more mechanics, more buttons to press, there’s weak points, there’s platforming, there’s swimming, there’s enough pointless collectibles to make a Rare N64 game blush. It’s overwhelming. It’s exhausting.

The worst part of this is simply that all of these additions are bad. The dizzying number of enemies, weapons, and weapon mods (on top of the bloated number of mechanics, such as weapon weaknesses) means that you’re juggling an enormous amount of mental space to remembering every single correct way to use your arsenal to take out every single enemy - and the key word there is “correct,” because the game ironically has a severe lack of player creativity, and only wants you to play one way.

More weapons really doesn’t mean anything because none of them are satisfying to use. This is for several reasons - the game is extremely chaotic so besides glory kills (the worst holdover from Doom 2016) you have no time to absorb an enemy dying, every enemy feels like a bullet sponge because only destroying weaknesses has any visual impact, and the weapons don’t sound or feel good to use. There’s nothing like the original game where you mow down a large group of fodder with a chaingun in less than five seconds, where you have the super shotgun’s extremely satisfying sound and reload animation, where nearly every weapon serves some tactical role while feeling powerful and weighty.

The cutscenes and lore are the worst part of the game. It baffles me that they looked at Doom 2016, which was praised for having a protagonist who comically and violently did not care about any of the exposition dumps the non-playable characters were trying and failing to give him, and decided to have a game where there’s ten times as many exposition dumps and they’re ten times as long but you have to listen to all of them even though you’re as bored as the player character is. It baffles me that they thought Doom, a game where John Carmack famously compared the idea of having plot in games to having plots in porn, is a game that needed lore in the first place. There’s so much of it and it’s terrible. The dialogue is laughably atrocious - both when it wants to be funny (it’s never funny, and the constant fanservice is embarrassing) AND when it wants to be serious. How can a game be this intentionally silly and also this far up its own cyberglutes?

But is it fun? Unfortunately, no, and the reason for this is simply mechanical overload. The game is extremely heavy on resource management, enemy weaknesses, and mechanics, all of which you’re outright required to be using at all times. On top of the game’s large amount of weapons, and all the weapon mods for those weapons, you have: frag grenades, ice grenades, the flame belch, the meathook, platforming, double jumping, the chainsaw, glory kills, the blood punch, enemy weaknesses... there are so many mechanics that I’m probably FORGETTING several mechanics just off the top of my head. And, as mentioned, the game expects you to be using all of them all the time. When you’re low on health, press the glory kill button. When you’re low on armor, press the flame belch button. When you’re low on ammo, press the chainsaw button. And always, always, always hop around like a deranged monkey while you’re doing it. Don’t forget to shoot the Revenant’s shoulder cannons! That’s not a game, that’s work. It’s exhausting.

On top of the complete lack of freedom this affords the player to express themselves and come up with strategies, it also severely limits the already mediocre "combat arena" level design of 2016. Nothing can be placed creatively or controlled by the level designer because you have access to everything at the literal touch of a button. You don’t have to be careful about lack of health in a level with few ways to refill it because you can always glory kill. You always have ammo for every single one of your weapons because you can just use the chainsaw. Armor powerups are pointless because the flame belch gives you armor back. Even the powerups aren’t satisfying - a soulsphere restores your health to max, it doesn’t overheal you. Why bother?

This has the result of making every encounter an extremely tedious checklist. You never feel that you’ve outsmarted a tough encounter, that you’ve come up with a better strategy - when you die, it feels like you just didn’t play the game the very specific way that the game designers want you to play it good enough. When I’m playing the classic Doom games, there’s plenty of room for creativity and a lot of on-the-fly decisionmaking - choosing enemies to prioritize, what is the best way to kill them (do I rush in close to the Archvile with the Super Shotgun to stop it from getting an attack out or do I launch rockets into the crowd of Cacodemons that are going to close in on me?), considering the layout of the level and available resources, making use of infighting, considering what other enemies are present on the field and how they interact with high-priority enemies and my available resources (i.e. don’t use a rocket launcher when there are a lot of Lost Souls around), deciding whether to look for secrets to increase my resources before a tough fight, etc.

