DOOM: The Dark Ages is the third instalment in ID Software’s rebooted run of the classic shooter franchise. A prequel to both Eternal and DOOM 2016, The Dark Ages is set in the distant past during a time when the Slayer’s legend was still being written. The planet of Argent D’Nur is being invaded by Prince Ahzrak and his hellish legions, and the Slayer is the only one with the power to stop them.
Not content to just do more of Eternal, DOOM: The Dark Ages shakes up the flow and rhythm of combat significantly. Every effort has been made to make the Slayer feel like a tank. Every step feels weighty and if you jump from any decent height, the Slayer hits the ground with the force and sound of a meteor, even causing nearby fodder demons to explode.
This feeling of being an unstoppable force carries over to the Slayer’s arsenal too. ID’s tagline this time was “stand and fight”, and so naturally melee is a big focus. The new shield allows you to charge at your foe, stunning them briefly, allowing you to unleash your equipped melee attack (with your fists or flail). You can also throw your shield at the soldiers of hell, where it will embed in them, grinding away, holding them in place.
The guns are almost all entirely new, too. On paper, they may fulfil similar roles to earlier titles, but in practice they feel very, very different. In The Dark Ages, there are weapon ‘classes’ which include things like shotgun, spike, plasma and so on. As you progress through the game, you will unlock new weapons in each class, alternating between them by pressing F. The combat shotgun you start with, for example, fires multiple rounds at once, but once you unlock it, you can swap over to the iconic, single-shot, super shotgun.
The idea seems to be that instead of the weapon attachments of earlier games, they’ve given the Slayer an entirely different weapon. So while the super shotgun may have a much slower rate of fire than the combat shotgun, it is absolutely devastating at close range. Some of the weapon classes have more diversity than others. The second weapon in the skull-shredding class from the trailers, for example, is basically just an alternative fire mode.
Enemy weaknesses are another change. In Eternal, certain enemies would have weak spots to aim for that would either stun them or disable their weaponry in some way. In The Dark Ages you will instead need to focus on parrying green projectiles to send them back the way they came, overheating armour by shooting it and then smashing it to pieces with a shield throw, and darting about the battlefield with your shield charge.
Having come fresh from a replay of 2016 and Eternal, this change of pace took some getting used to. The grenades, flame belch/ice bomb, chainsaw and glory kills from earlier games are all gone. There’s definitely a lot of fun and satisfaction to be had with this new combat system, but whether you will like it more than what it used to be is a harder question for me to answer. Regardless, it’s undeniably bold of ID Software to so drastically change things up with each new game.
Rest assured, once it clicked, that good old DOOM magic began to kick in. The guns feel fantastic; melee combat is intuitive and impactful, and the opportunity for strategy remains as you balance the various abilities of your shield, with the plethora of new enemy and weapon types. Before long, the sound design and visual cues of The Dark Age’s new combat system will become second nature, and you’ll be comfortably ripping and tearing until it is done.
There are a number of new mechanics in combat that I’ll leave for you to discover, but one I wanted to highlight is Life Sigils. Replacing the 1-Up’s from Eternal, they allow you to keep fighting if you die in battle. The difference here though is that you can choose whether to use one or not. In Eternal, if you had one and died, you’d be forced to use it up. Allowing you to choose is fantastic, because it means you can save them for an encounter you’re really struggling with, instead of wasting them on one where you made a stupid mistake early on.
Exploration and upgrades follow a similar pattern to prior games in the series. Each level has gold, lore entries, weapon skins and more to collect, usually as a reward for completing a short traversal puzzle or unique combat encounter. They’re fun distractions, but it’s largely familiar stuff at this point, and so some of the novelty has worn off here. Each weapon has an upgrade tree, with the last few entries requiring rarer resources. Again, nothing groundbreaking here, but it remains fun.
DOOM: The Dark Ages’ level design was particularly tough for me to wrap my head around. On the one hand, the sense of scale and spectacle in some of these maps is insane. The sheer amount of stuff going on with huge titans fighting in the distance, battleships flying around and imposing architecture looming over you, is super impressive. But on the other hand, there are a handful of chapters I can only describe as drab.
DOOM Eternal’s environments had a vibrancy to them, the colours popped and all the levels were readable. Aptly named, sometimes The Dark Ages can be a little too dark, with the more natural environments like forests or caves coming across as muddy and just uninteresting visually. This is perhaps an unfortunate side effect of having far more enemies on screen at once, and needing to account for some of the more open levels.
There are a number of open and less linear environments, and they too are a mixed bag. ‘What if modern God of War was a first-person shooter?’, seems likely to have been the pitch, and I’m not sure that it delivers. The increase in space allows for the player to approach the main objectives from a number of different angles, and there are plenty of nooks and crannies to go down to find the aforementioned collectibles. However, I’m not sure DOOM has enough verbs in its vocabulary to justify a wide-linear design philosophy.
DOOM is not a “stop to smell the roses” type of game, and it’s odd that the level design of The Dark Ages doesn’t always seem to understand that. If you open up a level, especially in a shooter, you need to justify it: from a narrative perspective as well as gameplay. Sometimes, it works. The first open level taking place outside a city under siege is a good example, but the others? Not so much.
Speaking of narrative, the story here is about as silly and unimportant as it was in Eternal, although The Dark Ages definitely takes itself more seriously. As someone who loved the world building and lore entries in Eternal, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but your mileage may vary. The cutscenes are efficient and unobtrusive and easy to tune out if it’s not for you, but the flip side of this is that on more than one occasion I found myself wondering “why is the Slayer here again? What was the point of all that?”
That said, the art design is absurdly strong, making the cutscenes a joy to watch regardless of whether the story is of interest or not. The armour, weapons and architecture of the Sentinels, Maykrs and the various denizens of Hell are gorgeous and ridiculously creative. Getting to see the various people and places referred to in Eternal, but in their prime, is a real treat.
Regarding the soundtrack, sadly, I really noticed Mick Gordon’s absence here. The music remains heavy, but it feels more influenced by old school metal riffs than the more chunky, distorted and electronic sound Mick is known for. Perhaps worse than being noticeably not Mick’s work, is that it just fails to stand out at all and lacks an identity of its own. Given the legacy of the soundtracks of both 2016 and Eternal, this is a real shame.
I haven’t even talked about the sections where you pilot a giant mech, or fly a dragon. The mech levels are few, brief and kinda shallow gameplay-wise. Once again, however, the sound design puts in a lot of work here, making you really feel the weight of every punch. The dragon sections are a bit more robust, they take place in huge maps allowing you to fly around, chase down hell-ships, and even land in certain sections allowing the Slayer to jump off to return to some regular shooting. These side shows are a fun way to break up the campaign, but that’s about all there is to them.
DOOM: The Dark Ages is a bold side step for ID Software. It ultimately succeeds in reinventing the classic DOOM formula yet again, in what is undoubtedly another bombastic, relentless and just plain fun shooter. There’s more than enough new here that it avoids feeling like a retread of Eternal, and it still provides plenty of that pure, unadulterated chaos the series is known for. The soundtrack is, sadly, unremarkable, and I wasn’t entirely sold on the more open levels, but these flaws are not enough to deny the onset of The Dark Ages.
Rating: 8.5/10
DOOM: The Dark Ages was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher.