Reviewed for: Playstation 4
"In the first age, in the first battle, when the shadows first lengthened, one stood. Burned by the embers of Armageddon, his soul blistered by the fires of Hell and tainted beyond ascension, he chose the path of perpetual torment. In his ravenous hatred he found no peace; and with boiling blood he scoured the Umbral Plains seeking vengeance against the dark lords who had wronged him. He wore the crown of the Night Sentinels, and those that tasted the bite of his sword named him...the Doom Slayer."
In 2016, Id Software released a reboot of perhaps the most famous first person shooter of all time: Doom. This 2016 release was the ultimate power fantasy game in its year, casting the player as a man so religiously feared by the denizens of Hell that the demons put together borderline biblical accounts of his rampages (such as the one quoted above). In it, your goal was simple: be as unrelentingly cruel to demons as possible, and do so swiftly. There was a surprisingly deep story, but it ultimately took a back seat to the carnage. In the days up until its release, I, being the pretentious little termite that I am, immediately wrote it off as the kind of thing that only neanderthals who complain about cutscenes could enjoy (and, well...the critics of today's review topic haven't exactly proven that statement wrong, but I digress). 2016 was a year where I was trying to broaden my horizons as a gamer and expand my craft as a critic, however, so I picked up a copy fully expecting a good guilty pleasure title at best. Little did I realize that Doom 2016 (henceforth referred to as Doom, while the original Doom will be called "the original Doom", because it's all confusing) would completely change the way I viewed gaming. Suddenly, I came to expect extreme freedom of motion in my games, making me progressively less and less of an RPG guy and more of the kind of neanderthal I'd spent so long raging against. In the years prior to 2016, I'd awarded game of the year to the following games: Mass Effect 3 (a story-based RPG), The Last of Us (a story-based stealth game), Dragon Age: Inquisition (a story-based RPG), and Undertale (a story-based RPG). In 2016, it was Doom. To say that Doom was an eye-opening, game-changing (no pun intended) experience for me would not be an overstatement, so when Doom Eternal was announced at E3 two years ago, I automatically put it down on my list of things to look out for. The contrast between the days leading up to the release of Doom and Doom Eternal is striking. As Doom Eternal loomed on the horizon, I found myself counting down the days and consuming as much of the existing lore as I possible could, so great was my excitement for this game. And yet, there was still a bit of hesitance in the back of my mind. See, the demos and marketing materials shown before the release all gave me the impression that they might be trying to do too much new stuff. They showed off new weapons, new abilities, new demons, new tools, new movement systems, and I couldn't help but wonder how the game was going to balance it all. The closer we came to Eternal's release, the further into the back of my head this hesitance went, but it was still there. Well, at the time of writing, I've played through Doom Eternal's campaign three times (once on Hurt me Plenty, once on Ultra-Violence, and once on Nightmare) and am currently doing Extra Life mode on "I'm too young to die" difficulty for a trophy, and I believe it's safe to say the honeymoon period is over. I wanted to take the time to painstakingly outline this review before starting it partly because I wanted this to be as comprehensive as possible and partly so that it would allow for the honeymoon period to pass. Now that I'm done outlining and have been with the game for long enough to have come down from the initial high, is Doom Eternal good?
Well...it has cutscenes that I can easily skip and it has jumping and the slightly more "game"-y art style means that the combat doesn't look as gorey as it did in Doom even though it's objectively gorier, and also I have to have a free Bethesda.net account that I literally never have to manually sign into again after the first time booting the game up, so 0/10 worst game ever made and it has cutscenes....
