Love/Hate: Doom Eternal (2020)

Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be covering Doom Eternal, the eagerly-anticipated follow-up to the landmark Doom (2016)! This is another one of those Doom games with a bit of a reputation. While it’s generally considered a great game, long-time fans are sharply polarized about it due to some major changes made to the formula Doom (2016) set. Some people love it and think it’s the best game in the entire franchise, while others find its mechanical complexity and rock-paper-scissors gameplay annoying and wish that it had stuck closer to the free-form template of its predecessor. What did I think? Read on to find out…

Love

• Gameplay Evolution – Doom Eternal feels kind of like a remake of Doom II: after stopping the demonic incursion on Mars, we now have to go stop the hordes attacking Earth. However, while that game was basically just an expansion of Doom (1993), Doom Eternal is very much an evolutionary sequel. It takes the gameplay of Doom (2016) and tunes it in some very intentional ways:
  • First of all, there’s now a strongly-defined gameplay loop that keeps resources flowing without requiring you to take time to find item pickups. Need health? Go for a glory kill to drop medkits. Running low on ammo? Use your chainsaw to chop a demon in half and unleash a rainbow-hued spray of ammunition. Is your armour damaged? Use a shoulder-mounted flamethrower to make enemies drop a steady stream of armour pickups. Any resource you could want is available at your fingertips, and this helps keep Doom Eternal on a relentless, breakneck pace forward at all times.
  • Furthermore, most of your abilities are now no longer locked behind item pickups; instead, they are mostly on a very quick cooldown system. Personally, I love this change. For one thing, if I know that my grenades, chainsaw, and flamethrower are on a short cooldown, I am actually incentivized to use them… instead of what I usually do, which is hoard them for a dangerous boss encounter that never comes. If the game has to account for you not having them, they’re functionally useless. However, if you are expected to have them and be using them, then they can be woven into standard gameplay seamlessly. This also has basically perfected the chainsaw’s place in your arsenal: it’s the sort of visceral weapon that’s hard to balance in a “normal” game, but when it’s something you’re expected to use on the regular, you can make it as gory and overpowered as you’d like!
  • In addition, enemies in Doom all have defined strengths and weaknesses, which encourages you to use your entire kit in battle. For example, the Arachnotrons’ dorsal gun can be destroyed by a rocket or the shotgun’s secondary fire grenade launcher, which makes it far easier to fight. At a certain point, these strengths and weaknesses start to become second nature, and you’ll find yourself automatically gravitating to the right weapon for the right circumstance. Some people bemoan having combat prescribed on you like this and would like to just use whatever gun they want at all times, but I really enjoyed this system. It makes even the simplest combat encounter into a puzzle-lite experience. And, honestly, it’s not like you can’t brute force your way through the game with any gun… it’ll just be harder and take longer.
• The Soundtrack – Doom (2016)’s soundtrack was legendary. Doom Eternal‘s soundtrack is, in my opinion, even better. I was headbanging so hard to “The Only Thing They Fear is You” that I nearly propelled myself face-first onto my kitchen floor (this is not a joke, this actually nearly happened to me). This song has turned into a modern-day “time to fuck shit up” anthem for good reason, but the rest of the soundtrack is just as badass.
• Gore – Doom (2016) was considered pretty violent, but Doom Eternal blows it out of the water in terms of sheer, joyous brutality. Demons lose chunks of flesh off their bodies with every hit, and it’s not uncommon to see high-HP enemies like Hellknights running at you with exposed bones after a few hits. The glory kills are also as visceral as ever, with demons meeting all manner of gory ends from your fists and melee weapons. However, this manages to stay fun, because…
• The Goofy Art Style and Tone – Doom (2016) was going for a rather realistic and high-fidelity look: not exactly the horror atmosphere of Doom 3, but you were clearly meant to feel like this was an epic and serious adventure… despite the fact that you were still picking up glowing item drops and encountering random power-ups in the world. Doom Eternal, on the other hand, says “fuck it” and leans right into its video gamey-ness. This game is bright and colourful, like an extremely-violent Saturday morning cartoon. Enemies aren’t really designed to look “realistic”, they’re just cartoon bad guys who need to be rad as hell. Hell, you even get silly, exaggerated sound effects, like the “GULP!” a Cacodemon makes when it swallows a grenade – it never gets old! Again, your mileage is going to vary with this one, but I loved how unabashedly silly Doom Eternal is willing to get.
• The Super Shotgun – The Super Shotgun is back and even better than ever. It now comes equipped with a meat hook, which you can fire at an enemy to stun them and pull you over to them for a glorious, point-blank buckshot blast to the face. With a bit of practice, this thing quickly becomes an additional movement tool in your arsenal, making it utterly indispensable!
• Secrets – Doom Eternal builds on the level design of its predecessor, packing its maps with all sorts of secrets (similarly to classic Doom). The in-game map really helps you to work out how you’re supposed to reach these secrets, so if you’re actively seeking them out, it never feels unachievable.
• Platforming – Like many action games, Doom Eternal breaks up its combat encounters with some lite-platforming. However, unlike those games, Doom Eternal‘s platforming can actually be challenging at times. Furthermore, a lot of the game’s secrets are hidden in the platforming sections, so working out how to reach them is often a challenge in and of itself! While I wouldn’t play Doom Eternal if it was only a platformer, I found myself enjoying these intermissions way more than I would have ever expected.
• The Crucible Blade – You don’t get the sword adorning the cover of Doom Eternal until the late game, but goddamn was the wait worth it. This sword will one-hit everything (outside of bosses, the Marauder, and the shielded Doom Hunter). Running up to extremely intimidating enemies, such as Barons of Hell, and just chopping them in half effortlessly might just be the most badass moment in the entire game.

