Doom Eternal - Year One Pass

The combat in Doom Eternal is the best in the genre, and I do not think it is close. Most shooters hand you a gun and a room full of targets. id Software instead built a system where ammo, health and armor are things you take from demons by force, mid-fight, using different tools. Chainsaw a zombie and it coughs up ammo. Stagger something and rip it apart for health. Hit a crowd with the flame belch and they shed armor while they burn. You are never topped up and comfortable, so a fight becomes a rolling series of decisions about which resource you need next and which enemy will give it to you. It plays more like a fighting game than a run-and-gun. That design leans on weapon swapping harder than anything else out there. The super shotgun's meat hook yanks you across an arena. The ballista strips a Revenant's jetpack. Sticky bombs from the combat shotgun pop a Cacodemon's mouth or blow the arm cannons off a Mancubus. Enemies have specific weak points that reward you for aiming at hardware instead of center mass, and the fastest route through a big encounter is usually a chain of two or three guns fired inside a second. Add the dash, the double jump and a soundtrack engineered to keep you moving, and the ceiling goes somewhere most action games never reach. Years on, players are still discovering new ways to route the same arena. That ceiling comes with a floor you have to climb. This is far more demanding than the 2016 reboot, and the difficulty spikes are real. The Marauder is the flashpoint: an enemy who blocks everything until he flashes green, punishes greed, and forces you to fight at one specific distance. Some players learn the rhythm and come to love him. Plenty of others bounce off entirely. The optional Slayer Gates are harder still, dropping you into cramped arenas with no room to breathe and no checkpoint mercy. If you want a shooter to play with half your attention while a podcast runs, look elsewhere. If you want something that asks for your hands and your head at once, very few games repay practice this well. The stuff between the fights is where it sags. First-person platforming across monkey bars, wall climbs and jump pads shows up constantly, and it swings from harmless to genuinely irritating in the stretches with instant-death drops. The story arrives in stiff cutscenes and a mountain of codex entries written in a very serious voice about Maykrs, Argent energy and Hell priests, which sits oddly against a game where you punch a demon's skull off. Battlemode, the asymmetric two-demons-versus-one-Slayer PvP, is a smart idea that never found the population or long-term support to stick, so treat it as a curiosity rather than a selling point. The Ancient Gods expansions bundled in here extend the campaign properly, though Part One front-loads punishing new enemies like the Spirit and the Blood Maykr and simply assumes you are already excellent. Part Two eases off slightly, hands you a Sentinel Hammer that feeds you resources on demand, and closes on pure spectacle. So what you have is an all-timer combat engine wrapped in a game with tedious connective tissue and a lore fixation nobody asked for. My advice: start on Hurt Me Plenty, skip the codex if it bores you, and give the Marauder three honest attempts before you decide he is unfair. When the loop clicks, usually around the third or fourth level, nothing else quite scratches the same itch.

Alex · Scout Team

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