Obviously I'm being facetious and mercilessly making fun of the inevitable 0/10 user reviews on Metacritic, because some people only exist to be made fun of. I find that a good test of a game's objective quality is to look at the kinds of things people have to resort to complaining about to give it a 0/10. Sometimes it's due to very real problems that people just blow out of proportion...other times, it's "this game has cutscenes." If you take a small stroll through the 0/10 reviews, you'll find this complaint alongside such obviously mentally stable statements as "Doom is supposed to be BRUTAL why is there jumping?" or "Doom is supposed to be BRUTAL but these graphics are cartoony!"(always with BRUTAL capitalized). It's a similar kind of reaching wannabe-masculine insecurity that you see in the metal music community. I remember being a big fan of the metal band Trivium back in high school and seeing people absolutely flip out over the fact that their upcoming album had "notes" in it. That album turned out...not great after all, but the only thing metalheads were concerned about was the fact that nobody would think they were a satan-worshipper if they listened to it in public. But I digress. Enough people have made fun of these edgelords already, the horse doesn't need to be beaten any further. So what's my actual answer to the question I posed before starting that tirade?
Simply put, Doom Eternal is the single best first person shooter ever made. Less simply put, Doom Eternal sets a new standard for combat versatility, player empowerment in the face of seemingly impossible odds, and absolute Godlike power fantasy. It's a game so good that I legitimately don't think I could possibly play Doom again having now experienced it. As we'll go on to explore, Doom Eternal isn't perfect...but it's damn near close. So load your super shotgun, punch your nearest rock, and allow me to just kind of gush and rant for a little while about why Doom Eternal is good.
The first of these additions I'd like to touch on is the new roster of demons. The usual suspects are all there (imps, cacodemons, soldiers, etc), but a combination of brand new demons and demons from the original games that haven't yet been implemented in the modern series bring the demon count up to insane levels. There are the arachnotrons, which are similar to the Spider Mastermind, the final boss from Doom. There are the tyrants, which are similar to the Cyberdemon, the first boss from Doom. There are gargoyles, whiplashes (belly dancing snake demons with powerful whips), dread knights, prowlers, as well as a couple ultra-powerful recurring demons. The first one of those that I want to discuss is the one that seems to dominate all conversations surrounding Doom Eternal: The Marauders. Marauders are former soldiers in the elite army that the Doomslayer once led, now consumed by hell. In other words, they're demons with strength and speed on par with the slayer, and as such, they've garnered a reputation for being supremely difficult. Marauders are immune to all the game's "super weapons" (which we'll discuss shortly) and have different tactics depending on their distance from you. Get too close and they'll shoot you with a shotgun, get too far away and they'll throw their axe at you. You have to make sure to keep a Marauder at about mid-range to bait them into starting a melee attack. When they begin the attack, their eyes will flash green alongside an audio cue, and that's when you shoot them to essentially "parry." Parrying will give you the ability to shoot them for a limited time before they recover. To defeat a Marauder, this must be done a few times, and in some later-game arenas, they'll be surrounded by other demons, making the game of distance cat and mouse more complicated. Oh, and to make matters more complicated, that parry window is the only time you can shoot them. Try at any other point, and they'll both raise a shield just in time to avoid damage and summon a flaming wolf familiar to chase you. Sounds difficult, right? Well, if you listen to most people on social media, yes. It's a different kind of battle strategy than you typically have for any given wave of enemies, but it demands that you control the battlefield even more efficiently than you're used to. This enemy famously killed popular YouTuber Markiplier something like...200 times? I didn't see the video so I don't have the count, but it was something ridiculous like that. However...I've only died to any one Marauder once or twice across all my playthroughs, including nightmare. I wanted to take the time to talk about them because they're an interesting lore concept alongside an interesting gear thrown into the proverbial works, but I didn't actually find them to be the difficult monster the internet believes them to be............................................that honor belongs to the other demon I want to discuss: The Archvile, which is new for the modern saga, but a returning demon from the original games. I had my ass handed to me by Archviles enough times to make me understand the feeling that most people feel when they see a Marauder coming at them. Archviles are essentially bullet sponges that summon waves of buffed enemies (enemies that are both stronger and twice as fast as their regular counterparts), call waves of fire from beneath you, erect shields of fire around them, and teleport to the opposite side of the arena on a whim. I died in Archvile encounters more times than in the many levels before they appeared combined...and they don't even show up until like 5 levels before the end. Lest I be accused of being overly braggy for not having Marauder troubles, I figured it would be good to mention that I did have a nemesis in Eternal. Thankfully, unlike the Marauder, Archviles can be taken out by super weapons, so it's just a matter of getting over the mental hurdle of, as lead director (and face of this game) Hugo Martin says, "dropping your nuke."
On the subject of weapons, before I go too much further into the flow of combat itself, I think it would be good to dissect those first. Like in Doom, you have your set of standard-damage-larger-capacity weapons: The combat shotgun, the heavy cannon, and the plasma rifle, all of which share ammo pools with their larger-damage-smaller-capacity counterparts: The super shotgun, the chaingun, and the ballista, respectively. The ballista serves the same purpose as the Gauss cannon from the previous title, and the rest are pretty much the same weapons. In terms of standard weapons, finally, there's the rocket launcher. Each of these weapons have two unlockable modifications each (except for the super shotgun, which only has one). Each mod has a different use case, and you'll likely find a use for each of them as you play. To give just a couple examples, the sticky bomb mod for the combat shotgun and the precision bolt mod for the heavy cannon can both be used to swiftly destroy enemy weak points. Likewise, many of the heaviest demons are easily sent into a pain recoil animation through use of the chaingun, so both of its mods, while slowing down your movement speed, have use cases: the mobile turret mod makes it so that you're putting out about three times the firepower (possibly staggering enemies quicker), while the energy shield mod gives you a bit of damage protection to offset the slowed movement in case you don't want to gamble on the extra firepower. But by far the best mod in the game is the one mod attached to the super shotgun: the meat hook. See, the super shotgun comes with a grappling hook that pulls you towards the enemy you use the mod on, only that isn't exactly the right way of describing it. It's more like the grappling hook makes the enemy you use the mod on into an anchor, as if you don't move the thumbsticks you'll get pulled toward the enemy, but you can also swing around them instead if you wish. The mod has one more use case to touch on, but that's for a slightly later paragraph.
As with Doom, the focus in Doom Eternal is freedom of movement, as that grappling hook for the super shotgun probably implies. You have to constantly be on the move, looking around and jumping out of the way of demon attacks. Demons are fast and aggressive, and this time around their AI is much smarter than in Doom, with certain enemies seeming to predict which ways you might move and aiming fireballs accordingly, so remaining 100% on top of your movement is crucial. To give you a fighting chance against AI that are this smart and aggressive, Eternal introduces a dash mechanic that wasn't present in Doom. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like: an instant "blink" in whatever direction you choose. You can perform a max of 2 dashes at a time, and they refill very quickly, but not so quickly that you can spend every waking minute dashing. The key is to use these dashes as emergency tools. For instance, if you see that a demon has predicted your movements and a fireball is headed straight for where you just jumped to, the dash can be used to get out of the way right at the last minute. Similarly, if you misjudge the distance a heavy demon can jump to punch at you, you can chain both dashes to get out of range before the hit lands. It requires some practice and getting used to, but eventually, correct use of the dashes becomes second nature. But the dash, in spite of what a godsend it is, isn't enough to make this game a walk in the park.
See, while the devs were kind enough to give the player a couple of new tools to manage combat (we'll be touching on those tools after this), they also decided to ramp up the challenge in order to force the player to truly master all the new tools they've been given. A key change made in the transition from Doom to Eternal is that the maximum amount of ammo for each weapon is cut almost exactly in half. In addition, the infinite ammo pistol from Doom is gone, so all you have are ammo-consuming weapons, and the amount of ammo they can carry after maximum upgrades is half what they could carry in Doom. Furthermore, the sheer number of demons and the specific loadouts of demons in a given arena are...baffling at times. The level of chaos in Eternal's battles by around the 5th mission easily puts the chaos in Doom's FINAL level to shame, and it just keeps increasing from there. On multiple occasions during my first playthrough, I'd find myself putting some distance between me and a demon to get my bearings and get a sense of who else was in the arena, and upon seeing just what I was up against, I'd think "b-b-but that's impossible!" So many battles in this game, I'd find myself absolutely letting loose in desperation after seeing how much I had to overcome (even before the halfway point), but I'd almost always get through without dying and feeling like an absolutely unstoppable badass! The game does a good job of starting you off in an encounter at a level of chaos just high enough to make you think that was it, and then saying "heh...not bad, player...you made me use 10% of my power!" like it's an anime villain or something, and doing it just inconsistently enough that you don't start predicting it. A fine example is one of the boss encounters. I'd finished a grueling battle against the boss in question and was feeling accomplished before moving on into the next room, hearing the villain of this level say "We are NOT! DONE! YET!" and spawning two more of the boss I'd just killed. Quick side note: Normally I'd save this point for the paragraph on bosses, but I feel like it's a relevant point to bring up to prevent discouragement in anybody reading this: For all bosses that have multiple "stages," Eternal has multiple checkpoints. So, if you die to a boss in its second stage, you don't have to do the first one again. I bring this up to remind the reader that Eternal is tough, but completely fair.
