Doom Eternal

 

After Doom 3, I was waiting many years for a new game in the series. Eventually, Doom (2016) came out, and while it felt like a weird departure in many ways, i also enjoyed it quite a bit and thought it was a decent shooter game. Doom Eternal is the sequel to that flavour of the series, and I went in without any expectations.

Soon after playing the game for just an hour or so it was clear to me that Doom Eternal was nothing really like Doom 2016, or even any game in the franchise really.

All of the mechanics from even Doom 2016 are changed here. Its not the same formula at all. First of all, the game takes its self much more seriously in tone. Whereas in Doom 2016, you had a few quick short almost sarcastic cutscenes where they would even mock having cutscenes at all like that one scene where a computer starts talking to you and the character just smashes it and says shutup or "no time for talking" or something - In Doom Eternal its like they're trying to constantly do this big grandiose lore-dump at the player and trying to build this complex narrative but its like what the fuck? its just missing the point of Doom.  The tone is just all off. There's cutscenes constantly of just characters talking to eachother or listening to voice logs and its all just boring and contrived its like forced-lore and I just found it all out of place especially in a Doom game, it felt more like Halo or something. They tried to give the main character a sort of personality, the subtitles even say "Doomguy" and whenever he interacts with other humans they treat him like a celebrity and are sycophantic, its just weird. The only story I needed was that demons are bad and kill the demons, all this other shit just felt shoehorned.

The artstyle is kinda off too, which makes it worse. Like the graphics arent terrible, but everything has this nu-overly modern look with too many multicolors and flashy effects. It's not dark and gritty enough, its too flashy and neon glowing sign. The demons have really nice textures and models for the most part, but some of them look too much like cute toys or something with over saturated colors.


The main drastic changes are mechanically. The game is brutally difficult and unforgiving, even on difficulty 2/5 which is the one I played on. What you come to expect from a Doom game is just minimal mechanics, no RPG bullshit, its just the player and his skills against the hordes of demons. But in Doom Eternal it has layer upon layer of these awful roleplaying almost skill point systems. You have these 'runes' which add 3 perks to your players, then you have your weapons each with different attachments you can level up, then you have this glyph wheel which adds even more perks, then you have Sentinel crystals which add permanent stat boosts like more health and ammo/armor and bigger perks. Like what the fuck? I dont want to deal with this shit, it just means the game has trouble keeping balance with its self because it has to try to account for the player missing upgrades. Like in order for the game to 'progress as expected' the player has to search around the map to make sure not to miss any of these crucial upgrades or later in the game he'll be way too weak and "underleveled", or the opposite, if he finds too many upgrades, then the later game becomes easier than the beginning of the game - totally screwing up the balance and pacing. Why do they insist on putting this level up bullshit in Doom games? one of the main reasons I wanna play Doom is to GET AWAY from that kinda stuff. I'm pretty sure it was in Doom 2016 to some extent, but theres like 5 different ways of levelling up in Eternal and its just a fucking mess and is annoying to deal with.

Its particularly jarring because in the first quarter of the game I was really struggling to come to grips with the games mechanics. For starters, it has way too many controls and they're clunky as fuck too. Not only do you have 8 or so weapons, which fine cool whatever, you also have these left and right extra gadget abilities that shoot flamethrower/freeze bombs or hand grenades. And its like mandatory to use this shit because they make the enemies drop armor/ammo. So its like a clunkfest trying to constantly swap weapons and using these left/right gadgets, I kind of hate it.

Not only that stuff, but the enemies are designed almost like mini-classes from a Hero shooter like Overwatch or team fortress or something. By that I mean each enemy type has a very specific 'weakness' that requires a very specific gun to hurt them easily. Like for example the spider weakness is shooting their guns on their back, using the machine guns sniper scope (Yeah, the machine gun attachment is a sniper scope. Its dumb and clunky too) But then other enemies, like the Caco demon, its weakness is shooting a Sticky bomb in its mouth from the regular shotgun. So what the game expects you to do is constantly swap weapons every 5 seconds like an ADHD ridden sperg, while jumping around constantly, while constantly dashing, while constantly doing these quicktime animation Glory kills for health, its just really quicking exhausting and even annoying to play. It doesn't really feel like I'm doing crazy skillful stuff, it just feels like I'm some dumb tard spamming a million buttons and swinging my mouse around like an idiot, I just really dislike how they've done the mechanics in this game.  Like instead of you deciding for yourself what gun you wanna use in what situation, it almost forces you to use THIS specific gun for THIS specific enemy, I just dont like it, other doom games arent like that, the whole 'weakness' system just hurts the games fun factor, as does the whole multiple attachment system, as does the whole 'generate health/armor/ammo' from glorykills/chainsaw kills shit. I don't like it!

