Love/Hate: Doom – The Dark Ages (2025)

Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! We’ve now reached the most recent entry in the franchise, Doom: The Dark Ages. This prequel was an exciting prospect, which would take the franchise into a completely new direction with a fusion of sci-fi, medieval warfare, and heavy metal. Like Doom Eternal, it has a bit of a mixed opinion amongst fans, so I’ve been curious to see what I’d think of it. Does it live up to its pedigree, or is Doom: The Dark Ages an unworthy successor? Read on to find out…

Also… this article will be going over a couple cool surprises that I genuinely think are best left unspoiled if you intend on playing Doom: The Dark Ages. This might seem like a weird thing for me to point out given how little I care about the story in any Doom game, but I really enjoyed experiencing these surprises completely blind and I think that you might too!

Got it? Okay, let’s dive in…

Love

• Creative New Weapons – Given that this is a prequel in an entirely new setting, Doom: The Dark Ages has an entirely new and remixed arsenal of weapons to rip and tear demons with. These are, for the most part, very fun and creative! Most weapons also have two fire modes, which wildly alters how that weapon functions in combat, adding more variety and personalization to your arsenal.
  • First of all, there’s possibly the most badass weapon ever conceived for Doom: the Pulverizer/Ravager, a gun which grinds up skulls on-screen and then fires the shards at enemies!!! That’s the most metal fucking gun I’ve ever heard of, it’s glorious to witness!
  • Then there’s the Chainshot, which is basically a railgun which fires a cannonball on a chain, annihilating enemies on impact, and then rapidly retracts the ball back into the gun for the next shot (potentially killing more enemies on the way back). It’s pretty strong at a base level, but you can charge your shots to make the impact even more devastating.
  • There’s also the Shield Saw, which takes your standard Doom chainsaw and turns it into an all-purpose offensive and defensive tool. We’ll get into this in greater detail later, but this is by far the most impactful implementation of the chainsaw in the entire franchise, reinventing it into more than just a backup melee option. You can even enchant it with special runes about halfway through the game, which makes it even more ridiculously overpowered.
  • Finally, there’s the Ballistic Force Crossbow… literally the “BFC”. As the name would suggest, this thing is hilarious and glorious in equal measure, obliterating every enemy on-screen every time you fire it.
• Gore – Doom: The Dark Ages improves upon the already considerable gore engine that Eternal introduced. Enemies still explode into tiny bits and larger demons will continue fighting while missing entire chunks of their bodies, but The Dark Ages innovates things a step further, because they can now have entire limbs get blown off too. It’s not uncommon to see Hellknights and Mancubi missing both arms, severely limiting the threat that they pose to you… plus it’s just super satisfying to witness the carnage you can effortlessly dispense on them.
• Streamlined Upgrade System – I complained that the last couple Doom games’ upgrade/progression systems feel pretty superfluous, but it seems that id Software agreed with me, because The Dark Ages streamlines these processes. Instead of making you hunt for upgrades hidden around levels (which you could easily miss, so the game has to be balanced around you not having them), you now have to defeat mini-bosses in order to earn a preset buff to your health, shields, or the ammo capacity for one of your weapons. I definitely prefer this system: the upgrades are still pretty superfluous at the end of the day, but they come as a reward for overcoming an actual challenge tied around the core gameplay systems, so they end up feeling more satisfying to go for.
• IS THAT FUCKING CTHULHU??? – Aaaand here’s the spoiler I was alluding to in the intro. Around two thirds of the way through the game you have to make your way to the “cosmic realm” in order to rescue one of your allies. You spend a whole level trying to wake a “titan-class entity” in order to get there and you’re just kind of going through the motions to do so… but then you realize that you just woke up fucking Cthulhu and have to ride on his back through a portal into his domain! This also marks a shift in the level design, as the cosmic realm has a pretty distinct aesthetic from any other location we’ve been in a Doom game, and also brings with it some new enemies to boot. Oh, and you also get to kill Cthulhu, because of course you do! As soon as Cthulhu shows up, Doom: The Dark Ages really starts to hit its stride and become a good time.
  • So I haven’t played Quake, but I’ve heard some discussion that the presence of Cthulhu might hint at a connection between Doom and Quake. Apparently that game’s got eldritch horrors in it or something? Goddamn, I might just have to play Quake here too at some point, a Lovecraftian boomer shooter sounds awesome…
• Level Design – I’m just going to flat-out say it: The Dark Ages is the most creative game in the entire Doom franchise, by far. In addition to the creative new arsenal, The Dark Ages has the most varied and interesting level designs in the entire franchise. While they largely play out like the other modern Doom games, there is far more design and aesthetic variety to the locales you fight through.
  • Prior Doom games were always stuck cycling between “research base”, “destroyed city”, and “hell”, but The Dark Ages leans into its heavy metal-inspired, sci-fi/medieval trappings with fortresses, hellish forests, demonic craft, plus the large-scale mech and dragon levels. However, the introduction of the aforementioned cosmic realm really opens things up, with a very different and eerie aesthetic that really helps it to stand out. The game starts getting weird here too. The cosmic realm features occasional sequences of mindfuckery where the levels start changing themselves as you walk through them and no longer operate on a “rational” level. The underwater sequences are also really spooky, evoking some major feelings of thalassophobia. By the time you go from that to getting swallowed by Cthulhu and having to fight your way through his body, I was totally on-board for the wild ride that The Dark Ages‘ final hours wanted to take me on.

