Here's what you need to know; things have quite literally gone to Hell on Earth as the planet is ravaged by a full-scale Demonic invasion. But as Earth is transformed into a smouldering Hellscape and the armies of Darkness harvest human souls on an industrial scale, all hope is not lost, not while The Slayer lives. But older, darker forces stir, forces that have facilitated the extinction of Mankind for their own ends as they have done countless times before to countless worlds. The Slayer has other plans, however, and this endless cycle of destruction is about to be brought to a violent halt at the business end of a Super Shotgun.
Welcome to the Apocalypse, folks; entire countries are on lockdown, including my own, thousands of people are dead and thousands more are going to be, the entire world is terrified. But with the Government urging people to stay indoors, we all need some way to pass the time, which is easier for some of us than it is for others. Take me for example, I bought the Borderlands 3 season pass, beat the game as Zane and am now on my fourth playthrough with my fourth Vault Hunter. A new beast is on the board now, however; the sequel to one of the most hardcore games of the past decade, Doom: Eternal, and to say this game has been hyped is an understatement, but was it worth it, the short answer is yes, oh my fucking God, yes, but please do stick around for the long answer.
Doom: Eternal's opening cutscene is perfection, it's absolute perfection. We see Earth, scarred with demonic symbols and glyphs while nameless victims cry for help. But someone is listening, as on his orbital fortress, because he has one of them now, the Slayer is getting ready to hunt. This really is an entertaining sequence, with someone down on the surface rambling about having faith in "him" while the Slayer suits up and loads his shotgun, the sequence ends with a badass close up of the Slayer's glare as he pumps the shotgun, before hard cutting to the title, again accompanied by the black magician Mick Gordon's soundtrack. You're then thrown straight into the mayhem with a bit of a tutorial to show you the ropes of combat, though if you played the previous game, little of this will be new to you. We'll get to gameplay, but first let's talk about the story, because that's something the Doom franchise has an odd relationship with, and Doom: Eternal is no exception. Doom 3 was a very story heavy game, and fleshed its story out with its collection of audio logs and PDAs, Doom 2016 had a very light story, but still had a stupid amount of backstory and lore hidden in the codex, Doom: Eternal is more in the middle. There is still a codex full of backstory and lore, even more than before, in fact, and you'll still be spending the vast majority of the time killing demons, but this time the game actually has a couple of cutscenes, moments of the Slayer meeting people and getting told to stay out of their way, or later on when we learn the Slayer's true identity in a moment of pure, unadulterated fan service.
Doom: Eternal doesn't tell a complex story though, the plot is actually stupidly simple; the Slayer is on Earth looking for the Hell Priests overseeing the invasion. Where things get a bit insane is how this game fleshes out the lore of Doom, as him killing the Priests pisses off some very powerful people, and when they tell him to stay away, he obviously ignores them. Doom: Eternal takes that amazing world building from the previous game and not only continues it, but puts it right in the players face, and it's awesome. I mean, how many games are there where you piss off God. This naturally means the Slayer is even more badass than before, and with the game going considerably deeper into his past and the things he has done, you get even more of a taste that he is a God, and even outside of the lore and in the game itself you see this; for god's sake, he blows a hole in a planet then gets to the escape pods by firing himself out of a point defence gun at them. I won't spoil what is revealed about him, but it literally is a game changing reveal, and makes the already massive world of this new Doom series even bigger in a way that's kind of beautiful. The game also goes heavy into the history of Argent D'Nur and the Sentinels, you even visit Argent D'Nur in this game, or at least the parts of it that aren't Hellified, and if the 2016 game made this world interesting, this game makes it completely captivating, as before, I sat and read all of the codex entries, and the more I read, the more I fell in love with this game's worldbuilding. Doom: Eternal is a truly galactic game as you not only go to Hell and Earth, but Mars, obviously, the Arctic circle, Argent D'Nur, Hell again and probably the most insane of all, a world called Urdak, the home of the angelic Makyrs and their matriarch, the Kahn Makyr, who is one of the game's antagonists.
