Modern game developers have truly become masters of the sequel. Almost anytime I play a sequel to a game I liked these days, I know I’m probably in for a great time. It can also be the case when I didn’t care for the first game. Developers seem to be better than ever at getting all the feedback they need from the last game in a series and fixing all of the issues people had. In recent years, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Spider-Man 2, and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor are all great examples of sequels that made their gameplay better in a nice variety of ways that very few people would take issue with.
In this era of sequels just tweaking what needs to be tweaked, it makes me truly respect what id Software has been able to do with the DOOM series. After a very successful reboot with DOOM (2016), id went and completely revamped the formula for DOOM: Eternal. Suddenly, the game had significantly more mobility and felt like a very different experience. The game also added in a fair bit of platforming. Some people loved this, and some people hated it.
It would have been easy for id to pivot back to the original formula for the next game or to lean even harder into what made DOOM: Eternal a big hit with so many. Instead, they decided to go even crazier. DOOM: The Dark Ages is arguably a larger departure from the original game than even DOOM: Eternal was. Instead of ramping up the mobility, the game limits it significantly. Instead of dashing around, you now have a shield and are told to “stand and fight.”
It’s bold but also brilliant. DOOM: The Dark Ages takes a lot of big swings. The slower mobility, open level design, and parry are all massive shifts from past games. Some of those swings can miss, as is inevitable when you take a lot of chances. But many more hit, and while I don’t think The Dark Ages quite hits the highs of DOOM (2016), it’s a very valiant effort, and easily one of the best FPS of this decade so far.
The Romantasy Girlies Are Going To Be All Like “Shield Me DOOM Daddy” After They Play This
As the name of the game implies, DOOM takes the sci-fi/hell setting of past games and adds a medieval twist to it. The main way it does so is with the new shield. The Dark Ages does more than introduce a simple shield, though. They built the entire game around it, and it is fantastic. The beauty of the shield is that it is one of the most versatile weapons that I’ve ever seen in a first-person shooter.
Obviously, being a shield, it can absorb a bit of damage. When you are taking gunfire from opponents, you can raise the shield up and take some of it on. Once you take too much, the shield drops and has a brief cooldown period. The shield is so valuable that you will feel naked without it. You almost never want to be in a position where you don’t have your shield by your side. So, rather than just taking gunfire and occasionally firing back, you will want to take the fight to the demons. Luckily, you can also do this with the shield! First off, you can now parry certain attacks, which causes damage or can stun foes. The Dark Ages has huge battle arenas, and at times, you will have physical and ranged enemy attacks coming at you from all over the place. Of all the ranged fire, certain projectiles that are a bright green can be parried directly back to your enemy if you lift the shield just a bit before they hit you.
At times as there will be dozens and dozens of projectiles on the screen at once. Fortunately, the projectiles don’t move all that fast. There are many times when your goal will be to try and get in front a green projectile, so you have to avoid a bunch of attacks that you can’t parry to get there, much like in a bullet hell game where you have to navigate around tons of bullets to wherever the small opening is. There is something undeniably gratifying about parrying a ranged attack, and then watching it fly back and hit your enemy. That feeling of satisfaction never got old. I played The Dark Ages on “Ultra Violence” (which is one step up from the “normal” difficulty), and I did find the timing on these parries to be a bit too forgiving. There were many times when I was almost certain I raised my shield way too early and still got the parry off. There are also a lot of times on a chaotic battlefield where I was off to the side of a projectile by several feet and still seemed to parry it. The Dark Ages has some pretty robust difficulty options. I know that you can tweak the parry timing a bit, but I decided to keep the settings as they were, because I thought the overall difficulty balance was pretty good on the setting I was on, but there are times when it felt a touch odd.
It’s especially odd because the parries against physical attacks felt a fair bit more logical to me. Enemies with physical attacks can be pretty relentless, and parrying a string of attacks in order to stun a foe always feels good and like a real accomplishment. Despite that occasional wonkiness, I thought the parry was a really positive addition, mostly because even if I was low on health and low on ammo, I was never in a situation where I though that I might be better off just dying and starting over. You always have a chance because of the parry, no matter how grim things are, and it does feel great overall.