In addition to the mid-boss checkpoints, Eternal is also fair in that it gives you a bunch of extra tools to use to manage the chaos. The most immediate tool is the chainsaw that first made its functional appearance in 2016's Doom. Like in Doom, using the chainsaw on a demon grants a slight refill for ammo. A change to the chainsaw in Eternal is that it recharges after a little bit of time, so you'll almost always have a use when you need it, which helps offset the overall smaller ammo supply you have. However, the tradeoff is that it only refills to one use, and unlike in Doom, the maximum fuel of the chainsaw is 3. This means that the chainsaw can no longer be used as an instant kill on something very heavy like a Baron of Hell. You can still use it to kill mid-tier demons like the Mancubus or the Pinky, but the fact that you're going to be using the chainsaw more often in Eternal means that you'll very rarely have the fuel to pull that off. So, you'll be using the chainsaw quite a bit, but it's only a get out of jail free card when it comes to ammo. Similarly, in Eternal you have three super weapons! There's the crucible blade (a giant laser sword), the Unmaykr (which I'll be discussing later on), and of course, the series staple super weapon, the B.F.G (Big F***ing Gun). So you have multiple "nukes" that you can drop to make things more manageable, but like with the blessings added to the chainsaw, it comes with one drawback. In Doom, the B.F.G. had a maximum of three shots that could be refilled by finding its specific ammo within levels. In Eternal, the B.F.G. and the Unmaykr share an ammo pool, and the ammo pool amounts to just two B.F.G shots. The crucible blade has a maximum of three uses with its own ammo, but each use can only kill one enemy, and if it's an enemy with multiple "stages" (for example, a boss that returns as a standard enemy later on), then each use can only take off one "stage". Ammo for both the B.F.G/Unmaykr and the crucible blade are supremely limited as well. Furthermore, as previously stated, none of these super weapons work on the Marauders, so each super weapon can work wonders for crowd control, but you can no longer afford to make it a casual decision.
Now, up until this point I've only been talking about new tools that come with major new caveats, but there are new tools where the only caveat is a bit of recharge time as well! In addition to your standard frag grenades, you also have a new ice grenade which freezes enemies in place to give you some breathing room. Then there's the "flame belch," which sets fire to enemies, causing them to essentially bleed armor pickups. Then there's the "blood punch," an all-powerful melee attack that is charged by performing glory kills (attacking an enemy until they flash blue and then melee attacking them for a violent kill animation, just like in Doom...I didn't realize until just now that I'd forgotten to mention glory killing, that's how much there is to talk about with this game) and sends a shockwave out to kill enemies and gain a little extra health. And all of that is before upgrades come into play. By locating Sentinel Crystals in levels, you can eventually make it so that shooting frozen enemies causes health pickups to drop, the flame belch causes even more armor to drop, the blood punch causes enemies killed by the resulting shockwave to drop health, and by fully upgrading the meat hook on the super shotgun, you can make it so that this grappling hook sets enemies on fire as well! The amount of ways you can get enemies to drop health and armor in this game is astounding, and what's more, none of them are mutually exclusive! You can freeze an enemy, then use the flame belch on them, then shoot them to get both health and armor pickups, how crazy is that? Before I go on to discuss the final tool, which segways into other combat topics, there's Extra Lives. If you've ever...played a videogame before, you know what they are. Essentially, you find extra lives in levels, and if you die with at least one stored up, you instantly use that life and get all your health back. It can be a Godsend in the right context, and at other times you'll get almost all the way through a boss fight, lose your last life, and have to start over again with only the one life. I was initially going to take a little bit off the score for this lack of control, but then I remembered that literally every game with a lives system is like that. So...if you're like me, you haven't played a game with lives in a long time, and the last one you played was Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you'll want to get out of that particular mindset.
The final tool to discuss isn't so much a tool in your arsenal as it is something you can exploit. Certain mid-tier enemies have "weak points" that give them more powerful attacks. For the Arachnatron, it's the little turret on the top of their frame, and destroying it means removing their rapid-fire capabilities. For the Mancubus, it's the arm cannons, and destroying them means giving them wimpy little fireballs instead of giant ones. For the Revenant, it's the cannons on its shoulders, and destroying them means taking away their long-range combat capabilities. As discussed in the paragraph about weapons, the best tools for destroying weak points are the sticky bomb mod for the combat shotgun and the precision bolt mod for the heavy cannon, but you may be thinking "precision aiming in a Doom game? What gives?" I thought that too when I was reading early reviews. After all, in a game all about constantly being on the move, the idea of making sure you're aiming at exactly the right spot on a demon probably seems counterintuitive. However, the game makes it work by adding just enough aim assist on these mods to make it that you can quickscope these weakpoints fairly easily. For me, even on Nightmare difficulty it was simple enough to quickly bring up the precision bolt mod and shoot off a Mancubus arm cannon in a millisecond. Now, there are a couple of "tiers" of demons. I bring this up as a way of showing how the game gradually gets the player thinking. Fodder tier demons such as imps and zombies are weak to everything, so they require no tutorials and not much thought, but starting with the heavy tier, you start to see demons that are strong, but they have weak points to concentrate on. You start off just facing fodder, then towards the end of the first level of Eternal, you meet your first demon with a weak point. For each demon with a weak point, you get a brief tutorial about it before you fight them for the first time, ensuring that you know how to ramp the challenge these particular demons bring down. As the game progresses, you gradually move through the heavy tier, and the demons that don't have weak points still have weapon types that will make them go into a pain response animation, so even without a specific point to aim at, you still know of a specific weapon that will help in fighting them. Finally, starting at about the halfway point, the game begins introducing the super heavy demons. These are demons that either have no specified weak points or weapon weaknesses, or if they do, they're strong enough that they'll be a challenge even if you act on these weaknesses. The tips for these enemies have little to no detail about how to kill them, rather, the game will give hints like "you can break through the shield with this," giving you a small bit of survival knowledge in a pinch, or in the case of the Tyrant, "shoot at it until it dies," giving you no help at all. All of this is to say that the game gives you knowledge on specific ways to handle most of the demons, and for the really hard ones you're left to approach them with nothing but your knowledge of how to handle the chaos. As the game gets harder and harder, your specific instructions become more and more vague, thus combat becomes a melting pot of strategies you've been using for the early levels and your own ideas you end up coming up with in the heat of battle.