Mixed

• Parrying – Combat in The Dark Ages is pretty fun in general, but I can’t help but feel a bit mixed on it due to one fundamental design decision: the emphasis on parrying using the Shield Saw, which warps the entire game around this one mechanic.
  • Regarding the actual mechanics of parrying, these work pretty well (and this is coming from someone who generally dislikes parry-oriented games). Many enemy attacks will either glow red (unparriable), green (parriable), or purple (straight-up unblockable), clearly signposting how you can react to the attack. The parry window is also very generous*, allowing you to respond to the attack relatively early and still be successful, and you can spam the parry button without penalty. That said, if you want a more simple or challenging experience, the parry window can be tuned to your liking in the accessibility menu.
  • That said, while the actual mechanics behind parries aren’t too painful, the way that it warps the game is unfortunate. For any enemy that can be parried, the most efficient thing you can do is to parry them. For enemies like Mancubi or Nightmare Imps, which will occasionally throw out a parriable projectile, this isn’t too bad. However, for enemies whose entire arsenal of attacks can be parried, such as the Hellknight and Cyberdemon, they’ve become a fucking joke because you can easily avoid every attack they dish out by spamming the parry button. These are two of the most iconic enemies in the entire franchise, so it’s sad to see them become such a non-factor in battle.
  • Building off that last point, because parrying is always going to be the best course of action when available, it makes combat often feel even more prescribed than it was in Doom Eternal: just parry and shoot until they’re dead. Some enemies also kind of require you to fight them the same way every time you encounter one. For example, Revenants can make themselves immune to damage and can only be hurt if you parry two of their attacks. Naturally, this makes Revenant fights feel pretty one-note. Vagaries are also a very repetitive mini-boss thanks to the parry system. They are heavily armoured, which typically will require you to parry a few attacks to break their armour before they start taking damage.
• Weapon Imbalance – The other major issue with Doom: The Dark Ages‘ combat system just makes the feeling of monotony worse: the weapons are severely imbalanced. Specifically, the Super Shotgun and the Shield Saw stand head-and-shoulders above every other weapon option.
  • First of all, let’s talk about the Super Shotgun. On its own merits, this is a glorious weapon. It deletes enemies from existence, killing all but the heaviest demons in one or two shots, and blowing entire limbs off with ease. Its only real trade-off is that you need to be up close to use it, but that’s not much of a drawback in a Doom game. However, it is so powerful that it makes every other weapon in your arsenal feel crappy in comparison. It starts to become a genuine issue as the game goes on; I could use the Chainshot, but it has pretty limited range and you typically need to take a moment to charge it before firing… so why aren’t you just using the Super Shotgun? I could use the Cycler, but it’s pretty weak and its plasma rounds don’t really damage armour that quickly… so why not use an upgraded Super Shotgun to instantly destroy enemy armour? I could use the Rocket Launcher, but why risk taking splash damage when I could kill an enemy just as efficiently with the Super Shotgun?
  • Feeding into the previous point, the Shield Saw makes the Super Shotgun all the more powerful. Dashing has been removed in Doom: The Dark Ages, so the only way to get around quickly is via a shield bash attack, which locks onto an enemy and then launches you into them. This annihilates fodder enemies instantly. Those enemies that do survive can then be followed-up with a Super Shotgun blast, which will typically kill them within a hit or two. Again… why would I use the Pulverizer to deal with crowds of fodder enemies (which is, ostensibly, its combat role) when I could just shield bash them to greater effect without using any resources or having to swap my weapon…?
  • That’s not even the end of it though, because the Shield Saw can be thrown at enemies. This cuts fodder enemies in half, killing them instantly, but it will also get stuck in larger demons, stunning them and allowing you to… just run up and kill them with your Super Shotgun. If you wanted to, you could probably get through like 90% of the game with just the shield and Super Shotgun and wouldn’t feel like you were handicapping yourself for it.
