"Doom: The Dark Ages" Review - Rip & Tear (My Hair Out)

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Developer: id Software

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

This isn't the kind of review I wanted to write, but time marches on. I think it's fair to say that Doom 2016 changed who I am as a gamer. Prior to 2016, I actually wasn't a fan of any game whose loop was faster than your usual RPG fare. But Doom framed fast gameplay in a way that clicked with me bigtime. I not only 100%-ed it, I 100%-ed it over 6 times. So, it should come as no surprise that in its year, Doom handily took home my GOTY award (beating out Inside, which won more specific awards in that article than any other game at that time). 

Then, in 2020, the team at id Software released Doom Eternal, which blew 2016 out of the water in every conceivable way. Better gameplay, a better story, everything. And if I'm correct in thinking I 100%-ed 2016 around 6 times, I easily did so with Eternal over 10 times. So when Hugo Martin ad the rest of the id team revealed Doom: The Dark Ages last year, I was cautiously optimistic. There was no way it was going to beat Eternal, but it would for sure still be good, right?

...right?

Well, yes, but in a half-hearted "I guess" kind of way. There's really no easy way to say it. While Doom: The Dark Ages is (by many objective measures) good, it's still a massive disappointment for me despite having been prepared for a lesser experience. And to give you one last bird's eye view of where I'm coming from, I 100%-ed Doom: The Dark Ages as well...but I don't think I'll ever touch it again.

Comparison is, as we all know, the thief of joy. I knew that if I went into The Dark Ages expecting something comparable to Eternal, then I'd only be let down. There's the fact that you can't improve upon (near) perfection very much, of course, but Dark Ages was also advertised as a very different kind of Doom game, so comparisons naturally have a much bigger cartoon money bag waiting. In spite of that, comparisons nonetheless made their way into the mix because of the many things Dark Ages does worse outside of combat. Level design, for instance. 

There's precious little verticality to be found save for massive drops from cliffs to lower areas. But there's no going back up from these and you just happen to already be at the top of every cliff, so what little verticality exists is there solely for the (objectively awesome) spectacle of demons getting crushed just from the slayer landing on the ground near them. In that way, the verticality that exists does its job well, but its absence from the rest of the game is felt far and wide in the blandness of the levels. There are actually 4 kinds of levels.

There are the more traditional Doom levels where you're basically moving through a linear path with several hidden nooks and crannies filled with secrets, for starters. But the secrets are more like slightly off the beaten path collectibles hidden in plain sight. In fact, Dark Ages has a pretty liberal interpretation of what "secret" means in the first place. Sometimes you'll get a message saying that you found a secret area just by walking down a slightly different path with no barrier to entry, in fact. It's not that I need secrets to be hidden behind 90's adventure game logic, but every secret here feels like a half-hearted afterthought...and you'll be continuing to read the phrase "half-hearted" throughout this review. 

A good example of that afterthought idea is one of the game's collectibles: gold. Like in past Doom games, character progression involves gradually upgrading your weapons and tools, but in past titles this has been accomplished with the help of things like special tokens you'd find in hidden spots. In Dark Ages, however, you simply spend "gold," all of which is lying haphazardly throughout levels. A lot of the time, individual pieces of gold are just laid out for you along the critical path, and at other times a sum of 50 gold (at absolute most) will be your reward at the end of one of these unrewarding secret paths. There are other currencies that fill the role normally occupied by special tokens as time goes on, but I have to question why we have to go through the arduous process of picking up individual pieces of gold in the first place. Also...you know what the last game to oversimplify its established currency system was? Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It's a false equivalence to compare the two in any way beyond this (because lest we forget in the midst of my vigorous bitching, this is a good game), but I find I have little patience for regressive system changes. 

Another example would be the skins you unlock as rewards. These may very well be an even more half-hearted attempt at content than the gold. Every single weapon has four possible skins: the default skin, a demonic skin, a maykr (angelic) skin, and a solid gold skin from completing the weapon's mastery challenge. In Eternal, there was a wealth of different skins for each weapon type. There were skin types that were consistent across weapons, sure, but there was also plenty of individual looks to supplement these more basic ones. 

