DOOM Eternal Year One Pass (DLC)

Let me be direct: the Year One Pass is not a standalone game. It is a bundle containing two single-player campaign expansions for DOOM Eternal - The Ancient Gods Part One and The Ancient Gods Part Two - and it requires the base game to run. If you bought DOOM Eternal and bounced off it, skip this entirely. If you cleared it on Ultra-Violence and immediately started thinking about Nightmare, keep reading. The Ancient Gods Part One is where the pass earns its reputation. id Software took Eternal's already demanding combat loop and stripped out the breathing room. Every room is a gauntlet. The enemy density is obnoxious by design - waves of increasingly aggressive demons stacked on top of each other, with Marauders thrown in specifically to ruin your rhythm. The pacing is relentless to a fault, and some players hit a wall that feels less like a skill check and more like a stamina test. That said, the UAC Atlantica opener is genuinely one of the coolest mission settings the franchise has ever used, and the new arenas have a precision to them that rewards tight weapon quick-switching, smart flame belch usage, and grenade timing. If you played the base game passively, this DLC will expose every bad habit you built. Part Two pulls back slightly on the brutality and is better for it. The Escalation Encounters replace the base game's Slayer Gates - mandatory arenas per level plus a brutal optional second round that requires you to have actually mastered every mechanic Eternal ever taught you. The Crucible is gone, replaced by the Sentinel Hammer, which lets you stun groups and recover health under pressure. It fits the resource management loop cleanly. New enemy sub-species push you to cycle weapon modes and alternate fire more than the base game did, which keeps the action from going completely autopilot. The final boss against the Dark Lord splits opinion - some critics called it underwhelming compared to Part One's bosses, others felt it was a worthy, skill-testing finale. Honest answer: it depends entirely how much you clicked with Eternal's rhythm by the end. The community consensus is that neither expansion matches the full base game in terms of pacing and feel. The story goes places that divide fans, the music is less impactful, and the difficulty curve for Part One in particular is steep enough to drive casual players away. But if you are the kind of person who replays Eternal levels to optimize kill times, or if you play on a controller and have already worked out how to handle Marauders without panicking, the Year One Pass gives you several more hours of the sharpest movement-shooter combat loop available on console. There is no multiplayer component here - no Battle Mode, no Horde Mode add-ons - just two dense solo campaigns built for players who already know what they are doing.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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