  • Underlying these issues is the game’s weapon mode system, which gives you two different versions of each gun. These largely boil down to one mode emphasizing “crowd control” and the other mode emphasizing “single-target damage”. However, this ultimately means that all of your weapons’ roles overlap. Conceptually, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the Impaler and the Rocket Launcher: they’re both hard-hitting ranged weapons, but the Rocket Launcher has splash damage, no projectile arc, and can be upgraded to heal you instead of hurt you if it explodes in close proximity… so obviously I’d much rather use that in the vast majority of circumstances. As a result, you can kind of see how you end up naturally filtering towards the best-in-class weapons available to you and then never bother utilizing half of the game’s arsenal.
  • All this said: at the end of the day, I was using the other weapons, but mostly for a bit of fun and variety if I was low on Super Shotgun shells. That said, I could feel the trade-off I was making every time I did use a different weapon. Every other gun has some sort of downside, whether that be in terms of crowd control, rate of fire, or damage efficiency, but that’s just not the case with Shield Saw + Super Shotgun combos. The only weapon that really earns its place as a reliable alternative is the upgraded Rocket Launcher, because high damage and the ability to self-heal after a parry is just an insane combo… but, again, that just makes the rest of the arsenal all the more obsolete.
• The Music – In case you weren’t aware already, Mick Gordon (who had scored the prior two Doom games) did not return for The Dark Ages due to unfair treatment by executives at id Software. Instead, they’ve replaced him with the music production company, Finishing Move. While I certainly can’t say that I “Hate” this soundtrack, it’s ultimately just disappointing in comparison to what we had before. It’s just generic, Metallica-style heavy metal bombast and lacks the sort of signature personality that Mick Gordon had produced for the franchise. It’s too bad too, because the early tracks suggest that it might mix metal and medieval battle soundscapes, but it quickly devolves into mediocrity. It’s fine enough on its own merits, but there isn’t a single track here that could inspire me to sustain self-inflicted blunt force head trauma from headbanging too hard.
• Glory Kills – Glory kills, the flashy execution animations from the prior two Doom titles, are basically absent from The Dark Ages. I’m reeeeeally mixed on this change. On the one hand, executions no longer halt combat to play the same kill animations over and over again. On the other hand, I really enjoyed those over-the-top kill animations, so seeing them get replaced with a generic Spartan kick every single time kind of sucks. Granted, they do still let you glory kill bosses, but these aren’t nearly as elaborate or fun as they were in prior games. I’ll put this one into “Mixed” because not interrupting the pacing of combat is probably for the best, but I can’t help but feel that a bit of personality has been lost in the process.
• Doomguy Dies (Sort Of) – Pretty late into The Dark Ages, Doomguy gets imprisoned by the bad guys and dies while trying to escape. You then wake up in hell as a zombie and have to fight your way back out. Again, this is another cool little narrative twist that The Dark Ages throws at you… but I’m not a huge fan of the execution of it. Becoming a zombie doesn’t actually change anything: you died and went to hell, but you got to take all of your equipment with you, so the actual gameplay is identical to the rest of the game. The concept of Doomguy being so angry at demons that he fights his way through hell to resurrect himself is kind of funny, but it’s also just… kind of dumb. Like, it pushes past “rule of cool” and goes into “rule of stupid”. Why do your possessions go with you when you die? Why the hell did you even have any of them with you when you died to begin with…? You were captured by the bad guys, are they fucking stupid? So you can just live forever by being too angry to die? I’m sorry, I love how Doom (2016) and Eternal had everyone afraid of you, but taking the stakes away from death is never going to sit right with me, it just feels like powerscaling wankery.