The same can be said of armor skins. There are a grand total of three here (discounting any additional ones that might unlock after the mega-hard permadeath mode), with two of them being barely distinguishable from each other. From context clues you can tell that Eternal had a lot more armor looks than that...one of them was a pretty pink unicorn costume, for christ's sake! And while Dark Ages doesn't seem to have a legion of loyal fanboys to preemptively address, I'll nonetheless set up a straw man: I can see the argument being made that Dark Ages will have more looks flow in with time, and that Eternal also had looks added over time. And the issue with this statement is that there was plenty of specific cosmetic content in Eternal at launch, and all the following skins were released entirely for free. There's no such wealth of content at Dark Ages' launch, and I'm not feeling confident about the chances of free stuff rolling in. This feels distinctly like a microtransaction shop in the making. In my most cynical prediction, I fixate on the whole "gold" concept. I have this bad feeling that gold will end up joining skins in the microtransaction queue before all is said and done. That's all just speculation, but this is already a price gouged product (weighing in at a $70 price tag) with quite a bit less content. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft Gaming Head Phil Spencer won't try to milk the player base for even more with time. Then, when that doesn't make him exactly 100% of all money that exists, he'll close id Software, fire everyone involved, and cry a river of crocodile tears about how he has to please shareholders when people call him out on it...but again, all speculation and borrowed trouble.

But all of that is more of a tangent that anything. I'm not trying to say that Dark Ages is bad or has its core negatively impacted in any way from lack of cosmetics and a differing progression system. No, my goal here is to make a case for why it feels more like it was a weary chore for the developers than a product of joy.

Let's get back on track. After all, I was talking about the more traditional levels' designs before I went off to talk about the secrets. Really, I would liken these levels to those found in Doom 2016, but with the clever secrets and verticality taken out. And that isn't a compliment. Save for the final levels in an alternate realm (which are fantastic and feel refreshing), it's basically nothing but same-y castles from the word "go". If you've seen one traditional level in Dark Ages, you've seen them all. 

The same goes for the second level type that Dark Ages toys with: the semi open-world levels. These are considerably weaker than the traditional levels, and they aren't even the weakest ones we'll be discussing today. Essentially, sometimes you're placed in a sprawling, bare-bones map with multiple objective markers scattered around, and you tackle these objective in whatever order you please. One would think that such areas would lend themselves better to intriguing secret placement, but one would be wrong. Rather, it seems like 75% of the time, secrets are hidden behind big obvious doors that require keys to open. You will find these keys since they're always located close to the critical path, and from there the only challenge involved is backtracking to those doors and standing in front of them while they automatically unlock. Again, I don't need five piece mega puzzles for these things, but secret collection in the open world areas are functionally akin to walking simulators. I never felt like I earned anything when I found a hidden collectible in the traditional levels, and I felt it even less in these open areas. 

Furthermore, these sections, just like the traditional sections, all feel the same. Picture Halo: Infinite's level design without the grappling hook and no mountains, and you have the open segments of Doom: The Dark Ages. There are one or two descents into hell that use this formula, and they're the exceptions to this rule, but that's only because they're a welcome change of scenery. 

The third type of level involves giant mechs...and giant mech sections in games are never actually good, so it's basically a foregone conclusion that these levels are weak. If I'm channeling my inner Shinji Ikari in a Doom game, we have a problem. With all this in mind, though, I'll say that these mech sections are among the better mech sections I've experienced...it's just that even a good mech section usually isn't great. You'll be plopped into a linear stretch of land, and from there you'll make your way to the end of the area by fighting off hordes of titans. Mech combat involves landing Pacific Rim-style punches against titans using R1/RB, with each punch filling up one tic of a special attack bar. At half-full, you can use R2/RT to do a ground stomp for multi-enemy damage. When the bar is full, you can use these same buttons to launch a devastatingly strong punch. You can also charge this bar by performing perfect dodges when titans launch an attack. So, these sections are ultimately weighty boxing matches, and while the punches feel good to land, it's all about as boring as mech segments typically are in contexts that aren't Armored Core. More than anything, I can't help but wonder what the point of these segments was. Inside a mech, we're all of equal strength. The Doom Slayer doesn't become more badass in a mech. Your nearby chartered accountant would be exactly as badass inside of one. So what's the point? The answer is either a misguided idea of upping the scale or a weary resignation to pad out the runtime. I can't say for sure which of these is true, if any, but everything I've said thus far about this game's design tells a bit of a story. 

Then there's the worst, last level type..and I think I'll capture the spirit of it by posing a question: should one ever say to themselves "aw man, do I have to get on the laser dragon again?" 

