I mentally started writing this while I was waiting for a monkey bar to move very slowly into the right position for me to progress. I started watching it move. How is it moving? A hovering rock. Why is it moving? Because halfway through development somebody wrote "friction" on a whiteboard and it accidentally got into everybody's heads that this was a huge fuckin priority.

Everything about this game, apart from the combat itself, is a barrier to enjoyment. It's like they held a company-wide focus group and implemented every single idea. It's all menus and tutorials and virtual collectables and skins and seasons and XP and poses and please just shut up I want to shoot the monsters.

And it's so patronising. Look at the map! Here's where you'll be having a fight! Oh just wait up a moment, I know you've not even seen this enemy yet, but here's a little video of exactly how to defeat it optimally! Off you pop! Don't worry about missing secrets, we've put big yellow question marks up, and you can zip back to them any time! Have fun!

Like others have said, all the lore guff feels like a big misstep too. Mind in 2016 where someone tried to explain the plot and Doomguy just ripped the comms panel off the wall and went towards the nearest demon? Good times. Here you spend the first half hour fighting to get to a meeting, you listen to what they're saying and let them escape, then the next job is to track them down and kill them? THEY WERE RIGHT THERE!

When I went to play today, I noticed that the icon on the console dashboard said "Doom Eternal Battlemode". I thought maybe I could remove the battlemode bit, save some drive space, but no that's the eighty gig main game. The campaign is a ten gig add-on that can be deleted. The focus here was always live service shite with a mobile game style interface. Obnoxious.

Combat's real good though eh

Oof. I know it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I fair enjoyed 1. Bored to tears by this though, sacked it off pretty quick.

Graphically it's pretty impressive, but big chunks of it early on are so dark that I was just stumbling about looking for a way forward. I missed a bunch of the voice logs, and I think it's at least partly down to how it looks so realistic that it's hard to be actually read as a game (though I have this issue with a lot of modern games TBF).

The puzzles are exactly the same stuff as before, but easier. WTF.

Combat in 1 was simple, but felt pretty dynamic, I often found myself stunning one guy then switching to another, flipping between them and doing flashy combos. Here it's all one on one, and while it looks great it feels like a QTE sequence that replaces visual cues with trial and error. Tedious shit.

And while I may well have misread it, I felt like some of the more supernatural elements of 1 could have been attributed to Senua's psychosis, yet here it's just "yep there's an underground night giant, we all know about it". I dunno. Feels cheap somehow.

Disappointing!