*I wasn’t even playing with the “default” settings either: I played on Ultra-Nightmare difficulty, which actually reduces the parry window by a fair bit.

Hate

• Story – Despite a much stronger emphasis on story presentation, Doom: The Dark Ages is every bit as dire as prior Doom entries when it comes to narrative. Hell, in my opinion, putting more emphasis on story makes the poor execution all the more egregious (similarly to Ninja Gaiden 3). Granted, your mileage will certainly vary on this one: some people really like modern Doom lore, and they’ll probably appreciate all the tidbits of worldbuilding and the various factions on display here. Me, though? I was bored to tears any time a cutscene started. Hell, this is part of the reason why the Cthulhu twist was so exciting, because I was so zoned out about what was happening that when ol’ tentacle-face suddenly appeared I went “wait, what the fuck!?”
• Health and UI Overload – Another thing to consider with the removal of the glory kill system is that they also functioned as a regular health top-up. With this crucial resource gone, The Dark Ages introduces a mechanic where health drops appear when you defeat an enemy while you’re on low health. In theory, this incentivizes you to always stay aggressive and on the move. In practice, this just got really fucking annoying, because it means that you’re constantly getting into a low-health state in gunfights. That would be fine, but getting to low health makes most of your screen turn red and dulls the music and sound effects. Making matters worse, even if you do kill enough enemies to get your health back up, enemies will stop dropping health pickups LONG before you’re topped up, meaning that you can find yourself back in low-HP territory very fast. I much preferred the Glory Kill system, where you could proactively seek opportunities to keep your HP up and avoid this kind of situation entirely.
• Staggers – So y’know how I mentioned that the entire game gets warped around using the Shield Saw and being able to parry enemy attacks? If you use your shield to block a non-parriable attack, then it can get overloaded and become unusable for a few seconds. This can happen quite suddenly (usually after one big hit or around three smaller ones), and lasts long enough that you’re almost certainly going to lose health or miss out on parry opportunities waiting for it to recharge. It’s such a weird system. I guess it discourages you from turtling up to avoid damage, but it’s such a brutal punishment to inflict in a game that revolves entirely around the shield. Take away my ability to block, fine, but could they not allow you to continue parrying at least?
• Mech and Dragon Levels – Two of the flasher new features in The Dark Ages are levels where you take control of a giant mech to fight gargantuan demons and levels where you get to fly around on the back of a dragon… they both kind of suck.
  • Let’s start with the mech levels. Despite the massive scale, the ambition of these levels is tiny. They play out as simple, one-on-one fist fights where you throw several punches and occasionally dodge incoming attacks until you power up a finishing move to kill the enemy titan. Rinse and repeat about twenty times, and you’ve got the entirety of the mech levels. Granted, they do occasionally give you a giant chaingun to shoot enemies with for a couple minutes, and that’s by far the most fun that these levels ever get.
  • Then there’s the dragon levels. I guess I prefer these ones over the mech levels because at least there’s some spectacle to flying around on a dragon, and it controls very well. Unfortunately, these levels are about as simple and half-baked as the mech levels. You just fly around until you find a target, lock onto it, and then wait for an opportunity to dodge incoming attacks, which will charge your gun and allow you to destroy the target. Rinse and repeat a few times until the game allows you to land and get off the dragon and get back to some real gameplay.
  • Honestly… I had a lot more fun with the platforming in Doom Eternal. Sure, controlling a giant mech or flying around with a dragon may be more of an exciting spectacle, but in practice it’s so dull and mindless. At least the platforming sections always had some fun secret to keep an eye peeled for.
• Shredder/Impaler – For all my complaints about weapon imbalance in The Dark Ages, the Shredder and Impaler (which are the two options for the “rail spike” weapon class) are the absolute worse of the lot and deserve special recognition for this.
  • First of all, the Shredder is fucking ass. It’s basically this game’s take on a machine gun: a rapid-fire weapon that you can spray and pray to kill enemies. Unfortunately, it fucking sucks. Each individual shot doesn’t do a whole lot of damage, and it takes a relatively long time to kill enemies compared to other weapons. It’s not even particularly good for gunning down crowds either, so you’re using a weak weapon to kill one enemy up close… when you could just use the Super Shotgun to kill them instantly. Hell, the Pulverizer isn’t amazing either, but it’s considerably better than the Shredder since it will kill every nearby enemy on-screen in short order.
  • Then there’s the Impaler. It’s significantly better than the Shredder, but it’s maybe the most outclassed “high single-target damage” weapon in the entire game. It fires out a single, highly-damaging spike at a fairly low rate of fire, but this comes with a couple drawbacks. For one, you have to be very precise or it will miss its target entirely. Secondly, the projectile is heavy and so it has a pretty significant arc that you have to compensate for at range. It also doesn’t have any splash damage, which sucks for a game like this were you are surrounded by enemies all the time. At long range, you’re better off using a Rocket Launcher, and at close range you’re better off using the Super Shotgun… hell, I’d even rather use the Chainshot, which is also not very good, but at least it has some pretty significant splash damage once upgraded.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a pretty decent game in its own right, but it really feels disappointing when compared to its masterful predecessors. While I appreciate that id Software weren’t content to sit on their laurels, pivoting the entire combat model around a parry system warps the entire experience, and not for the better in my opinion. There’s also the fact that parry systems are all over the place in gaming these days: Doom (2016) felt so fresh because it was discarding a modern trend-chasing, so suddenly jumping on this trend makes The Dark Ages feel like it’s edging towards conventional design philosophies.

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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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