If you're presented with a dragon with laser wings, your first feeling ought to be childlike elation...but in Dark Ages, I found myself rubbing my face with frustration whenever that stupid Gloryhammer character showed up. In the sections where you're riding this dragon, id Software (NOTE: that lowercasing and uppercased S is indeed how they spell their name, as odd as it sounds) breaks out a gameplay type that, like mech combat, is never really good: aerial dogfighting. It's the worst part of Halo games, it's the worst part of realistic war games, and it's the worst part of Doom: The Dark Ages. In these low points of the game, you'll spend your time flying through empty airspace until you come up against a large enemy variant of some kind. Then, you'll lock on to them, fire your laser turret, and sluggishly dodge attacks in one of four directions. If you perfect dodge a green enemy projectile, your gunshots gain some extra firepower. Then, sometimes you'll get a finishing move where the dragon latches onto a titan's neck and breathes fire down its throat. Then you'll land on a predetermined landing area for a brief period of time sometimes. As for the more traditional interpretation of dogfighting, you'll come across demonic fighter jets at various points in levels, and you'll want to try chasing them down to blow them up for some of that god-forsaken gold. The problem is that it's still dogfighting combat, and worse still is the fact that these ships simply vanish into thin air after a certain amount of time flying along a rigid, predetermined path. You get more than enough gold from the levels themselves, so it's not like you need to kill these ships or else you're SOL for upgrades. Rather, it's the fact that one of the mission challenges in each of these sections involves killing a certain amount of hell ships. If you fail to kill one before it flees, you'll have to reload from a checkpoint more often than not if you want to reach 100% completion for that level. Hardly a problem for a casual player (which it's totally fine if you are, by the by), but for my purposes as someone who can't help but feel unfulfilled if I go through a Doom game without reaching 100%, it's a headache. A laser dragon ought to be a high point of any experience, but good god does it drag the rest of the game down.

I've talked an awful lot about level design and very little else thus far, but it's worth noting that Doom games live or die on that. In Doom 2016, arenas were structured with plenty of ways to duck out of enemy fire plus a ton of verticality to take control of a combat scenario wherever needed. In Doom Eternal, arenas were filled with seemingly endless tools to further your speed and aerial momentum (i.e. monkey bars to swing from and jump pads in strategic locations). Doom games are almost entirely the sum of their parts, and Dark Ages pretty spectacularly fails in one of the biggest ones.

But I bring all this up to transition into combat, which is obviously a bigger part than the level design. This is also where I get to be a bit more positive, but my praise still comes with some asterisks. In the marketing for Dark Ages, director Hugo Martin said something along the lines of "in Eternal, we asked you to be a fighter jet. In The Dark Ages, we're asking you to be an armored tank." Rather than a focus on freedom of movement and speed above all else, Dark Ages asks players to stand their ground. It's the "immovable object" kind of power fantasy to Eternal's "unstoppable force" approach. Understanding that is the key to enjoying Dark Ages' combat. 

The Slayer's main tool in this title is a shield, so the flesh and blood of combat lies in blocking and parrying. You can also throw the shield to cut down waves of fodder demons or stop a larger demon in its tracks by lodging the shield in its chest. The demons you fight will shoot red projectiles at you that must be blocked or avoided (not dodged, because there's no such system here...just in the mech and dragon parts), and these projectiles will come from just about everywhere. Joining these red projectiles are green variants, and these green variants can be parried back at the demons that loosed them. This all culminates in a gameplay loop that is meant to be something akin to a bullet hell, but I'd call it more of a bullet "heck." And I think that tells you what you need to know. Enemy attack patterns never change in the slightest, so you'll be faced with exactly the same projectile waves with green variants placed in the exact same spots in the wave every time. Ideally this would result in combat scenarios where the predictability gives way to the chaos and you have to choose where to move and what projectiles to parry, all while balancing your knowledge of these specific patterns to make your choices. However, you never quite come across fights that reach this ideal scenario. These large open spaces you're always in make the predictability all the more prevalent. There are accessibility options available to make things more challenging if you'd like, but all these really do is make demons spongier and make you more frail. Nothing quite erases the toll of the level design on this loop. I will give the loop this: the parrying is fun. That's really the saving grace here. As wide as the parry window is and as predictable as the green projectile placement is, it's always satisfying to pull it off. 

Here's the thing, though: in spite of that, I can't say I ever felt powerful in Dark Ages (well, except for the whole "landing so powerful that it kills demons a mile away" thing that you don't really have any hand in doing). If I'm going to be, as Hugo said, an armored tank, I should feel durable at least. But the shield becomes unusable for a few seconds after taking a small amount of damage. So, you're encouraged to block since there's no real way of dodging damage and no verticality to sort of mimic a dodge (like in Doom 2016), but you can't really block much. Would it make things even easier than they already are to have a shield that doesn't wear down? Perhaps. But as I've been saying in one form or another throughout this review, a challenge isn't necessarily the goal. Maybe they could've made the shield only a little more durable but allowed you to shoot from behind it? Maybe they could've drastically reduced the parry window, but parrying could cause your shield to auto-parry every kind of projectile for a second or two? I'm not a game designer myself, so I can only provide so much insight into how things could've been improved. As it stands, I've never felt so flimsy in the big green shoes of The Doom Slayer. 

Compounding onto this is something that isn't necessarily an actual issue to write home about, but something I kept feeling no matter how hard I tried. It never really felt like I was mitigating damage. You still get a "you got hit" kind of notification when you block damage with your shield. So even when I was playing these fights perfectly, I kept feeling disheartened because everything I'd learned from previous titles was telling me I was totally blowing it. I get that this is more of a personal problem than anything else, but it's still worth noting.

Compounding onto the issue yet again is an issue that I'm open to hearing I'm wrong about. It's entirely likely that I've misread the situation, but I don't think I have. Essentially, it often seemed like I was still taking damage even when I parried a projectile perfectly. Like, I would execute the parry, and in the same frame, I'd take damage. This wasn't a "I felt like it might be happening" scenario like the last complaint, this was a case of seeing my health go down. Is it possible that I could've been hit by some unseen shot from behind me at these exact moments? If it were only one time, yes, but this was multiple times. And if I'm right on that, it kind of defeats the purpose of a parry.

On that same trail of thought, I did notice something odd that I wouldn't call a negative...just a bit of extra ammo in my argument about Dark Ages ultimately being a half-hearted effort. Before I went into the final battle, I stayed behind a bit and replayed some parts of some missions in order to complete the last of the weapon mastery challenges. Most of these challenges involved triggering secondary effects from base gunfire, so for the sake of convenience, I temporarily tweaked the difficulty settings to make both myself and the demons spongier. Myself because I needed to stay alive to make sure these effects triggered, and the demons because I needed them to stay alive for the exact same reason. At one point I was needing to reload from a checkpoint in order to start an encounter again for the grinding, so I put myself in front of one of the game's cyberdemons and sat back to let him kill me. And you know what I noticed? He wasn't dealing less damage to me...he was only dealing damage on a coin flip. If he performed a four-hit combo, only one or two of those hits would actually result in damage, and there seemed to be no consistency as to whether it was one hit or two. Not a negative, as I played this with the settings set to 200% damage to me outside of this context, but I think it implies a bit of rush.

Before I move on to weapons, I should mention melee combat. One other way in which Dark Ages differs from previous titles is in its dedication to melee attacks alongside the guns. In Doom 2016, melee was a weak but nonetheless viable way of approaching combat. In Doom Eternal, melee was ultimately useless save for a super attack that had to be charged up. In Dark Ages, melee tends to be front and center as a sometimes vital approach to a fight. So important is this system that the game features not one, not two, but three different melee weapons. 

Each melee weapon contains a certain amount of "charges" that accumulate, with one charge equalling one attack. These attacks ultimately share functionality with the chainsaw from the previous titles in that they both deal massive damage and cause demons to drop extra ammo, but they're never an instant kill on anything save for the weakest of the fodder demons. With all of this in mind, the only differences between the melee offerings are the exact level of damage and the time it takes to gain a full charge. It's a system that works, but I can't help but wonder if we really needed three of them? It feels like an awful lot of bloat in a gameplay system that could've used that fat in more important places...and it feels especially unnecessary given the fact that first-person melee combat never quite feels as powerful as it should.  

As for the guns themselves, I only really enjoyed a few of them. If you have a favorite gun, there's pretty much no reason to use anything else save for the occasional defensive needs. Some demons utilize armor while other utilize shields, and certain weapons work better on certain types of defenses. That's how things work in theory, but in reality you can just use whatever weapon you'd like a lot of the time. I happened to like my weapon of choice an awful lot, but I would've liked some reason to use anything else. Without a reason to use a different weapon, why have a whole suite of them, after all?

Firstly, there's the combat shotgun. What do you want me to say? It's a shotgun.

Secondly, there's the super shotgun, which is the combat shotgun but better. This iteration of the super shotgun, however, lacks the flaming grappling hook that was present in Eternal's iteration, so it's just an objectively inferior version that I didn't really feel like using.

[NOTE: From here on out, Dark Ages tends to suffer from what Yahtzee Croshaw refers to as the "fussy bitch approach to naming conventions" wherein widely accepted names for things are changed arbitrarily, so I'm just going to call the rest of the weapons what they'd be called in any other Doom game.]

Thirdly, there's the assault rifle. This gun is a high rate of fire weapon that can be upgraded to ricochet off of the shield if you have it lodged in a demon's body...which is cool, admittedly.

Fourthly, there's the semi-sniper rifle. This is basically the assault rifle, but in a single-shot mode that deals increased damage with headshots. A cool aspect of this gun is that it can be upgraded to refill itself if you successfully land headshots, encouraging that immovable object style of gameplay in order to continuously use it.

Fifthly, there's the plasma rifle. This is an extremely high-speed gun with the narrowest spread of the bunch, meaning that it pretty much only deals damage to whatever you happen to be pointing at. It's just like all the other plasma rifles in this series in that it gets the job done but isn't exactly inspiring.

Sixthly, there's the ballista, which is basically a bigger plasma rifle. Unlike in previous titles, however, this one is also semiautomatic rather than single-shot. So I really can't fathom why anyone would choose to use the plasma rifle when they could use this instead.

Seventhly, there's one of the all new weapons: the pulverizer. This gun simply has a skull sitting in the middle, and it grinds this skull up to shoot bone fragments. How metal is that? Furthermore, this gun has the widest spread of them all, meaning that you deal damage to an incredibly large swath of the area in front of you when you fire. Sadly, this gun feels beyond weak. The sounds for it just aren't very punchy, and it kind of feels like you're using a leaf blower for all the damage it deals. That's to be expected given the spread, but I was still astonished by how lame it felt. 

The same can be said of the eighth weapon, the ravager. This is simply a more powerful pulverizer with a smaller spread, and it feels exactly as weak.

Then, there's the ninth and tenth weapons, which are the grenade and rocket launchers. The only difference between the two is that the grenade launcher's projectiles are bouncy. These deal the most damage out of the arsenal, but they also come with the risk of self-damage if used too haphazardly.

Finally, there's my weapon of choice: the chainshot. This is just a steel ball on a chain that gets shot out at varying levels of power depending on how long you charge a shot, but it feels the most awesome to use. It's also the weapon that objectively works the best with the gameplay loop. I realize using the word "objectively" to describe something that sounds like an opinion probably seems self-important as all get-out, but you can upgrade it so that it becomes automatically full-charged if you execute a parry. What other weapon in this arsenal works with the primary gameplay loop as perfectly as that?

Oh, and I 100% forgot to write about this until the moment before hitting the "publish" button, but there's also the Ballistic Force Crossbow (B.F.C), which is this game's version of the iconic B.F.G from past titles...and it blows. The only times I ever used it were for mission challenges, since things never got so chaotic that this kind of firepower was needed.

So, as you can no doubt see, weapons aren't exactly a strong point in Dark Ages. But the upgrades are all pretty great, actually. I've already given the best examples of this, but while they don't make the weakest weapons any better, they at least expand upon the purpose of these weapons in interesting ways. 

And on the subject of upgrades, I feel obliged to mention the mastery challenges I've been alluding to off and on. Like in previous titles, once you've unlocked all upgrades for a weapon, you're given a task to perform with that weapon to unlock one final mega-upgrade. In Dark Ages, most of these challenges are unusually reasonable to perform, which I definitely appreciated. Other Doom games would have challenges that you'd have to spend quite a long time replaying missions to achieve, but a lot of the time you can complete the Dark Ages mastery challenges just by going through a level normally. That's one thing I have to give the in-game economy: it does seem to lend itself well to this exact aspect if nothing else. You seem to unlock mastery challenges at a steady enough pace starting in the mid-game that you can avoid stacking up too many to do at a time if you start working towards a given challenge right away. 

