Doom: The Dark Ages is the shooter that I never knew I wanted
When I saw the reveal for The Dark Ages, I was skeptical. My memories of Eternal at the time were fuzzy, but I remembered it being too much of a good thing, and adding a shield and Serious-Sam-style hordes made me worry that it would be even more "too much". It also looked weird for Doom.
As we got closer to release, though, I became more cautiously optimistic. It looked like they had reworked the combat to be simpler and, surprisingly, build on elements of 90s Doom that were dropped in Doom 3. It made me interested in this weird-looking take on Doom. As you can guess from the title, I think it worked.
For context: I've played this game on both the Ultra-Violence and Nightmare presets, and I had the threat detector turned to parry-only. I found both to offer a good challenge, but if you really want to be tested in every possible way, you'll need to play around with difficulty sliders, especially for the parry window and resource amounts.
Puny god!
Despite taking place before the events of Doom (2016), The Dark Ages is a mostly self-contained story. An ambitious demonic prince named Azhrak has teamed up with a mysterious "outsider" called The Witch, and the two are searching for a powerful artifact that would give Azhrak the power of a god. Resisting him are the Sentinels of Argent D'Nur and their Maykr gods. The latter are currently wielding the Slayer as a mindless weapon, but it's clear he's breaking free of their control. Regardless, he's going to be slaying a lot of demons, and while the Sentinels are divided on whether he's a threat or messiah, he's their only hope of stopping the wannabe god.
For the most part, this story is very simple, even old-school. Cutscenes almost only play between levels, and unless you want to read the completely optional Codex (I did), the story won't interrupt gameplay. This means that there isn't much time for character or narrative development, but it is an entertaining, over-the-top popcorn flick that does its job of contextualizing why you're killing demons across multiple dimensions.
More interesting is the world itself. It's still simple, so don't expect any complex lore or a fully fleshed-out society, but the locations are interesting and varied. Argent D'Nur, the techno-fantasy world featured briefly in previous games, is now the main focus. Compared to some other fantasy-themed shooters like Quake or Amid Evil, there is a clear attempt to make Argent D'Nur feel like it was once a normal place with bustling cities, rural farmlands, resource-rich mines and sacred holy cities. It's all now fallen or falling to the chaos of Hell, but it still gives us a more complete picture of the world than past games. Even similarly-themed levels are very distinct from each other, like how it has both a typical mining village along with a much more fantastical abandoned mine.
In contrast, Hell is still mostly the familiar volcanic wastelands and industrial fortresses we've seen from past games, but there are a couple late-game areas that give us a much more surreal glimpse of the soul-processing realm. The Witch's realm, for its part, is nothing short of breathtaking, where even the marshlands offer bizarre and unforgettable moments. For me, her realm is actually the most captivating in the game.
As you can expect, all of these locations look fantastic, and I regularly paused to gaze at the gorgeous vistas or investigate some little detail that caught my attention. Even the familiar lava pits of Hell regularly got me to stop and appreciate the artistry. There's also far more moving and dynamic elements than in past Doom games. You'll regularly see ships and creatures flying overhead. Sentinels may run past you or be found hiding somewhere to tend to the wounded, and titans will regularly be seen in combat or writhing in agony on crosses. Even the playing space features breakable props and subtle particle effects, and they finally brought back keeping bits of blood and gore around as a testament to your violent handiwork. It all comes together to make a world that not only looks remarkable but feels surprisingly alive at times.
Come fly with me! Let's fly, let's fly away!
Along with this interesting world comes a few more open levels that offer the strongest sense of exploration in the series since the 90s. While the majority of levels are still the linear ones that have been dominating Doom since Doom 3, the more open levels still give us a chance to feel like we're exploring the world rather than just taking a guided tour of it, and as a fan of 90s Doom's more open levels, I enjoyed that occasional change of pace, especially since the more annoyingly confusing elements weren't retained.