But for all the talking I've been doing about chaos this and chaos that, I don't think I've actually given an example of how combat might go. So, excuse the incredibly poor grammar in the following sentence as I attempt to simulate what your thoughts in a given combat encounter might look like if you go in with your health, armor, and ammo full:
"There's an arachnatron, pull out heavy cannon, swap to precision bolt mod, quickscope at the turret, missed, quickscope again, got it, I've lost 75% of my armor but I'm ok, pull out super shotgun, use flaming meat hook to get in close to arachnatron and shoot it right up close to kill it in two shots and get some of my armor back with the fire, run back to the start of the arena to look at what has spawned now, turned too late, a hell knight just knocked off all my armor and now I'm at 75% health, pull out chaingun, swap to mobile turret mod, fireballs from imps and gargoyles have knocked off even more of my health now, but they're all right behind the hell knight, ice grenade the crowd, flame belch the crowd, drop two frag grenades in the center of the crowd while at the same time deploying the mobile turret mod for the chaingun and firing point blank at the frozen hell knight, hell knight is still alive and unfrozen but I got almost all my health and armor back from that, hell knight is jumping at me now, dash backwards twice and fire just the chaingun without the mod, it's stunned now, dash forward twice and launch into a glory kill, powering up the blood punch, now there's a cyber mancubus and a whiplash, the cyber mancubus will poison the floor, meat hook the cyber mancubus and swing out of the way of its guns at the last second and blood punch its armor off the second the meat hook breaks off, dash backwards twice to get out of poisoning range while simultaneously switching to the rocket launcher, fire once and dash to dodge the whiplash's attacks and the cyber mancubus' poison, fire twice and rinse and repeat, fire a third time and kill the cyber mancubus but now I'm low on ammo, run across the battlefield to escape the whiplash and find an imp or gargoyle to chainsaw, chainsaw it, a baron of hell and a couple shield soldiers have spawned in my area, plasma rifle, swap to heat blast mod, blow up soldier's shield while building up heat, unleash heat on the baron of hell, dash backwards to avoid attacks, swap to chaingun, swap to energy shield mod, deploy energy shield and open fire on the baron of hell, whiplash has entered the scene and the ice bomb still isn't charged yet, swap to super shotgun and meat hook the whiplash, swinging out of the baron's way, shoot the whiplash, dodge back twice and wait for meat hook to reload then do it again, glory kill the whiplash, swap to chaingun, low on armor, other enemies by the baron, flame belch the crowd with energy shield up and while shooting, baron is staggered, glory kill it, blood punch the burning crowd for a slight health bonus."
Reading that pretty quickly, I calculated a read time of about two minutes. In the flow of gameplay, everything I just wrote down would've taken place over the course of maybe 20 seconds if you get caught on something or accidentally switch to the wrong weapon first. And it's just the first wave of the battle, and it's the least hard wave of enemies you're going to face. The full battle will take maybe 3-5 minutes, with the tactics getting even more and more hectic as the battle progresses. Even then, this was just what my brain could come up with. In reality, the 20 seconds that this scenario would've played out over would've had even more going on than I said. With all that I've said about controlling the chaos, I hope that this meager example of what might happen in a battle is enough to show how you'll be constantly switching weapons and utilizing tools for specific use cases. However, on higher difficulties, even that isn't going to be enough. There's also...an attitude adjustment that must be made. During my time on Nightmare difficulty, I found that the chaos of battle was even more chaotic with the greatly increased enemy damage, and while thought still had to be involved, I found that embracing the Doom Slayer inside myself was really the only way to survive. I remember coming to a point in literally the second level where I had my ass handed to me something like 10 times. The encounter started on a cliff overlooking the arena, and I could see a couple enemies with weak points down below. I was well out of their range, so I (being the thinking person that I am), every time, would start the battle off by sniping the weak points off from afar, then leaping down to fight fair. After about the tenth death, I flew into an almost controller-throwing fit of rage that I haven't experienced in a long time. I would be a terrible streamer/"Let's Play"-er because I never vocalize my internal thoughts when I'm alone, but my internal thoughts went something like this after that death: "F*** IIIIIIIT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!" and I leapt down into the arena without taking the time to snipe off weak points. Instead, I just starting trying my hardest to just....friggin kill everything in sight. No real rhyme or reason to it other than taking off a weak point when I could, just blasting everything I could and using as many tools as I could at a given time. Eventually I tracked down a gargoyle and after sawing through its body with the chainsaw, I turned around and mentally screamed "WHO'S NEXT?!" only to find that I'd just won the battle. Then, in a later level, I had a similar problem, only there wasn't any sniping opportunity involved. I simply just kept dying and dying and eventually I launched into another fit of nearly controller-throwing rage. Rather than mentally screaming this time, I simply had my teeth clenched and, according to my dog, was letting out a low growl the whole time. Once again, I won the battle. It was then that I paused and wondered what the actual lesson here might be. After all, having to go into a fit of rage for every battle was going to give me a lot of headaches, and if I came to the conclusion that you had to be growling in order to win, I'd basically be no more secure in my masculinity than your average 0/10 reviewer or metalhead. Eventually, I realized that the secret was actually given by one of the hell priests as he addressed his followers on how to kill the Slayer: "Your hate must match his will." It was never about me being angry like the Slayer is, it was about both wanting to win more than anything and specifically wanting to kill everything in sight. It's the difference between the passive desire to win that comes with any game and the active desire that sees you using absolutely every method you can think of. To win battles on the harder difficulties, you simply have to show brute force. It's mindful brute force that sees you using the kind of force you need to regain this resource or the other, but it's brute force either way. It's a lesson you might think you understand while playing on normal or hard difficulty, but until you get to Nightmare, I wouldn't be so sure. I can only imagine that it's even more important a lesson on the permadeath "Ultra-Nightmare" difficulty, which gives me a headache just thinking about it.
