DOOM Eternal

I came into DOOM Eternal expecting DOOM 2016 with a bigger budget. What I got was something closer to a fighting game wearing an FPS costume, and it took me about three hours to stop fighting that fact and actually start enjoying it. The resource loop is the whole design: you chainsaw a demon to drop ammo, torch one with the Flame Belch shoulder-mounted flamethrower to spawn armor shards, pop a Glory Kill on a staggered Cacodemon to recover health. None of those resources ever feel like they are just lying around, which is intentional and polarizing. Players who wanted DOOM 2016's relatively generous pickups scattered across the environment will bounce off this hard. Players willing to internalise the loop will find one of the tightest mid-combat juggling acts in any first-person shooter made in the last decade. Movement is where the game does its best work. Double-jump, double-dash, meat hook on the Super Shotgun that yanks you across the arena toward whatever demon you fire it at, climbable walls, horizontal poles you can swing off. Standing still is a death sentence and the arena layouts know it: id built combat spaces that funnel you vertically as much as laterally, and the sense of speed once the mechanics click is hard to match. At 165hz on a decent PC it is genuinely one of the smoothest-feeling shooters available. If you are used to low-polling rate gear or a heavy mouse, this is a game worth tightening up your setup for, not because the skill ceiling demands it, but because the movement rewards every millisecond of responsiveness you can give it. The criticism that landed for me is the enemy-specific puzzle element. The Marauder, in particular, is a mid-late game enemy that forces you to bait an attack window before engaging. It works in isolation, but drop him into a crowded arena and he becomes an attention-tax on your peripheral vision while you are already managing half a dozen threat types. Some players love that friction. I found it annoying more than once. The late-game difficulty spike is also a real cliff: the first 75 percent of the campaign finds a satisfying rhythm of escalation, then the final chapters crank the pressure to a point where the game stops feeling fair on anything above Hurt Me Plenty. The story is also trying to be more than it should be. There are codex entries, cutscenes, and references to an expanding Maykr lore that nobody asked for. The game plays exactly as well whether you read all of it or zero of it. Multiplayer is the weak point. Battlemode, the 2v1 asymmetric mode where two players control demons against one Slayer, is a clever idea that never found a healthy player base. The Ancient Gods expansion content, split across two parts released post-launch, is where the single-player shines hardest and is worth picking up alongside the base game if the campaign hooks you. A horde mode was added later and gives the core combat loop a proper stress-test arena to grind. For a single-player-focused shooter, the package is substantial. For anyone who came for a live multiplayer scene to grind ranked play, this is not that game.

Fred · Scout Team

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