So , like I said, the way the mechanics work is that you start off with very low amounts of maximum ammo. Like 20 shotgun bullets. Even by the end of the game I seemingly barely was able to upgrade my maximum ammo that much. So what the game expects you to do is use this quick-press animation grab Chainsaw button, which instantly kills weak enemies and then a bunch of confetti pops out which gives you ammo. Now, I didnt realize for the first half of the game, but this thing regenerates slowly. You can go around the levels picking up gas cans which gives you some, but I didnt realize it also regenerates. Out of all the popups and tutorials the game has, I guess I missed that. But I just dont find it a mechanically satisfying way to play the game. Its like this constant obnoxious micromanaging and juggling of all these different mechanics. The UI and onscreen hud is just bloated and confusing too. By your crosshair you have these different tiny icons showing your chainsaw attacks, your left/right gadget uses, youve got to keep track of all of it and constantly remember to keep using the quick-kill animation Glorykills and chainsaw kills. Its like half the game is just watching animations play out. For the first 4 hours or so I was just constantly doing these Glorykills on enemies to get my health back, it just felt bad, I dont want to play a game where I press a button and I have to watch a 5 second long animation of my character doing something. I want all of the mechanics to be directly attached to my button inputs, no constant 'mini cutscenes'.

I just didnt really enjoy how they revamped the mechanics in this game, from the micromanaging, the chainsaw to kill enemies to make them drop confetti and ammo, the glorykills to get health, the left/right gadgets to get armor, it just feels convoluted and spammy and overly annoying to deal with. I hate to compare to classic doom games, but those games were so good precisely because they had minimalistic, simplistic mechanics and controls. Easy to learn, hard to master. Doom Eternal is like the opposite, it throws everything and the kitchen sink at the wall and tries to see what sticks, but nothing really does, it comes across like a bloated mess of confused controls and mechanics and upgrades that is just exhausting to have to deal with. I could only play the game for 1-2 hours at a time because I just left feeling annoyed with the whole process.

Actually atleast half the game isn't even doing combat.
The way the game works is you traverse these enviornments towards some arena, once you arrive at the designated arena, you cant progress until you kill all the enemies. So its not like classic doom games where youre constantly progressing through a level with enemies naturally placed in strategic places, no - its like you walk into an arena, the doors lock behind you, then it procedes to randomly spawn in demons almost like its a multiplayer deathmatch map instead. Thats about 90% of the combat in the game. Yeah, it feels like little instances of multiplayer deathmatch arenas instead of actual coherent singleplayer levels like classic doom games, I just dont like that style of gameplay. Give me a level with enemies hand-placed in clever places, not this arena shooter stuff. It seems like they just fundamentally misunderstand Doom, arena shooter doesnt literally just mean some closed off multiplayer arena with randomly spawning enemies...

In between arriving at these arenas, the game gets a lot worse.
You have tons of these almost puzzle platforming sections where you have to jump across monkeybars and look for these white patches of walls where you can Grab onto it. These walls almost look indistinguishable from normal walls, so much so that theyre extremely easy to miss. Frequently after ending combat I would spend dozen minutes or more just walking in circles trying to figure out what the fuck the game expects me to do next. The level design is mostly just atrocious and doesnt make sense. You have to climb all sorts of walls, punch boxes to stnd on, flip these big glowing switches sometimes in the most hidden places, Jump-dash across huge seemingly impossible gaps, its so tedious. Why is this even in the game? Why is there hours upon hours of puzzle platforming gameplay in a Doom game? Every single time I end a combat segment I can fully expect to spend the next 15-20 minutes doing nothing but jumping around like a dumbass trying to find the next place on the wall the game wants me to grab or the next gap I need to find my way across or the next puzzle or door I need to open, I hate it.

The game has a Dash mechanic where you can spam a button to do this quick burst of speed, but essentially youll just be spamming this the whole game which in effect makes the whole game annoying because it has an obnoxious visual effect and sound effect. A lot of effects in the game are just bad. Especially the Low Health indicator. The whole screen gets this obfuscated red tint and makes it really confusing to even look at whats happening.

I cant help but shake the feeling that the game plays and feels more like Halo than a Doom game. Everything about the presentation, the story, the jumping around arenas in low gravity dashing around like a coked up bunny rabit, the tryhard serious lore dumping, its just so off. I don't even like how the weapons look, they all look way too bulky and futuristic, none of them are all that fun to use, the only gun I liked really was the Double barrel shotgun, with the 'mastery' with the hook grab. This gun was kind of fun because you can press a button to hook yourself onto the enemy, generating armor, then you blast them in the face. So I just spent the whole game hooking myself to enemies then using the chainsaw to generate more ammo. The other guns are just okay. The rocket launcher has a lock on attachment ability, the plasma gun attachment has this microwave beam that blows enemeis up but makes you stand still and is really slow, I never really enjoyed using many of the weapons. I mostly just hate this weird dance you have to do where you have to shoot enemies enough, but not TOO much to kill them, just enough to make them 'glow' and get into the glorykill animation so you can get health from them...feels clunky.
Of course theres ammo and armor and health placed around the maps, so frequently you will be running around the arena looking for health and armor, but the bulk of generating resources is from doing these quick-kill animations and such.