All of this is to highlight just how chaotic and ridiculously fast-paced the combat of Eternal is, which brings me to my actual final point on just vanilla combat. In a shocking turn of events, it's a point that just about everyone in the Doom community agrees with: there is no shame in playing on a lower difficulty. The point of any Doom game is to make you feel like a God, an unstoppable demon-slaying badass, and the fact of the matter is that you'll probably be challenged on even the lowest difficulty. I'm the kind of person who gets an insane adrenaline rush from clearing an incredibly hard challenge like some of the battles on Nightmare difficulty (to the point that I've scared my dog far too many times from leaping up and shouting "YES!" when I succeed), so it's a matter of playing on the difficulty that gives you the challenge you need to feel awesome, and in the age of "git gud," it's shocking to me that the Doom community is supportive of the easier modes...but perhaps it shouldn't be. Doom players seem to understand the point of Doom, and with that understanding comes the knowledge that you can't feel like a badass if you're being discouraged by difficulty. I've seen people get made fun of in places like the Doom subreddit for complaining about the lower ammo capacity or for not adapting their strategies for the Marauder, but when it comes to playing on the easier difficulties, the attitude overall seems to be "yeah man, play on that mode if it's good for you!" So, I'm here today to mirror that sentiment. Even though the easiest difficulty is named "I'm too young to die," ignore that...or maybe reimagine it from the whiny tone it seems to imply to more of a stern delivery followed by cocking your shotgun. If all my talk about the hectic nature of gameplay is making it seem like it might be too difficult or too nauseating for you, I'd still ask you to give it a shot, even if on the lowest difficulty. Best case scenario, you're a little challenged and feel awesome when you clear a room of demons, worst case scenario, you're mowing through demons right and left with no challenge at all and feeling like a God for doing so. In the introduction, I mentioned that I'm currently playing on the easiest difficulty for an extra life mode achievement, so you can take my word for it: even coming off the incredibly-challenging-incredibly-rewarding heels of nightmare difficulty and facing absolutely no challenge in easy mode, I do still feel incredible on this difficulty, and I have, in fact, felt more like a badass when completing certain battles on this difficulty than in nightmare difficulty strictly because of how much more stylish certain encounters turned out without the higher level of resource management. In any case, no matter what mode you play on, you're getting the kind of experience the game wants you to have! I've probably harped on this point for longer than I need to, but when you love a game as much as I love Eternal, you want people to experience it no matter what form that experience takes. And unlike last year's excellent Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (which gave me the same adrenaline rush Eternal does), there actually is some degree of accessibility, so you'll likely find an experience that works! So that's all I'll say on difficulty from an accessibility and flow of normal combat standpoint.