The one exception to this is the plasma rifle's challenge. Other challenges will typically be something like "deal secondary assault rifle damage 100 times." For the plasma rifle, it's that kind of objective, but "1000 times." So, I had to stay back and seriously grind for only that challenge in order to reach 100% completion for weapons before the credits rolled. But that's a rather small blemish on an otherwise clear improvement over past titles, which Dark Ages is sorely lacking otherwise. Some might say these challenges are too easy. I say they simply respect your time more. I'd also say they put more of an emphasis on showing you know how to get the most out of each weapon instead of putting an emphasis on constantly operating at maximum efficiency.

But now we come back to negatives, this time in regards to the story. It feels odd to leave story and characters until close to the end, but that's just how things have to go in this review. Story has never been the point of any Doom game, but a thing I admired about the previous entries in the saga is how there was plenty of story available for those who wanted to seek it out. If you wanted to pour through the logs and lore tidbits, your experience would be richer for it, but you'd still have the time of your life if you didn't bother at all. Hell (no pun intended), in Eternal, there was a metric butt-ton of story and lore that wove its way into the campaign in ways that some people found too intrusive, but it was still handled with grace and balance. With The Dark Ages, good old Hugo wanted to bring story more front and center, so this game is filled with cutscenes and dialogue to the point where the Slayer is ultimately a side character in his own game. I'm not of the opinion that a protagonist has to be the absolute focus of a story if the supporting characters are great...but the supporting characters here aren't great...and that protagonist-centered opinion of mine goes right out the window in the case of something like Doom. 

The main characters of this story are King Novik (the narrator in the previous games) and his daughter. And we get to hear all sorts of stuff about their military tactics and other George Lucas-y things like that. If I'm playing a Doom game, I should not be listening to a bunch of boring humans talking about prepping an area for evac or holding their positions or rallying to the western gate. I should just be following the Slayer and making him kill demons in a well fleshed-out context. I don't fault the team for trying to bring story more to the forefront, but I struggle to think of a way they could have botched it more. 

In fact, there was exactly one moment in the story that actually got me as excited as I was during the Eternal DLC's reveal of the devil's identity. It's a spoiler to mention it, so just skip to the next section if you don't want it...but you won't really be worse for wear if you get this spoiled, so here goes. The Slayer dies in the latter half of the story. Shocking, I know, since this is a prequel to games where he's very much alive, but still. After his death and prior to being revived with demonic magic out of the humans' desperation for a savior, he is awakened in the realm of the dead with King Novik's monologue from the beginning of Doom 2016. That's it. That's what got me hyped. Something I've already heard before. It's cyclicality in a way, something I'm always hyped by, but it says something that that's the high point.

Following that high point is a low point that blows every other part of this lame story out of the water in terms of lameness, and it's another spoiler. After the Slayer defeats the Marvel character that serves as this story's villain, King Novik's daughter gives a hopeful speech to the remnants of the human army. Towards the end of this fairly ho-hum action movie speech, she starts to talk about how they need to continue to have faith, but to strongly consider who to have faith in. 

See where you think that's going?

Well, you're wrong. She says they need to have faith in themselves. 

What the hell did these people do? I'm the one who did all the work! All these people did was die and get kidnapped (in the woman's case, surprise surprise). This is a world in which the Slayer is viewed as a god among men, and whether that elicits hope or fear in a character is a personal thing. Now, this god among men, a man the legions of hell fear so much that they record testaments to his power as terror-stricken warnings to the rest of their kind, has slain the prince of hell as well as a corrupt angel that had mankind under its thumb...and the lesson the humans take away from that is that through hard work, they can do anything? I'm not one to typically feel this kind of way when stories take turns like this, but I also don't think I've ever seen a story turn that misses the point so profoundly.

Turning to a made-up strawman based on nobody once again, I can see some folks reminding me that I, myself, said story isn't the point. That is still true, but one must take developer intent into account to some degree, so given how important id themselves said it was for them to present a story this time, I think it's fair game for open and brutal criticism. 

And sadly, the criticism continues as we transition into technical fidelity...but it's not entirely negative. Let's get those negative aspects out of the way so we can end this on a better note than we started. 