While it’s not quite as effective as the parry, my favorite mechanic with the shield was the shield thrust. This mechanic combines both offense and mobility in an extremely cool way. Whenever you have your shield up, you will target any enemy that you are looking at if they are in a range. With the press of a button, you will go flying at that enemy and slam your shield into them. With how slow and heavy you feel throughout most of The Dark Ages, the speed of the thrust feels invigorating. When you hit your enemy, you still feel that weight, too. That combination really makes it feel amazing. It absolutely crushes weak foes and does pretty decent damage to enemies that are just a bit above fodder, too. It never even got close to getting old for me. I did wish that it was a bit more useful against tougher foes, as it never feels like it is doing tons of damage to them, but even then, it’s a great way to close the distance, or to retreat if you see a different weaker foe in the distance and want to create some space.
You can also throw your shield and use it as a ranged weapon if you wish. This move is particularly effective against specific smaller foes, but it can also help do some nice damage to bigger foes, as it will stay lodged inside of them and continue to daze and hurt them as you fire your guns into them. I never really liked to use this mechanic. It’s effective, but I just hated not having the shield on me for multiple seconds with how many enemies I was usually fighting off. Even if I didn’t use it much, it’s definitely a well-made mechanic that I’m sure many others will use often.
This Is The Part Of The Review Where I Critique A First Person Shooter For Giving Me Too Many Bullets. Sounds Logical.
This is still DOOM, though, so obviously, there still has to be some guns. The Dark Ages adds several new guns, like one that literally fires tiny skulls, as well as bringing back classics like the shotgun and grenade launcher. Every gun in the game has its uses and is fun to use. The game offers you an option for every circumstance you might find yourself in. There is an energy gun, a gun that shoots with a wide range, a more long-distance power gun, etc. The enemy animations react in satisfying ways when you hit them, and the sound design is strong with every gun.
One of the biggest differences between The Dark Ages and past DOOM games is with the ammo and gun swapping. In the first DOOM game, I ran out of ammo constantly and was often forced to switch my guns while I tried to generate more. In DOOM Eternal, almost every enemy had a specific weakness, so gun swapping was frequent in order to effectively kill the demons coming after you.
In the Dark Ages, it’s not that hard to get by most fights almost exclusively using just 1 or 2 guns. The Dark Ages makes it easier than ever to stay loaded up on ammo and only has a few clear enemies with weaknesses to a specific gun. There are plenty of different upgrades that help certain guns generate ammo, and the melee (which also gives out ammo when used) regenerates quick enough where I went through plenty of huge fights without ever running out of ammo for even one gun. This was just about unthinkable for me in past games.
Early on, I really liked this. Getting into a situation in past DOOM games where you ran out of ammo was super annoying. There were many levels in the first DOOM game in particular where I’d be desperately running away and going in circles across a battlefield because my ammo was so low. I also thought constantly switching weapons to exploit enemy weaknesses in DOOM Eternal could kill the flow of battles at times. The more generous ammo system can really improve the pace of the combat since you aren’t constantly pausing to switch guns.
But once I got a little past the halfway point of the game, I started to kind of miss some of the old philosophies. I think inevitably, everyone is going to have a gun that they love to use the most. I was a huge fan of the classic shotgun. Once it was fully upgraded, it could burn enemies, shoot in 3 round bursts, and it caused demons to drop armor pickups. The shotgun is a lot of fun to use, but it fit so well with my general medium range to short range playstyle, that I found it incredibly hard to ever switch off of it for more than 30 seconds. Anytime I ran out of ammo for it, my melee attack had usually recharged, and I could use that to generate more. I can’t say that I got “tired” of using it, but I could tell that it was losing some of its luster as I went along. I tried to switch guns just to mix things up, but whenever I got into a tough fight, which was fairly often, it was hard not to switch back to the shotgun.