Even the level exploration isn’t good. Again, it feels like a checklist - the vast majority of the game’s secrets don’t give you resources to help with a battle (outside of extra lives, which feel like the developers putting a bandaid on how frustrating the combat is), they reveal collectibles. There are so many collectibles. My first playthrough, I was exhausted by the second level with how many collectibles there were in the game. My second and later playthroughs, I didn’t even bother. It’s like an open world game but without the open world.

I enjoyed Doom 2016 when I played it the first time, and thought it was a fun game in its own right. I didn’t enjoy it as much on later playthroughs - its weaknesses became more apparent, and I found myself enjoying the original Doom games much more (especially with their huge amounts of high-quality usermade content). But Doom Eternal, rather than taking a step towards the original games, goes completely in the opposite direction, heavily emphasizing Doom 2016’s problems and trying to make up for weak gameplay by overstuffing the game with an overwhelming amount of mechanics, bad dialogue, exposition dumps, and collectibles.

Something that’s said often by fans of the modern Doom reboot games is that Doom 2016 and Eternal are a modernization of the original games. I don’t think this is even remotely true. Doom 2016 is only like the original Doom games in that it’s not Halo or Call of Duty, and they don’t play anything alike. This is to the game’s detriment - the original Doom games have held up extremely well. Doom 2016 and Eternal both suffer not just because they try to fix what isn’t broken, but because they think that having more things automatically makes them better.

I hope that Eternal is the exception, and the developers look at what worked about the original games, and what doesn’t work in the new games, and create a better, more focused melding of the two. Until then, I’ll continue playing the maps and mods of a thirty-year old masterpiece.

Game of the Month Mayo

Mecagonmiputavida que guapo está este puto juego y joder como se han jartado en la dificultad del primer dlc que yo lo juego en pesadilla y siento que no puedo sentarme por otro parte el segundo dlc está bien flamerdo y muy variado no simplemente hecho por gente que le pegaban de pequeño (de hecho he echado de menos un poco que me zurrasen bien duro).

Bueno menos el boss que es malo

Pero es que los bosses son una mierda

I've said in a number of reviews that I'm not a big fan of FPS games, but really I've quietly come to the conclusion that I do like "boomer shooters". Fast, crazy high paced gameplay where you're expected to run around strafing the enemies and collecting health, not hiding behind cover for most of the fights. The recent Doom game revivals embody this philosophy very well, and I've really taken a liking to both their new games. Doom Eternal exemplifies this gameplay very well, featuring about a dozen enemy types you learn how to combat and avoid, eight weapons with various powerups and alternate modes, and a level design meant to invoke a sense of fighting in an arena. It's a really fun and action packed game and is right up my alley. I had actually heard some negative rumblings about this game compared to the 2016 Doom title, but I thought it was on par with that game. I didn't mind the platforming sections, as they never overstayed their welcome and were a nice break from the action. I do have two complaints about this game though. Firstly, the game is balanced around having a full arsenal of weapons. You actually run through your ammunition pretty quickly, but the game gives mechanics making almost all weapons viable, and for replenishing your supplies at once. However, in the first level or two you only have two weapons, meaning you're going to be running out of ammo constantly. Once they give you your third or so weapon, the balance begins to work out, but that first level or two does not give a good first impression. My other issue is the length. Not so much the length of the overall game, although it did just start to drag a bit, but the lengths of the individual levels. I would often play for a bit before dinner or during lunch breaks, and I don't think I ever finished a level in one sitting. It doesn't matter too much, as they're pretty generous with checkpoints and you can quit and resume right back at your most recent checkpoint, but playing through the same level without any indication of when it's going to end gets a bit tiring. There's also more of a plot in this one, but it doesn't really matter and I didn't follow anything that was happening in it. Overall, a strong recommendation for Doom Eternal for me, and I think I need to start re-evaluating which FPS games I should invest in playing.