The majority of these more open levels are Slayer-only ones. You're dumped into an open area with some mandatory arenas and optional side challenges, and while resources may act as breadcrumbs to guide you to points of interest, you're largely free to tackle everything in any order you like. To me, these levels felt a bit like an ultra-violent collectathon, just with arenas instead of moons or jiggies. Even the gold and gems you collect for upgrades and these levels' wolf statue hunting add to the overall collectathon feel. Like most good collectathons, the levels are packed with so many challenges that a fight or puzzle is never too far away, and that sense of freedom mixed with all the attention-grabbing activities perfectly captures the feeling of any Banjo Kazooie or Super Mario Odyssey level. It's still a distinctly Doom take, but as a fan of collectathons, I adored these levels and think they're the overall strongest level type in the game.
A few other levels feature a dragon, where you're often switching between typical Slayer gameplay and taking flight on a dragon. As the Slayer, you're mostly tackling self-contained arenas or shorter linear sections, and while flying the dragon, you're often getting dragged into dogfights or taking out titans and enemy carriers. These levels don't have the collectathon feel, but they still have a liberating sense of freedom as you survey the level from the dragon and decide which target or landing spot to go to next. It's actually one of these levels that serves as the first truly open-ended one, and after thinking that Eternal had taken linearity to a repetitive extreme, that initial moment of looking down on a Sentinel holy city and realizing that I could go anywhere I wanted felt transcendent.
My only real complaint about these levels is that the game continues modern Doom's insistence on auto saving only, and the more open structure means it can be harder to gauge when the last save was. Something as simple as a "save and quit" option or "last saved at" message on the pause screen would really alleviate concerns about losing too much progress for those of us with lives outside gaming. At the very least, the autosaves did seem generous enough, but assurances would have been nice.
Guns and shields and flails, oh my!
While exploration is nice and a traditional part of the series, the real focus of Doom is, of course, the combat, and The Dark Ages is no exception. As mentioned in the intro, the combat system has been reworked from Eternal. Instead of focusing on staying constantly mobile and utilizing a myriad of single-purpose tools, this game focuses on getting into a rhythm of offense and defense with fewer but more versatile tools.
Guns still serve as the foundation of offense. For the most part, the standard arsenal returns, though the Skullcrusher guns are an experimental replacement to the Chaingun, and the Grenade Launcher replaces separate frag grenades. New guns include the energy-based Cycler and the very unique Chainshot. Unlike the last couple games, guns don't feature alt-fire modes through mods, instead falling into groups of 1-2 weapons based on ammo type. This was no doubt done to accommodate the shield, but I did make more use of both weapons in a group than I did of both mods for any weapon in Eternal, so I consider it a minor improvement. I also found the expanded arsenal to be very dynamic over the course of the game, with new guns and upgrades often changing how I approached the weapon sandbox. For instance, the Accelerator (Plasma Rifle) is a very versatile early weapon that soon gets overshadowed by other options, but with its own upgrades, it became my preferred weapon against some of the tougher close-ranged enemies due to its high rate of fire and crowd-controlling heat burst.
On the other side of the combat rhythm is the shield, which is the foundation of defense and crowd control. Along with a standard block/parry system, the shield can also be used to dash into enemies or thrown to kill or stun enemies. Throwing the shield obviously leaves you vulnerable, but you can call it back whenever you want. Blocking too many attacks will cause a shield break that leaves you similarly vulnerable, but in that case, you're forced to wait it out. More beneficially, parrying often stuns and damages enemies, and around a third of the way in, you start getting shield runes that add even more devastating effects when you parry a projectile. While there's nowhere near as many runes as guns, they all have clear purposes that make them useful at different times, though I tended to stick to the highly-damaging and crowd-controlling Holy Swarm.
The third and final component to all this is the melee, which feels comparatively tacked on. It has its uses, but it's more there to support the guns and shield. It also has a much more linear power progression than the guns or shield runes, and outside of cheesing a weapon mastery challenge, I never swapped to an older melee weapon.
All three of these options make the Slayer feel like a force of nature. Guns are as punchy as ever and still visibly tear the flesh from enemies. Parries and melee strikes come with a short slowdown as an audible crack and visible shockwave emanate from the point of impact. Every step sounds like a behemoth's stomp, and falling through the air causes a loud rush of wind ending in a thunderous landing whose shockwave tears weaker enemies apart. Even simply brushing against some environmental props causes them to shatter. It's all a pure power fantasy that is so delightfully Doom.