There is a sad lack of polish when it comes to bugs specifically. For one thing, challenge pinning almost never worked as expected. Whether mission challenges or weapon challenges, you can have three at a time "pinned", meaning clearly visible in the in-game HUD at all times. This allows you to track your progress towards a goal on the fly. However, if you have three pinned, you complete a challenge, and you try to replace that challenge in the pinned list with a different one, you're SOL until you enter a different level. This was a problem in every level I tried it in. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to remove the pinned challenge. Sometimes I could, but I wouldn't be able to pin another one despite now only having two pinned. It just never worked as one would expect at any point throughout the game's runtime, so it isn't an isolated thing. Potential strawman detractors might argue that it isn't that hard to just go back into the menus to review your progress...but dear reader, therein lies the rub, for the menus are actually the biggest conduit for bugs. 

Prior to starting this review, I went back to my review for Eternal to double-check if I brought this up, and I did: in that game, there was a somewhat-infrequent bug where you would have strange things happen when you exited the menu. If you pressed circle/B to exit, you would sometimes dash immediately upon returning to the game. If you pressed the center button, you'd sometimes freeze in place and not be able to walk forward until you moved in a different way or jumped. Well, in Dark Ages, that issue is no longer a small, somewhat infrequent thing. And it's worse. I don't think I ever did anything other than circle/B to exit the menu, but I'd say around 90% of the time, this would cause me to freeze up and not be able to walk forward. Not even jumping would break me out of that, and I seem to remember it helping in Eternal. So, I'd have to walk sideways in order to break out of that holding pattern.Yeah, I know, first world problem, but an existing bug made even worse in a newer installment of a saga is nothing to sneeze at. 

If that's still not enough for you, there were also several instances where pressing the melee button to execute a finisher simply didn't work. Unlike the menu thing, I can't pinpoint what the exact order of operations leading to this bug was, but it was more than one time, and it was always frustrating. To end off the negatives with a small thing, enemy AI sometimes bugged out and caused them to shoot way off to the side of me.

Now, the elephant in the room...nobody (including me) expected much out of the soundtrack without Mick Gordon at the helm. But I will say that I think I enjoy Dark Age's theme, "Unchained Predator", more than Eternal's "The Only Thing They Fear Is You." That's a hot take, I know, but that song just slaps like nobody's business! The rest of the soundtrack doesn't really impress (aside for some brief moments in the more Lovecraftian areas), but it's not offensive in any way. It's also a little disconcerting that id Software saw fit to hide the music so deeply into the audio mixing that it takes pushing it up to 11 to get any appreciable musical presence in fights, but that's more of a disagreement on process than an outright complaint.

As for the positives, textures never popped in, I never had any crashes, the framerate remained at a smooth 60fps throughout, and I never had any audio glitches or animation wonkiness. So, despite having a long list of negatives, it's safe to say that Dark Ages excels in the areas that truly matter.

You no longer believe that I believe Doom: The Dark Ages is a good game. I don't blame you for it. And I didn't use any question marks in that sentiment because I would bet good money that I'm correct. But it's important to remember that I did achieve 100% completion. Sure, there were times where I felt like I wasn't going to make it through the whole thing. But when later fights came around with slightly more chaos, I at least felt something of that trademark Doom rush. Speaking from a purely objective standpoint, Doom: The Dark Ages is a good game. It has a combat loop that feels great a fair amount of the time in spite of its best efforts to sabotage itself. On a technical level, as I said, it works in all the ways that matter. But dear reader, I can also see where the wind is blowing. Whenever I write something this long for something I'm not entirely positive on, it's usually a sign that I'm still in the copium-huffing phase and my opinion is only going to sour as time goes on. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I think I'm merely content to say I can acknowledge that Doom: The Dark Ages may be good...but I just didn't like it very much. It's a sad world we live in where I have to deliver that kind of verdict for the only saga to ever win my GOTY award twice in a row, but a wish for a better world does not a better world make. I can only hope that the slew of middling reviews for this game doesn't spell the end for id Software when Phil Spencer's beloved shareholders tighten his ball gag and tell him he's a bad boy for giving them creative freedom. But again, bridges and their time for consideration. 

Let us review:

Bad level design in general - 1.0

Dragon levels - 1.0

Lack of power in combat/lame weapons/over-reliance on melee - 1.0

Lame story - 0.5

Technical flaws - 0.5

The final score for Doom: The Dark Ages is, unfortunately...

6.0/10 - Above Average

Better luck next time, id Software, better luck next time