These settings aren't random, however, and are all weaved together by a surprisingly coherent story that only gets more and more biblical as it progresses. It's so nice that a game tells an interesting story and crafts a compelling world after the last game I reviewed, Borderlands 3, dropped the ball so hard, and how ironic is it that the game that gets it right is Doom. A big part of Doom: Eternal's storytelling and worldbuilding is its environments as like the 2016 game, the in-game world of Doom: Eternal is a goldmine of atmosphere and history. Take the Earth levels for example, as in these levels, the war against the demons has already been lost, the landscape is littered with crumbling buildings and abandoned and destroyed war machines, all being corrupted and infected by Hell. The streets and buildings are choked by Hell growths and littered with the remains of the dead. The game completely sells the look of a world literally gone to Hell, and sometimes you just have to stop and look, give yourself a chance to take it in. The game's other worlds are just as strong, Argent D'Nur for example has vast, ancient cites, sprawling mountains and forests, and reminders of a battle very long since lost; from the ruins of great temples to the corpses of Titans, lying where they fell at the hands of the Sentinels. As in the 2016 game however, the winner in this category is Hell, from the corrupted ruins of Earth and Argent D'Nur, down to the bowels of Hell itself in Nekravol, or as biblical types would call it, the tower of Babel, it's just horrifyingly beautiful. Even when you're not killing demons and just taking in the scenery, this game is epic, look in any direction on any of the levels and you'll probably find a desktop wallpaper.
Again mentioning Nekravol, in my Doom 3 review I praised the game for its ridiculously fucked up portrayal of Hell, and Nekravol feels like that, it is the fucked up version of Hell that every six year old Christian in the world pisses themselves at the thought of; a sprawling factory of endless torture and pain, where Hell's victims are crammed into cages and have their souls extracted through suffering. Like you'll be playing Doom: Eternal with a weak stomach in the first place, but some of this game's imagery is genuinely disturbing. Again though, for all the moments of horror, there are moments of utter beauty, Doom: Eternal is a visual feast, more so than even the last two Doom games which both also completely crushed it with atmosphere and worldbuilding. But one thing about Doom: Eternal's presentation is in a league above every other game in the franchise, even above the 2016 game, its music. Mick Gordon returns to compose the soundtrack and as I said before, his work is black magic, his score for the 2016 game is one of the best video game soundtracks in existence and is almost certainly the best used, but even that is underwhelming compared to his work in Doom: Eternal. When shit's going down in this game, his music is a strong as it ever was in the last game, it's hardcore, it's pulse pounding, it's metal as fuck, a symphony of heavy guitar and electronic beats that moves in perfect sync with the Slayer.
But where Doom: Eternal is just as effective is, weirdly, in the quieter moments, the game's ambient music is incredible; it can be haunting, atmospheric, filled with subdued rage or with a sense of wonder and awe. The Sentinel Prime level is a great example of this, with an amazing ambient homage to Sign of Evil, followed by a hardcore Electronic assault on the senses in the boss fight with the Gladiator. Like all things about Doom: Eternal, the music is rich, there's just so much to dig into and it's the kind of music that elevates a game from being fun to being an experience. And all of it; the music, the backdrops, the locations, the codex, makes this simple game so rich and juicy, like Doom 3 and Doom 2016, it's a masterpiece of atmosphere and worldbuilding. One area where Doom: Eternal makes changes from the previous game is in the look of a lot of the enemies and weapons, though these changes are purely aesthetic, and if I'm honest, a lot of it is improved. Oh yeah, after describing Doom 2016 as visual perfection a few years ago, I think Doom: Eternal is even more perfect. The game takes a lot of design ideas from the original Doom, while seamlessly blending it in with aesthetics and motifs from Doom 2016. Enemies like the Mancubus, Archvile and Cacodemon are spitting images of their OG Doom counterparts, while other enemies like the Revenant, Imp and Pinky haven't changed much from the last game. Doom: Eternal brings in some new demons like the Carcass and the Doom Hunter, the former being a support demon that can spawn shields, the latter being the top half of a demon grafted onto a hover-tank.
And for more goodness, the game brings in demons of Doom's past, like the Pain Elemental and the Arachnotron, both of which are a lot of fun to fight, as well as the Tyrant, which is basically a Cyberdemon, albeit one that looks and fights very differently to the Cyberdemon of doom 2016. As before, these are all a lot of fun to fight, and Doom: Eternal takes it a significant step further by giving a lot of them exploits; now in addition to shooting them until they stop moving, some enemies have weak spots and are weak to certain weapons or attacks. And you can use this to your advantage, crippling a Revenant's or Arachnotoron's ranged attacks by blowing off their cannons, or knocking off a Cyber-Mancubus' armour with a blood punch. One that never gets old is instantly putting a Cacodemon in a staggered state by shooting a grenade into its mouth, I could do that all day. And trust me, few things are more entertaining than staggering multiple Cacodemons and glory killing them all, first one before jumping or dashing to the next. The game really mixes up its encounters too with the demons you fight, throwing all sorts at you at once, from small fry like the Imps, all the way up to Tyrants and Doom Hunters, all with different strengths and weaknesses that you'll have to learn to exploit, and most of these encounters are stupidly fun. I say most because there is one issue, one enemy that I don't like and don't enjoy fighting, and if you've played the game or seen any reviews of it, you'll know its name already; the Marauder.