Mixed

• Story and Lore – Doom (2016)’s story and wider lore could be largely ignored, but if you dove into codex entries, you could find some crazy backstory about the Doomslayer. It was there if you were interested, but it wasn’t bogging things down for those who weren’t. Doom Eternal chooses to weave this lore directly into the narrative, with characters constantly referencing your history and past deeds… shit that we have zero frame of reference for if we hadn’t been reading those codex entries. Look, while this was probably a sensible decision from a game development perspective, I don’t give a fuck about Doom‘s story. Every time a character started going on a lore dump monologue, my soul wanted to leave my body. The only reason this doesn’t end up in “Hate” is because you can still mostly-ignore it, and at the end of the day I do appreciate the effort (it’s the actual execution I take issue with).

Hate

• The Marauder – One of the new demons introduced in Doom Eternal is the Marauder. If you’re familiar with Doom enemies, the Marauder is an Archvile-level threat (that is, a highly dangerous, kill-on-sight, priority #1 enemy). These bastards are just utterly annoying to fight, taking all the worst excesses of Doom Eternal‘s mechanical complexity to heart. They require you to fight them in extremely specific ways, using very specific spacing, and must be killed as fast as possible in order to come out alive. This is bad enough when you’re facing one solo, but when you start encountering them while getting swarmed by other enemies, they become an utter nightmare. This gets so much worse when you start running low on ammo, forcing you to fight them sub-optimally (which is extremely bad here, because they can nullify most of your damage and pump out consistent damage themselves until dead). It’s easily the enemy with the most-prescribed combat design in the entire game, but just are not fun to fight.
• The Unmaykr – One of the most exciting secrets you can find while exploring in Doom Eternal is a Slayer Gate, which teleports you off to a secret challenge area to earn an “Empyrean Key”. Once you collect all six of these (which is no small task, because some of these Slayer Gates are fucking hard), you can take them back to your ship to unlock a secret weapon: the Unmaykr, a special power weapon which uses BFG ammo! Holy shit, if it’s using up our most precious resource, then this thing must be incredible! …yeah, no, it’s fucking ass. It’s basically a stronger Heavy Cannon… which is fine, but “fine” doesn’t cut it when I’m using ammunition that could be used to fire the fucking BFG. Like, let’s put it this way: I could kill one enemy faster than usual with the Unmaykr, or I could wipe out an entire arena in one shot with the BFG… hmm, I wonder which I’m going to pick? What a fucking wet fart of a way to end that side-quest.
• Exhaustion – I had a blast with Doom Eternal, but man, does the game demand a lot out of you. It can get mentally exhausting at times, and I was finding myself just saving and turning it off at times, not able to muster up the energy to keep going any further that evening. It’s not one of those games where I just want to keep playing as much as possible, I was often playing just one level at a time and then turning it off because I couldn’t deal with the mental load.
  • The mechanical complexity makes this a difficult game to just pick up and play, let alone come back to after a break. I actually had to put it down for a couple months so I could work on the Ace Combat, Final Fantasy, and Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate article series. When I came back, I was a couple hours in already and had to re-learn all the basics without any guidance, which made things pretty difficult for a couple sessions.

I really enjoyed Doom Eternal: in fact, I’d daresay that it’s my favourite in the entire franchise. There’s just something about its gameplay design that puts you into a Tetris-like flow state. Like Tetris, where you can close your eyes, picture the falling blocks, and move them to clear lines, I can close my eyes, picture a demon, and know how I would dispatch it most efficiently. It makes for an extremely compelling and addictive experience, which is just further ratcheted up when “The Only Thing They Fear is You” starts blasting through your headphones. Seriously, this game rocks. Doom 3 got me interested in the franchise in the first place, and Doom (2016) is the game that finally got me to try these games out, but if Doom Eternal wasn’t so fucking amazing, I wouldn’t have bothered to play the rest of the franchise as well (or write these Love/Hate articles, for that matter).

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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