Doom takes a parry-heavy turn, but retains its blood and guts core in The Dark Ages.
What Is It? You know what Doom is. I didn’t play the 2016 game or Eternal, but I still know what Doom is. We all know what to expect with The Dark Ages: plenty of demons spewing blood, big, powerful weapons, and the unstoppable force that is Doom Slayer. On all of those fronts, The Dark Ages is a smashing success.
Doom: The Dark Ages is a game centered around momentum and constantly moving forward. You will frequently be surrounded by enemies, big and small, and regardless of where your ammo or health levels sit, the correct course of action is almost always to keep on blasting away. The game encourages and rewards this through frequent health drops from slayed foes and enables it through a notable mechanic of allowing Doom Slayer to quickly close the gap with a distant enemy using a shield ability.
The momentum carries over between battles as well. The levels are split between fairly linear layouts and wide-open areas which have many optional secrets to find. I spent a lot of time seeking these out and I couldn’t help but notice how quickly I always wanted to move through the world. The game makes this possible through smooth, quick movement and platforming. It’s nice when the “move fast, shoot loud, and break stuff” motif carries through to the vast majority of the game, even outside of combat.
Fights are large-scale affairs in The Dark Ages. A typical combat set piece will have Doom Slayer walk into a large, open area and be greeted by a few groups of small, weaker enemies. There will be one or two large enemies mixed in, there are roughly eight different types of these in the game each with their own patterns, strengths, and weaknesses. Add in a few middle-ground enemies who can’t be killed in one shot but generally don’t require full attention, and that is the basic setup. For bigger battles, this pattern will repeat a few times and often culminate in a boss who is a powered-up version of one of the large enemy types. You will focus on the large enemies currently attacking you while using the weaklings to farm health and shields, and probably just make sure you don’t get blindsided by one of the middle baddies.
A common feature among the large and medium enemies is that they will all, eventually, fire glowing orbs of some sort at you. When you see a green one, and they will always, eventually, fire a green one, that is your queue to parry the orb. Exactly what happens when you parry will depend on what add-on you have equipped at the moment, but it will generally stun the enemy and probably deal a bit of damage to them and maybe even surrounding enemies. Parrying probably isn’t 100% necessary in this game because everything can be fully blocked with your shield. If you take too much block damage your shield will become inactive for a short timeframe, but most attacks aren’t so relentless for this to be an issue. The main benefit of parrying is the short breather it provides you in the middle of the massive, non-stop battles you will find yourself in throughout the game.
The gun selection here is strong and perhaps most notable for its restraint. All of the weapons fit on a single weapon wheel selector. They mostly work at short and mid range, with a few longer range options. The game wants you to fight close up and use your shield and melee attacks frequently, and the gun options reflect that. There are upgrades for weapons, shield, and melee attacks. You get a few choices along the way about what upgrades or melee weapons to equip, for example, which help you customize to your play style just a bit.
The game plays out over 22 chapters and will take in the 12-14 hour range the first time through. There is a story here, but it mostly just serves to get you into new locations to kill a bunch of demons and not much more. Playing on Ultra Violence difficulty, I had a lot of deaths because just a few hits can wipe out most of your health. There seemed to be some stopping point at 5 HP where the game would make it more difficult than those last HP to fall then the prior 100+. Deaths can be mitigated through sigils which provide an instant revive, these are typically well hidden throughout the levels. There are a ton of difficulty settings you can tune to your exact liking to make the game fun for you.
The Best Part: The way in which the game handles health. Health is obviously vital, but for the vast majority of the game you never really have to worry about the HP number showing on the screen.. Health is essentially a binary stat in this game; you are either dead or not. If you aren’t dead, you have plenty of chances to regain most of your health in a matter of seconds. Smaller enemies, which can be killed by the handful in one move, will drop health when you are low and larger enemies will eventually get into a state where you can perform a finishing move (a simple melee attack, nothing spectacular, visually speaking) and the enemy will drop a large chunk of health and ammo. As long as you don’t hit zero health, you can quickly turn things around and be back to near full strength in a matter of seconds. All of this adds up to provide a wonderful system of not needing to constantly keep tabs on health; just keep running and gunning.
The Worst Part: The game uses two alternate gameplay modes to break up the non-stop demon-blasting FPS action; aerial combat on top of your trusty dragon and fistfights in a massive mech suit. The dragon parts are a lot of fun to me, having you maneuver through some tight spaces and chase other flying objects; you move fast and do fun things. The mech combat, however, did not land for me. This is mostly due to it being basically the exact opposite of the rest of the game; slow. The mech, and your giant demon enemies, most slowly and the special moves take a bit to fire. It isn’t bad by any means, and it only shows up for a few brief sections, but it’s the wrong kind of break in action for me.
The Verdict: Doom: The Dark Ages is a massive success in my book because it knows what it wants to do, and it does it very well. The game wants you to blast through enemies by the dozen before they can kill you, then find the next horde and repeat. The level/battle designs, weapons, health/ammo systems, and shield mechanics all feed into the idea of momentum and continuing to push forward. It’s striking when the game breaks from this, either in the mech sections or in the cutscenes, during these I simply wanted to get back to running through these well crafted worlds, blasting fun guns, finding tiny toy doll secrets, and mowing through hundreds of demons.
If that sounds like a good time to you; Doom: The Dark Ages should be on your gaming playlist.
How to Play: Xbox Series*, PlayStation 5, PC
*console played on for this review
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