The game has the standard DOOM roster with a bunch of new additions, all of which I pretty much hated. I'm not gonna remember all the names but it has this one guy I think called Maurader whos this guy that blocks all of your shots with a shield, and unless you stand in Medium range you cant hurt him. You have to wait for his eyes to glow green then you shoot him to stun him, THEN you can damage him. So you just stand around waiting, tanking damage, while he spawns this dog to attack you, waiting to be able to stun him with the cue, again, just tedious gameplay. And a clusterfuck because usually the game likes to just throw you into a closed arena and spawn a billion random enemies at once and see if you can sperg out hard enough swinging the mouse around like a maniac swapping guns like someone on cocaine long enough to survive. I just think I dont like this game, really. Its not for me. I like the simplicity of classic doom, I like the tension and horror and 'groundedness' of Doom 3. I even liked Doom 2016, which upped the excitement and action even more, but its mechanics werent as bloated and unnecessarily  demanding and fucked up with Upgrades shit like Eternal is.

I dont know if I should be ashamed to say it, but the first 5 hours of this game I was dying constantly. Every single checkpoint I would die multiple times. Finally I got the hang of understanding the game demands that you engage in constant animation kills, you need to constnatly be 'generating ammo' and spamming your stupid left/right gadgets, you need to be constantly opening up your 'Codex' to find out each enemy types weakness, swap your gun accordingly, and...Its just not the kind of gameplay I like. I hated having to think that if I dont mindlessly explore every inch of the boring levels and find these upgrades, I might be too "weak" in the end-game to do anything. Why is this even a concern? Its like I'm playing a RPG and I have to grind for levels or something, so stupid.

Another complaint is that the individual levels are too long. I'd want to jump in and play a quick session , only to find a single level taking 1-2 hours. Why isnt it more cut up and condensed? Another thing I love about Doom is usually the levels are bite sized, thats not the case here. Its like this grueling slog of a gauntlet just to get past one level, again, its exhausting, especially with all the puzzle platforming nonsense.

Frequently after missions it will throw you back to this very generic and boring Main base, where you can walk around the base and use this collectable called 'Sentinel battery' to unlock rooms that give your character upgrades, stuff like new weapon attachments, new perks, etc. I didnt realize this was a thing except a few hours into the game, because the base is so annoying to navigate and everything looks the same. Took me a good amount of time to even figure out how to get upstairs and start the next mission at one point, the staircase is tucked away in the corner instead of being some obvious place, just why. One of the most annoying hubworlds of recent memory.

None of the levels really stand out, yeah some of them have some cool locations and big crazy monster corpses and weird shit on the ground, but again the artstyle is still a bit oversaturated and almost cartoony at times. Like the whole feel of the presentation at times is like a mobile game or something like that, the constant "Rewards!"  "Congratulations!"   "Unlocked this! Unlocked that!"   all the shit all over the HUD, etc. Its too much.  I cant even remember a single name of any level or much of what I had to do except constant bad platforming and then being locked in a arena.

Towards the end of the game, thankfully you start to go into hellish places which is actually interesting and wakes you up a bit. The game has a few "bosses" but really most of them are just regular enemies that you kill once as a boss then gets put into the regular roster of enemies you have to fight. Its kinda weird how the game has constant handholding and tutorials too, like everytime a boss happens or new enemy it will pause the screen and tell you exactly how to kill him and even show you a little video demonstration, EVEN for the last boss...

The game has all sorts of features and optional things you can do, theres a "master levels" segment where you can play custom challenges, I'm sure theres lots to do, I was hoping I would really like this game, I was hyped for it, but unfortunately upon playing it, maybe its just not for me. I can understand some people liking it, but everything about it was just put together in such a way that I didnt really enjoy. Yeah, sometimes the combat can be satisfying, zooming around the arenas and gibbing enemies, it has a lot of callbacks to classic doom like the powerups and Rip and tear stuff, its got all sorts of mechanics, the graphics at times can be thrilling with all the hyper-paced stuff going on, the monsters in particular are really highly detailed and it is exciting to see all the different ways you can destroy them, so maybe one day I'll try to replay it, I dont know, but as of right now it just wasnt for me I guess. Oh yeah, and the music is dog shit. The sound track is just really bad and annoying. Its all djent mixed with electronic bullshit or something. I just found myself feeling irritated by it constantly. It's like comically stupid and bad how dumb it sounds. Fuck the music.

4/10