Doom The Dark Ages fixes Doom Eternal’s worst problems, but I’m still uncertain

Streamlined controls, a tighter story, and strafe-to-kill gunplay make Doom The Dark Ages a great follow-up to Eternal, but I remain unsure.

The greatest level in the entire Doom series is still Phobos Lab. It doesn’t have the gimmicks of a Doom 2 stage, the dark claustrophobia of Doom 3 and 64, or the speed and scale of Eternal and 2016’s soft reboot. But Phobos Labs is a singular expression of the essence of Doom. I enjoy Doom Eternal, and I respect how much id was prepared to experiment after the success of 2016. I also feel like Eternal is contrary, in various ways, to the fundamental spirit of Doom. From what I’ve seen and what id has now told me, Doom The Dark Ages feels closer to the nucleus – it’s radiating that Doom energy, but there are a couple of things that give me pause.

Doom The Dark Ages is a prequel, set between the retconned ending of Doom 64 and the reemergence of the Slayer in the 2016 game. As per the backstory in Doom Eternal, our dagger-ring-wearing space marine is now serving as a superweapon for the Maykrs and their army of Sentinels. The war against the demons is at its fiery peak, and the Slayer has become the furious, grunting equivalent of a hydrogen bomb: if a battle is going awry, the Makyrs deploy him to swiftly wipe out anything with horns and a tail.

I like the setup, and aesthetically The Dark Ages feels like a more committed version of Eternal. Adrian Carmack’s 1993 concept art emphasizes sci-fi and body horror; the original trilogy, Doom 64, and 2016 all find inspiration in Alien and Event Horizon. But The Dark Ages feels more like Army of Darkness, or Gerald Potterton’s Heavy Metal. The ruined, haunted medieval cities of Eternal are alive in The Dark Ages. It’s an FPS game by way of iron maidens and bearded axes.

And that’s the first fundamental difference between The Dark Ages and its predecessor. Eternal was all about vertical movement and quick-but-complex button presses – between your weapon, your melee, the Blood Punch, and the flamethrower, and then also the weapon-specific enemy types, whose weak spots were best exploited only if you used certain attacks, there was a lot of variety but it could be fussy and fiddly to play.

Remember in Doom 2016, when Samuel Hayden is explaining to the Slayer that he needs to carefully extract the energy rods from the Argent tower, and the Slayer just smashes the computer console with his boot? That’s a defining moment for the character, and it captures the spirit of Doom as a whole. Eternal was imaginative, but it got away from that blunt-force aggression – it was too designed. In the best possible way, The Dark Ages feels coarser and rawer.

Take the Shield Saw. You can use it to block, parry, and deflect demons’ attacks, and you can even throw it, but all of these actions are mapped to a single button – they’re context-sensitive. The trademark glory kills have been reworked, too. In 2016 and Doom Eternal, you’d stagger an enemy, see the glory kill prompt, then hit a button and wait for the execution animation to finish. If you succeeded in staggering multiple demons at once, it was unlikely you would manage to glory kill all of them before they recovered their footing and the prompt expired.

In Doom The Dark Ages, it’s all completely different. You have three melee options: a mace, a flail, and an electrified gauntlet. Of course, you can use these in open combat, but if a demon is staggered and ready to be glory killed, rather than pressing a key and watching a quick animation, you smack them with your melee weapons – it’s all ‘unsynced’ and still in your control, and you’re not locked in place until the animation ends.

Game director Hugo Martin offers a neat summary. In Doom 2016, it was all about run and gun. In Doom Eternal, it was jump and shoot. And in The Dark Ages, the philosophy is stand and fight. You absorb attacks with your shield. You counter with a shotgun blast. And then you finish with the flail. “In Doom Eternal, you felt like a fighter jet,” Martin says. “In Doom The Dark Ages, you’ll be an iron tank.”

But that doesn’t mean the game is more static. On the contrary, from what I’ve seen, it’s considerably more streamlined and faster-paced. One of the great, visionary mechanics in Doom 2016 was how glory kills would give you health and ammo – it was the perfect metaphor for the Doom Slayer’s blood lust, and how aggression, ferocity, and ripping and tearing make him stronger.

Doom Eternal slows it down and overengineers it with extra layers. You can extract armor from defeated enemies, but only if you hit them with the flamethrower first, which is mapped to a separate button. Like 2016, to get the most ammo from them, you use the chainsaw – but getting the most health means using another ability, the Blood Punch.

There’s perhaps an enjoyable mastery curve in there, but like other elements of Eternal’s combat – and its vertical exploration and platforming – the system is also obstructive, over-intricate. Doom The Dark Ages cuts everything right back. Martin uses the analogy of a guitar but with fewer strings. Movement and gunplay are more “ergonomic.” It’s less cerebral; more below the neck.

“The flamethrower, I really loved it in Eternal,” Martin says during a group question-and-answer session, “but it wasn’t necessarily intuitive. When you learned the control scheme it was really engaging, but for some people they never pressed the flamethrower to get armor. Everything you need to press [in The Dark Ages] is right there. The inputs are easier to access. Everything feels like it’s in reach.”

The writing of Doom The Dark Ages has been governed by a similar discipline. Eternal had a lot of lore, and a lot of that lore was contained within the ‘Codex’ – if you wanted to fully understand the story, you had to routinely pause and read explanatory pages from this in-game encyclopedia. For The Dark Ages, Martin has another helpful axiom: “out of the Codex and into the cutscenes.” This time around, if you want to understand what’s going on, all you need to do is play.

“In Eternal you had to read more to get more of the story,” Martin says, “so it’s just about streamlining it and making it so that if someone plays through the game they get the whole story. They don’t need to read a ton of Codex pages to fill in the blanks.”

So, why the reservations? During the presentation from id Software, there’s one word that jumps out more than any other.

“We have moments where it opens up to what I call a sandbox,” Martin says. “Those levels are maze-like; they fold back on themselves. Exploration is a huge part of the game. Through exploration you’re going to be able to make yourself more powerful. As you explore the space, you unlock more.”

Doom has always been partly characterized by secret hunting – even E1M1 has the hidden toxic pool outside and that balcony where you can find the shotgun. But personally, I think all of the games are at their best when they’re choreographed and linear. The worst levels in Doom Eternal are the quasi-sandboxes: the Super Gore Nest and Urdak. I think where id excels – both historically and in its modern iteration – is in creating staged, contained, and borderline corridor-shooting-style gunfights and setpieces. The Doom Slayer rips and tears. He doesn’t go for a walk.

But despite these “sandbox” sections, id is seemingly mindful about keeping up the pace. The Shield Saw isn’t just for blocking attacks and bouncing off of demons’ skulls. It can also be used for traversal. When you target an enemy, you can use the Shield to zip straight over to them, almost like an extension of the Super Shotgun chain hook in Eternal. Martin explains more.

“You lock onto an enemy, it rockets you across the arena, and you shield bash them. Someone described it as ‘feeling like a pinball.’ You’re just this wrecking machine. We also have sprint in the game now. In a lot of ways, the game is actually faster.”

When Doom The Dark Ages was first announced, I expected that id would double down on the experience of Eternal: more mechanics, more lore, more world. From what I’ve seen and heard so far, The Dark Ages actually feels closer to Doom 2016 – but perhaps also like another interpretation of the series’ identity.

After Doom 2016, id could have just made ‘more Doom 2016,’ but it tried something different and made Eternal. Again, after Eternal, id could have just made the same game but longer, larger, and louder. The Dark Ages feels like an authentic effort to find something new, and not rely on the format of a previous success. We’ll find out for sure when the Doom The Dark Ages release date arrives on May 15.