Yeah, It’s Hell, But At Least It’s Spacious
The level design also wears out its welcome a bit as you go along. Early on, I loved the huge wide open battle arenas that The Dark Ages gives you. This game wants a more epic and cinematic feel, and the bigger fights make it seem like you are truly in a war with hell in a way that the past games didn’t. It gives the game another level of stakes and intensity that I really enjoyed. However, just like the guns, it feels a touch repetitive once you get into the back half of the game. Past DOOM games had a bit more variety in their battle arenas, which caused me to use at least a few different tactics for each battle. With The Dark Ages, I found myself using a lot of the same guns and the same strategies in every fight. To be clear, the core stuff here is all phenomenal, especially with the new shield. So it’s not a bad thing, but the game definitely slowly ran out of steam the further I went because of the lack of variety that comes from some of these design decisions.
One nice thing about the more open maps is that The Dark Ages has by far my favorite exploration in the series. In between all of the violence, there are upgrade materials hidden throughout each level that you can find. In the other two games, I often completely ignored this and started mainlining the game because the vertical levels and hard to navigate maps made the exploration unenjoyable for me. The lack of verticality and sprawling levels make it a lot easier to read the map and find various upgrades this time around. These upgrade materials can be found with simple exploration and occasional light navigation puzzles. I spent a surprising amount of hours trying to find as many upgrades as I could, which was a huge win for the gameplay loop, and did help mix things up a bit when the action failed to.
Do I Really Need A Story Beyond “Me Shooty Shoot The Demons With A Gun?”
The Dark Ages has a few other ways it tries to mix things up beyond the exploration. As expected, there are boss fights, and this is probably where the parry mechanic shines most. Because of the slower movement in the game, parrying attacks is often vital in these fights, and the game throws some interesting and fun attack patterns at you that I enjoyed going up against. The game also features massive setpiece mech fights, where you take on other giant enemies with mech melee combat or with a giant gun. I thought that the gun sections were pretty fun, but the melee sections always felt a bit simple and awkward for me. There are also levels where you fly a dragon around, which looks very cool, but they also feel a bit clunky to me. These are mostly “no harm, no foul” type of scenarios, though, as you don’t spend much time with either, but I definitely wish they were better. It would have enhanced the game a fair bit if they had hit for me.
The story is also a similar “no harm, no foul” situation for me. Id Software hyped up that this game would be more story heavy than past games in the series, which I was excited for. But I don’t think it took more than five minutes for my eyes to start glazing over during the cutscenes. The game throws a lot of characters and worldbuilding at you fast, and like past games, I think you need to spend a bit of time in the codex to really understand everything that is going on. If anything about the story struck me as worth diving in, I might have done so, but when the story doesn’t even catch the faintest bit of my interest, then it doesn’t seem worth the time. Luckily, I don’t think anyone is really playing this game for the story, so this wasn’t a big deal at all to me.
One big change that did work out for me was one the studio has gotten a lot of shit for. DOOM: The Dark Ages moved on from its beloved main composer, Mick Gordon, and opted to use “Finishing Move” to make the soundtrack instead. I had no problem with past DOOM soundtracks, but I thought they could be a bit overpowering at times, and they could distract from the action. The Dark Ages has a much more generic sounding metal soundtrack, but it’s a really good generic metal that felt like it fit the general action better. The sound mixing can make the music fade into the background more, but during big fights, it ramps up, and it hits in a way that the music in past games never did for me. I ended up thinking that the music enhanced this game in a way that it didn’t in past games.
What’s Next For Doom? If They Really Want To Spice It Up, They Could Turn The Slayer Into An 00s Scene Kid
If I was talking about 95% of video games right now, I would look at everything that DOOM: The Dark Ages does, and say that it does a lot of brave things, and does most of them really well. I would then say that a sequel to this game would probably be phenomenal, as there are plenty of little things that could be fixed for the next one.
Despite a few complaints, I really think that The Dark Ages is the DOOM game with the most potential. I think of all three games, a completely refined Dark Ages sequel would end up being my favorite game in the series and one of my favorite shooters ever.
But that’s just not going to happen here. Whatever id Software does next, it will likely be a somewhat dramatic departure from everything they did here. That makes me sad, as I really think The Dark Ages is special and not that many tweaks away from being extremely special. But it also makes me excited because the whole reason that this series is so great is because of the chances they are willing to take. This means that I have absolutely no idea what is coming next from id Software, but I also know that I can’t wait to find out.
Score: 8.5/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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