A rehabilitation of DOOM Eternal that does away with the stupid "the demons ask you respect their pronouns" jokes, demolishes the castle of funko pops, wipes away the allusions to your little brother's collection of nazi viking black metal records and instead chooses to go full Plutonia by making almost every room into a maximal Video Game combat encounter with little requirement for coherence in-between. Amps up the self-aware dumb and the feckless fun in so many ways, best exemplified in stuff like the Marauder getting silly little tweety birds above his head and a new enemy type that makes you do some Ghostbusters shit. It's cute!

Reluctantly played on Ultra-Violence, and I think calling the gameplay here "sweaty" would be an understatement - I literally had to plan scratching my nose and blinking around the iframes of certain animations... And I kinda loved it? Game-cocaine in its purest uncut form, a brilliant realisation of oldDOOM's slaughtermaps for the modern age that makes me wish this thing had the support of proper modding tools. One of only a handful of modern era video games I can think of that is capable of inducing the oft-coveted "flow state" that Pro Gamers aspire to, a game of DDR where you're stamping on necks.

My only real problem with the game is the things it does when you're coming down from the combat high. We've known since the days of Super Mario Sunshine that platforming puzzles that require a fly-by introduction of their layout are doomed to frustration and failure, and TAG1 throws in a lot of them to pad for time and exposition. Nothing that'll rip and tear your hair out, but has anyone ever seriously wanted to do timed parkour in a DOOM game?? C'mon... Stick to diagonal running please Doomguy. Anyway, it's just kinda funny to think that Satan (seriously id please just use Christian names for your bad guys, it's badass that you get codec calls from God in this one) designed the inner sanctums of Hell with a 1990s assumption that Doomguy can't jump, only for him to rock up in 2020 with two airdashes and a booster lol

The story is the usual "whatever" bullshit that we've come to expect from the nuDoom franchise, but I did kinda appreciate that they finally got rid of that robot fella and replaced him with a dweeby keyboard warrior who insists on calling the Slayer "Doomguy". Representation matters!