A shame. The sleekness of DOOM (2016) is nowhere to be found—it’s been replaced with ugly garishness in nearly every facet of Eternal’s design.

The chonky combat remains, with gun-feel and glory kill animations improved considerably—and the music is still great!—but that’s where the positives end. The game is pumped absolutely chock-full with annoying, difficult-to-internalize mechanics, overwrought platforming puzzles (the effortless platforming in 2016 is so much better!), and a stupid, hamfisted story and atmosphere.

The appeal of DOOM (2016) had a lot to do with the interplay of self-serious elements and campy ones. It was like watching a B-movie that believed, wholeheartedly, in its own awesomeness. Eternal just plops face-first into campy mud, goofifying everything and winking at the player incessantly, sapping the game of any actual coolness. Those moments of quiet viscerality from the first game are half-assed or just completely non-existent.

Id has cranked the difficulty up, both in terms of enemy aggressiveness and, just, the sheer amount of bullshit you have to learn and remember. Oh I can grapple and blood punch and flame belch and chainsaw and double dash and ice grenade OR regular grenade, in addition to shooting my weapons with hot-swappable mods? Cool! Is it any fun to juggle it all, really? No, it isn’t!

I came back to Eternal thinking I’d been too hard on it, and found just the opposite— I like it even less now. It infuriatingly squanders the potential of its fantastic predecessor, going decidedly for content quantity over quality, and losing almost everything that made the latter feel special. While it’s not terrible in its own right, I consider it one of my personal biggest disappointments of the modern gaming era.

There are heaps of interesting tactical decisions to make in designing your units to decimate the swordfodder obstacles in the way of you becoming The Nicest King Ever, but at least a quarter of the “skill” i built to play this game was “shuffling around pieces in your unit pre-fight to get a better RNG roll on the battle”. The preview screen holds a death grip on the entire combat experience: the information you are given is neither ‘perfect’ enough to do your own work, nor vague enough to allow improvisation and confidence to be your weapons, and so you ultimately have a black box simulator to press Go on when the numbers are good. I didn’t hate playing it, but from a theory perspective, this thing is not working to its potential.

And while I still have some qualms with 13 Sentinels’ plot despite enjoying it overall – considering its intricacy, I didn’t expect most every beat of Unicorn Overlord to be as complex as a butter sandwich. It is so, so flatly incurious about its characters’ interiority that it’s actually shocking. Every support conversation I saw was like a grey-boxed version of a scene that could be formulaic, but maybe charming too, if it were fleshed out – but they aren’t! The whole reading experience is at a level of cathexis and fidelity similar to a cheap flavored sparkling water.

The art’s execution is unsurprisingly good, though the character designs’ gender dimorphism is offputtingly consistent. Like, listen, I love Yahna’s b-cups, I’m not a joyless dyke, but if the women get to be this flamboyant and cheesecakey then why the hell do the men have no asses and stand like it’s their turn to play the xbox? Like at least give Ithillion some cheeks. It’s right there. Cowards. Anyway the HD2D by way of ‘overworld sprites illustrated like they could be pixelized but are left at full resolution’ is surprisingly good looking as well. also the mining minigame is weirdly satisfying. Overall I just feel worn down by the constant, tectonic level of friction between what the game could be, and what they actually did with it. (played on highest default difficulty, approx 130 hour final time)