On a deeper level, there's the aforementioned combat rhythm. Along with the new defensive dimension, enemies have considerably expanded attack patterns. The typical attacks of modern Doom return, but they've also brought back hitscan and shmup-inspired attack patterns from 90s Doom. The shmup-inspired ones are also far more fully realized than they ever were in the 90s, with some enemies able to fill the screen on their own, forcing you to weave through their projectiles looking for the parryable one. Essentially, every heavy demon has a "dance" you have to master similar to the Shambler Dance in Quake, and getting comfortable with each was a lot of fun and made this easily the most interesting take on Doom's iconic bestiary.
More akin to Eternal, you still need to remain incredibly offensive and make full use of your toolset, taking as few breaks as possible and only using defense when the combat rhythm demands it. Chaining shield moves and keeping the fire button held down between parries is critical, and much like waiting on cooldowns in Eternal, if you're waiting around for a parry opportunity, you likely have room to improve. (I say this as someone who still struggles with that against certain enemies.) Once it starts clicking, the combat feels incredibly fast-paced and much closer to the Eternal style of fast, varied inputs than the more traditional run-and-gun approach of most other shooters.
A really big difference from Eternal, though, is the weapon-swapping speed. It's slower, so weapon-swapping combos are no more. However, this slower swap leaves you vulnerable, and tougher enemies can punish you severely for careless weapon swapping. This is perhaps the hardest thing to get used to coming from Eternal, but I still really enjoyed it. Just like fast-swapping combos, it forces you to be smarter with weapon changes than most shooters demand, and it fits the offensive/defensive rhythm very well.
Argent D'Nur is Burning
Like the past couple games, the main place where all these combat characteristics come into focus is the arenas. Following Eternal, the emphasis is on taking out heavy demons while fodder infinitely spawn to support them. An occasional twist on this is Moral Encounters, which require killing demons to break their leader's shield, and after it breaks, the leader is often supported by respawning heavies. Once all the heavies or leader are killed, every other enemy immediately despawns, avoiding the anticlimactic cleanup problem many of Eternal's arenas faced.
One major change compared to Eternal is focusing less on verticality and tight spaces and more on open arenas of varying sizes. Arenas can range from smaller beds of pure chaos to massive battlefields that practically contain their own mini-arenas of short, partially self-contained fights. The larger arenas often feature fodder in the dozens while heavies still manage to keep you under constant pressure. It's not quite Serious Sam, but it's on a much bigger scale than we've seen from previous arena-focused Doom games while still keeping Doom's more interesting enemy compositions.
An even bigger but perhaps more subtle change is in how arenas flow. As mentioned before, it's not just about staying constantly mobile. It's about tearing through literal armies of fodder to seek out the more interesting heavies to engage with their "dance". In this sense, arenas are about quickly switching from "dance" to "dance", and as more and tougher heavies get clumped together, the offense/defense rhythm becomes more dynamic and difficult. It's more stand-and-fight than the typical circle-strafe-and-win approach that most other arena shooters use. It's maybe hard to really get until you've experienced it, but I do think this will push some hardcore arena shooter fans out of their comfort zone. Personally, I found it very refreshing and remember most of the arenas very fondly.
This more stand-and-fight emphasis also carries over well to bosses. While I think the four unique bosses are too close together, I still found them to be incredibly fun, and even the weakest one was one of the most hilariously over-the-top bosses I've ever seen. All of them do a fantastic job of pushing the different combat mechanics further than any standard enemy, so each feels less like a break from usual gameplay and more like mastering an extra complex "dance". Even as someone who has liked most of the modern Doom bosses, I think this is easily the overall strongest set in the series.
Rip and tear, until it is done!
Obviously, I love The Dark Ages. After my first playthrough, I immediately began a second and third, and I don't think I've done that with a shooter since Half-Life 2. I even got all the achievements on Steam, which I also rarely do. The world is captivating, and the combat system is perhaps the most fun I've had with one in a shooter despite (or maybe because of) how unusual it is for the genre.
I will at least acknowledge that if you just want a standard run-and-gun shooter, it's not what you're looking for right now. It's clearly influenced by 90s Doom and Eternal, but it's its own thing as opposed to a new collection of levels sticking to a battle-tested formula.
But if you want something a bit different and can get on board with what The Dark Ages is doing, it is an absolutely great time. I've really enjoyed every playthrough of its campaign, and I'm sure I'll enjoy plenty more in the future.