The Marauder is a dick, I hate him because every time he shows up, whatever battle you're in grinds to a halt. The Marauder is the one enemy in the game that doesn't play by the rules, designed to be an equal to the Doom Slayer, he's very dash happy and how and when he attacks doesn't always make sense, and he can instantly block all direct attacks with a shield, only being vulnerable to direct attacks when his eyes turn green, keep shooting the shield and he'll send his dog after you too, so have fun with that. He is one of the hardest enemies in the game, and easily the most bullshit, but the fact that he's then thrown in with all the normal enemies makes him insufferable. Doom: Eternal is all about momentum, as we'll get to when we discuss gameplay, but the Marauder disrupts that momentum every time he shows up, he's a perfectly fine one-on-one fight, but you only fight him one-on-one once, and every other time you fight him, you have to leave yourself open to every other demon in the room to focus on him, or avoid his dash happy arse until the rest of the room is dealt with, and he does take some of the fun out of it. The weird thing is that he's the only one though, he's the only enemy in the game that I don't enjoy fighting, which makes him all the more annoying, but also shows just how polished this game is, because when it's not the Marauder, be it lowly Imps, all the way up to towering Tyrant's and Doom Hunters and everything in between, sending them back to Hell is a treat, and their designs, even the Marauder, are gorgeous, especially the Marauder, in fact, his look is as steeped in lore as it is badass.
But where would the fun be if your tools for the job weren't all that impressive, luckily, Doom: Eternal has you covered. Anyone who played the last Doom will be familiar with these guns, because the initial lineup hasn't changed; you got guns like the combat shotgun, a plasma rifle, a BFG-9000 obviously, and a rocket launcher. The Gauss cannon has been replaced with a weapon called the Ballista, but it's still a slow firing, super accurate and high damage plasma weapon. Changes include the absence of a pistol, the radically old school look of the plasma rifle, and a handful of new mods to play with. As in the 2016 game, all the weapons have interchangeable mods, ranging from a grenade launcher and full-auto mode for the shotgun, to the returning heat blast for the plasma rifle and the new microwave beam, to a mod for the Ballista that is completely ridiculous, firing a charged horizonal beam that can cut pretty much anything clean in half. As with the last Doom as well, all of these mods can be upgraded with tokens awarded in combat, and mastered by completing challenges or finding the occasional mastery token. And like with the last Doom, some of the fully upgraded weapons are a bit insane, like the Chaingun's turret mod once it no longer overheats, or the Plasma Rifle's heat blast that gives you a damage boost when it's fully charged. Nothing compares to the Super-Shotgun though, nothing, because that meat hook is so much fun, it love it, I want to marry it.
And then you have the BFG-9000, and what else needs to be said, it's the BFG-9000, for when you absolutely have to kill every mother fucker in the room. Once you unlock it too, the BFG-9000 shares a slot on the weapon wheel with the Unmakyr, a super-fast firing, super high damage plasma weapon that's very impractical to use thanks to it sharing ammo with the BFG-9000, for which you can carry a grand total of two shots. Another awesome but not very practical weapon is the Crucible, which is basically a Doom lightsaber, it can kill pretty much everything in a single hit, except the Marauder because he's a dick, but like the Unmakyr, the issue is ammo. You can only carry three charges for the Crucible, and like the BFG-9000, you have to find ammo pickups in the environment, meaning you have to be very selective in where and how you use it. Which brings us to the issue of ammo, something a lot of people aren't happy with. Doom: Eternal does not give you much ammo, even when your ammo capacity is fully upgraded, you can still only carry twenty-four shotgun ammo, and one-hundred-and-eighty bullets, which is real problem when you're rocking the fully upgraded Chaingun. I asked my nephew about this and he's of the opinion that it isn't good, that you need more ammo, I meanwhile disagree, I think it's brilliant. Doom: Eternal is a lot smarter than it looks; it may look like mindless mayhem, but in reality, it's a game where you really have to think about what you're doing, you have to stay mobile, think fast and keep on top of your limited resources.