Now, that isn't the end of the extra stuff in Eternal. As you progress through the campaign, completing optional challenges and just making progress, you'll earn all sorts of rewards: weapon skins, slayer skins, podiums that the slayer stands on in the main menu, skins for the demons you can play as in multiplayer, victory and introduction animations for the slayer or demons that you can play as in multiplayer, icons and titles for your multiplayer profile, etc. There's a lot of focus on multiplayer-centric rewards, obviously, but the weapon and slayer skins are all pretty sweet. But that's not the end of it. At the end of every level, you receive a certain amount of event experience and Doom Level experience. I'm not sure what contributes to either of those pools, but I digress. As you earn more and more event experience, you unlock even more of the aforementioned rewards. It took until a night or two into my fourth playthrough to reach the final tier of rewards, and I figured that was probably it when I started writing this very sentence not too long before this got published, but then, the next day, I noticed that a full 13 new tiers of rewards had been added, so it looks like the rewards are just going to keep coming! Not only that, but if you have an Amazon/Twitch prime account you can get access to a whole other series of rewards for free! I linked my prime account to my Bethesda account and got myself the much-lauded "Doomicorn" skin, but it turns out that wasn't all that came with it, as I gradually unlocked more and more unicorn-centered rewards as I played that weren't directly advertised with the skin! There's been a lot of buzz in recent years regarding games as "live services." Usually that's a tactic used by the lizard people at EA or the snail-eating lizard people at Ubisoft to justify ridiculous in-game monetization that continues to provide more paid content in the game the player already spent the full $60 on. But Doom Eternal shows how great a "live service" game can be if you take the unhindered greed out of the equation. It's like no matter what you do, Id Software intends to reward you for it. Oh, you went back and replayed that level? Have a reward! Oh, you're playing the campaign again? That's great! Have a reward! Oh, you're still playing a couple weeks after the game released? How does a reward sound? Oh, you opted into getting this cool free skin with your amazon account? How about even more rewards you didn't know came with the package AND access to some more collections of rewards as the months go by that you didn't know you were gonna get access to when you collected that skin?! Oh, you stuck with multiplayer for this long? I spy with my little eye, something that starts with re and ends with ward! You're constantly being rewarded for doing nothing other than playing the game and having fun. Being rewarded for playing the game, imagine that in today's game industry! In case this isn't clear by now, there are no microtransactions, no loot boxes (or "surprise mechanics"), no "time savers," absolutely no way to get any of these rewards with actual money (you might argue that isn't true with the Doomicorn skin because it requires an amazon prime account, but I digress), absolutely no way to get these rewards without just playing the game. The example that comes to mind the most is the gold slayer skin and the corresponding gold podium. These items are only earned by completing the permadeath "Ultra Nightmare" mode. Companies like EA would leap at the chance to monetize something like that, but not Id Software. The only way to get that rarest of rare skins and rarest of rare podiums is to beat the game on the hardest difficulty in a mode where if you die even once, you have to start the whole game over again. When you get that skin (as I likely never will), you get it because you earned it, and if you go up against somebody with a gold podium in multiplayer, you know that they don't have it because they paid, they have it because they accomplished this great feat!
Oh, I'm sorry, did you think that was all? Well, think again! See, you don't just get rewarded with cosmetic stuff. Once you beat Eternal in any save slot, you unlock something extremely special. After beating the game and returning to the fortress, if you go back to the Slayer's room and interact with his retro PC, you'll find you're now able to play the original Doom (the one from the 90's that started it all) in its entirety. If you beat Eternal, you unlock another full game.
Oh, I'm sorry, did you think that was all? Well, think again! See, next to the icon for the original Doom on the Slayer's retro PC, there's an option to enter a password which can be found on the bookshelf. Enter that password, and you'll be able to play Doom II: Hell on Earth in its entirety. If you beat Eternal and enter a password, you unlock two full games.
Ohoho, I'm sorry, did you think that was all? Well, think again! This one isn't really a surprise and it can't be played within Doom Eternal, but Doom 64, the Nintendo 64 followup to Doom II comes with Doom Eternal for free. So, to recap, if you buy Doom Eternal, you get a fantastic game as well as three other full games. Four games for the price of one! COME! ON! You wanna talk about bang for your buck, well here it is! Hopefully by now I've gotten across that this is a game that wants to be played and thanks you for doing so! At this point it's also probably pretty clear that I really loved this game, but how much did I love it, exactly?
Let us review:
Technical oddities - 0.1
Lackluster swimming sections - 0.1
Unmaykr is kinda lame - 0.1
The final score for Doom Eternal is...
9.7/10 - Nearly Perfect
Excellent work, Id Software, excellent work!
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