I Ripped and I Teared, and now It is done. Doom Eternal is pretty much what a sequel should be, more of the first game. I am of course referring to the game titled Doom from 2016 as the "first game" which while not correct at all is much easier to talk and write about as such so therefore I am declaring it okay. This game is more Doom. There are more weapons, more enemies, more levels that are also bigger, more upgrades, more systems/mechanics to juggle, and more story. More is not always better as Doom Eternal can be bogged down with its own nonsense at times but for the most part more in this case is pretty good.
Full disclosure: I did not play much original Doom or Doom 2 and while I did play through Doom 2016 I was not as struck by that games reverence to the original games as many people and as such I mostly ignored/ did not care about the story in this game. While many people have criticized the tone and story of Doom Eternal I will not because I did not find that stuff important in this game or the last one. With that being said, on to my review.
My Play through of Doom Eternal on Xbox One.
The Combat Loop
When you start playing the combat loop of Doom Eternal seems mostly the same as the last game. You start out with the shotgun (there is no pistol, so good by unlimited ammo option) and you quickly re-acquire the chainsaw and your first weapon mod. As the game progresses it becomes clear that there is a lot more going on here than the first game. You start running into much bigger foes that have weak spots that must be dealt with first or they will rip you apart. This factor changes your focus as you try to deal with the bigger stuff while also managing you health (via glory kills) your ammo (with the saw) and now your armor with a new flame belch that set demons on fire and causes them to spit out armor shards. As with the first game, the main thing is to stay on the move (always oscar mike). The difficulty I played on (the second lowest) allowed me to get away with getting up in the face of many of the larger demons and blast them apart with the Super Shotgun (I could not have finished the game with out that crutch). Later in the game you start seeing boss demons mixed in with the regular ones. These bosses are introduced as they sound, seemingly as one off encounters that you get past and are glad you never have to see again. Doom Eternal takes these bosses and brings them back time and time again in the second half of the game ( I fought one really tough boss 8 times) and even mixes them together. My trick for managing these encounters was to stay alive by using the smaller demons for health and ammo while building up enough of both to do some damage to the boss, rinse and repeat until it was gone.
The game does feature plenty of new stuff to deal with the masses of demons, so much so that the controller feels overwhelmed with stuff mapped to it. You have two different grenade types, different weapon mods for each weapon, flame belch and chainsaw, a unique super weapon which I won't spoil, a loaded weapon wheel, jumping and dashing that all require their own dedicated buttons. The fast frantic paced nature of the combat in Doom Eternal makes it very difficult to reliability do the thing you want to do when you want to do it. With all that being said and despite the many really bad difficulty spikes, if you really liked the combat from the last Doom game, you will really like this one as well. Unless you are savage (or playing on PC with mouse and keyboard) I strongly recommend lowering the difficulty at the outset.
The Upgrades and Stuff
After beating the first level you are whisked away to your castle in space (you read that right) where you find your home base. This is where you find the portal to the next level as well as various places to find unlocks and secret (man of which require energy cells to access). You also find a neat room where Doom guy spends his free time (I think it's neat anyway) with plenty of Easter eggs to find. There is also a training room at the bottom where you a free to fight all of the demon types you have faced with all of the weapons you have without fear of death or resource usage. It is a neat setting for a home base but it is a little too easy (for me anyway) to get lost in it.
The upgrades in Doom Eternal are numerous. There are upgrades for health/ammo/armor limits, each weapon mod has upgrades as does your suit. You upgrade you weapon modes by collecting combat points, your suit with praetor suit tokens and you stats with sentinel crystals most of which are found in levels. You open up access to some of these with sentinel batteries that you use in your space castle (the batteries are also found in missions). You also have collectibles in the form of plastic miniatures of the various demons, vinyl records and floppy discs that when all 14 are collected open access to original Doom I did not find all of these). There is also a giant gun that is locked behind 6 force fields that you need to complete special locked combat arenas to access to (I did not get this either). It is pretty clear that the developers put a lot of effort into the collectibles in Doom Eternal but I think the upgrade systems could have been streamlined and reduced as many of them don't seem that impact-full and I sat on many of these points for too long because I found nothing worthwhile to spend them on. I think that having fewer more useful upgrades would have went a long way to smoothing out the difficulty spikes in this game.
The Difficulty
I have already mentioned the difficulty but I bring it up again here because this game is much harder than the last one. Doom Eternal is unforgiving and it has many insane difficulty spikes that it took me way too many attempts to get past. There were cases where I barely got past a combat encounter only to find a boss demon appear that I would have to deal with before I got my precious check point. Most of the game I was able to deal with but in several occasions I had to replay the sequence over and over again with frustration setting in making it more difficult. I played this game on the second lowest difficulty and yet it felt as hard (or harder) than Halo on its highest (which I have beaten that way). If I had known it was going to be this bad I would have started it on its lowest setting. I dare not even try the harder settings with what I had to deal with.
Conclusion
I have complained quite a bit about this game but I still like it. It is a hard but fun and fast paced shooter that rewards skill and makes you feel like you are good, until those difficulty spikes when you fell powerless. I again strongly recommend playing this at a lower difficulty setting as it would have been more fun for me if I had done so. Even still I am glad I got and finished Doom Eternal and a wait and wonder if (or when) there will be a third one.