All of your equipment plays into this; you have the chainsaw which is now on a cool down, letting you use it more which you will need to do to get ammo. The Glory kills are back, and you'll need them for health drops, though you can also get them from the Blood Punch and killing frozen enemies once you've upgraded the ice bomb. And the new flame belch is a blessing thanks to it making enemies drop armour. Does all that sound like a lot to take in, yes, does it make for an intense and enjoyable experience, fuck yes. The constant ammo shortage forces you to play with all your guns, the chainsaw is a necessary tool to keep yourself alive, as is the flame belch. This throws a lot more strategy into the battles as now you can't just strafe and shoot, now you have to strafe and shoot while also keeping on top of your resources, making the combat even more dangerous as you constantly have to throw yourself into the thick of it to get ammo and armour, weeding out and farming the fodder while trying not to get torn apart by everyone else. Doom 2016 struck the perfect balance of being hard and making you feel unstoppable, and Doom: Eternal has doubled down on it, making a game that's far harder, but that I don't think I can go back from, I adore it, I can play it for days. But it doesn't just stop at weapons and equipment, because Doom: Eternal's greatest leap from its predecessor is movement. Since beating Doom: Eternal, I've replayed Doom 2016 and burned through Borderlands 3's latest DLC, and Borderlands 3, a game I love playing, felt disgusting to play, but the real kicker is that even Doom 2016, one of the most fun games of the past decade, was underwhelming to go back to.
Doom: Eternal just feels so good to play, it feels so good. In addition to the double jump, you now have a double dash, which even further increases the speed as you bounce around the room, constantly dashing and jumping out of the way of the demons. In addition to ledge climbing, you can also swing on conveniently placed monkey bars or get flung into the air by conveniently placed grav-lifts, letting you play with the verticality of a lot of the levels. But that meat hook though, mounted on the Super-Shotgun, firing it an enemy will pull you towards the enemy, letting you cover distance easily to hit them with a devastating point-blank shot. And on top of that, when mastered, the meat hook sets enemies on fire, I have a beard all of a sudden, how bizarre. All of this melts together into the game equivalent of a Prequel Trilogy Lightsaber duel; very fast, very flashy, and more like a dance than a fight. It is, however, the most ferocious dance you will ever have because even at full armour and health, death is always only a few good hits away, every fight is a fight for your life, and every fight is different. For my first playthrough of the game, I got my arse kicked, I was still getting to grips with it, I faired far better in my second playthrough, but what I found fascinating was the battles that gave me the most trouble were different in each playthrough. Example; in the Cultist base level, before you get the Super-shotgun, you get dropped into a smallish square arena that gets flooded with demons, and that room killed me half a dozen times in my first run, but I blitzed it in my second, meanwhile a room before that that I blitzed in my first run gave me real trouble in my second. I've never seen that before in a game, and I bet in my inevitable third run, a completely different set of arenas will be the bane of my existence, and that excites me knowing that Doom: Eternal will, at the very least, never get stale.
It does however bring me to say that this game has a learning curve, it being an even more hardcore game than the already hardcore Doom 2016, it's a game that forces you to play it a certain way and if you don't want to learn or it's too hard, Doom: Eternal probably isn't for you, my advice is obvious though, stick with it, git gud, and it'll be worth it, I promise. Weirdly, the game gets easier as you get further in, as you get upgrades and new guns, not to mention the extra lives scattered about that will throw you right back into the fight when you die, basically a get-out-of-jail-free card if you fuck up which you will, don't worry, it happens to all of us. They do kind of break the game a bit though, as you get more confident in the Doom dance and start needing them less, but you're still picking them up, eventually you'll have way more of them than you could ever need. To be honest, there's only one thing about Doom: Eternal's gameplay that I don't think is an improvement, and that's the boss fights, though I don't think that's the fault of Doom: Eternal, I think that's just because Doom 2016's boss fights were so awesome, because let's face it, nothing will ever compare to the Spider Mastermind. In fact, if I'm honest, the Cyberdemon tops all the bosses of Doom: Eternal, which might be heresy to say, I don't know yet. Doom: Eternal also has the Slayer Gates, six optional arenas scattered throughout the game that will unlock the Unmakyr once completed. Not that the Unmakyr is the only incentive for beating them, because in a way, they are Doom: Eternal at its most pure, they are small, contained arenas that throw literally everything at you and force you to use every skill you've learned if you have any hope of surviving.
They hold nothing back either, even super heavies like the Tyrant, which you'll have to fight two of in one of them, to the Doom Hunter, to my favourite cunt, the Marauder. My only complaint with the Slayer Gates is that there's only six. I do however take genuine issue with the secret encounters, which are a lot like the pervious game's Rune challenges, in that they suck. They're gore nests scattered around the levels that, once triggered, will spawn a bunch of demons that you have to kill in a usually very stick time limit, and why do I hate them, that's simple, killing a Marauder in thirty seconds is bullshit. Like the Rune Challenges, these almost always come down to trial and error, and you lose any recourses you use when you trigger them, whether you complete them or not. Rune challenges are gone, thank god, now Runes are just scattered throughout the world, as are the Praetor tokens for upgrading the Slayer's suit. Suit upgrades are less exciting than the weapons mods and runes, but useful nonetheless, upgrading basic stuff like decreased cooldown and buffs on your equipment; taking less damage from the toxic goo for example, or letting you fire two grenades between cooldowns. The ability to make yourself immune to explosive barrels is a bit daft though, as is making them drop ammo and respawn when they're blown up. The runes are where things get more crazy, obviously, giving you buffs like faster glory kills and the ability to do them from further away, to having greater control of movement in the air, to more strange ones like the two that slow down time either when you're in the air or when you take a fatal hit.
If I may rewind a bit to the goo though, because if you've read to this point, you know I have some issues with the game, and there's just one more I need to mention. Doom: Eternal's movement is incredible, but there are times where the game kind of spoils it, several sections where you have to do platforming or solve basic puzzles. The puzzles are not the real issue, it's the platforming; it's having to jump onto a floating platform and then jump to the next one before it falls, or having to jump dash across a bottomless pit and time your jumps and dashes perfectly or you won't make it, or a handful of sections where you are walking through purple goo that you can't jump or dash in, not technically platforming but you get the point. These sections don't suck because they're hard, they suck because they slow the pace of the game and get very tedious. But when you get past one of these platforming sections and get back to ripping and tearing, or get your hands on a new toy, album or cheat code that you can enjoy back at the fortress, it picks up again. I didn't mention that, did I? Doom: Eternal's levels are filled with secrets, it'd be criminal if they weren't, and these secrets vary from pickups, to cool shit like action figures of all the game's demons and vinyl albums you can interact with on the Fortress, as well as cheats you can mess around with, should vanilla Doom: Eternal not be crazy enough for you. The Quakecon cheat is particularly awesome, as is the classic Doom Marine armour you can unlock on the Fortress, which looks completely absurd and yet stupidly awesome, as well as a host of other player and weapon skins to play with, Doom: Eternal didn't need customisation, and I guess it's only there for the Battlemode which I haven't bothered with, but I'm glad it does, just for that classic armour.
A Steel Barrelled Sword of Vengeance
Doom: Eternal is a dangerous game; once it has its teeth in you, it won't be easy to get free from it, and once you're dancing to its tune, it'll make every other shooter out there underwhelming, even its own predecessor. There are things I don't like for sure; there are too many platforming sections and light puzzles for my liking, and they make especially replaying the levels less enjoyable, and the Marauder is a cunt. But when you're not platforming or fighting the Marauder, Doom: Eternal is in a class of its own; whether you're exploring its vast and beautiful levels, pouring through the codex and soaking up that juicy lore, or knee deep in the demons, there aren't many games out there that are as fun as Doom: Eternal. Its combat is a ferocious blend of recourse management, frantic movement and utter demon carnage, it's not a relaxing game, that's for sure. The game is tough, especially in its earlier levels, but it's a hell of a rush to rip and tear into a room full of demons and leave none standing, even more so than in Doom 2016. I'm not sure what a Doom 3 could do to top this, I guess we'll find out in another four or five years, probably, but I'll happily wait that long with this pair of Shooter masterpieces, my only regret is not getting the Collector's Edition with the wearable helmet. Doom: Eternal is an absolute must play.
To say that Tenby saved my soul is obviously a tad dramatic, but honestly, walking the mile and a half long expanse of South Beach, sun beaming down from above, music blaring in my ears and the other end of the beach just never seeming to get any closer, that might have been the happiest I've been all year. If only the far end of the beach really did never get closer, so that moment could just keep going and going. Or how about the nights where rather than sleeping like a normal person, I wired up my projector and watched Gerry Anderson's Stingray on the side of the awning, a show that still fills me with childish wonder and excitement, even as a broken twenty-three year old. Or how about when I threw my confidence issues to the wind and went swimming in the sea for the first time in years, I went with my camera bag, equipped to spend hours upon hours walking, and ended up going into town for swimming trunks and spending the rest of the day paddling in the waters off Tenby's North Beach. That was a great day, and until I succumbed to heatstroke in the early evening, it never stopped being great. My sister, nephew and I went on a walk in the afternoon because she "needed to get her steps in," and we ended up getting separated from each other in a field full of cows. As alarming as it was to be alone in a field, surrounded by dozens of tons of burger meat that were all looking at me and following me around, I kept my head and walked out of the situation was a massive grin on my face. 
