Leave a videogame series in a covered, humid environment for long enough and it will, according to some inextricable and mysterious law of nature, become Dark Souls. So, please put your hands together for Doom: The Dark Ages, which swaps out previous games' emphasis on guns (firearms) for an emphasis on guns (biceps), finally giving Doom Guy—videogames' meatiest man—a chance to put that bulk to use with a new focus on parry-based melee combat.
Which probably has a lot of you sucking air through your teeth, and I don't doubt it'll be polarising, but I have to admit I find id's willingness to continually get weird with its most famous franchise pretty admirable. What's more, it works—or at least it did in the three or so hours I got with the game at a recent demo.
The Dark Ages transforms Doom Guy from unstoppable force to immoveable object, a 1,000-pound gorilla in 2,000 pounds of armour, able to root himself in place and trade blows with even the most massive and monstrous hellspawn. He's still powerful, just in a different way than I'm used to.
Bring a fist to a gunfight
The Dark Ages is a prequel to 2016's Doom. Also, it's not set in the actual Dark Ages, so wrap your head around that. Instead, our Doom Guy finds himself in an alternate, Dark Age-themed dimension, where he's been technomagically enslaved to a sinister cabal of alien space Catholics who live in a metal teardrop in the sky. They're terrified of him, naturally, but he's too handy to get rid of. They shoot him down to the planet below like very angry pest control whenever the demon situation gets out of hand.
And that's all the plot you need, thanks. Off you go, to bludgeon your way across the planet with the occasional diversion to pilot a mech or fly a dragon. My demo—a press build I played on the slightly harder than normal Ultraviolence mode—consisted of four unconnected levels: a tutorial that sees you clear a castle of a stubborn demon infestation, a mech section, a lengthy dragon ride, and a more traditionally nu-Doom area—a wide open map filled with skirmishes and secrets.
The new focus on parrying and melee does not, you might be relieved to hear, turn post-2016 Doom into an entirely new game. It's different, yes, markedly so, but it's a change in rhythm rather than a fundamental overhaul of the entire experience: familiar instruments playing a new song. Where the last two games felt like I was constantly moving at a dead sprint, gaily blasting away hordes of demons and only pausing for the odd glory kill, Dark Ages had me constantly shifting between two modes: that familiar fast pace that has you zipping all over the battlefield, and showdowns with bigger enemies, the ones you have to go to work on.
The latter all but demand you root yourself in place and start trading blows—block, block, parry, slam. Early on in my demo, when I'd not yet adjusted to what the game expected of me, I treated them like I'd treat any big, powerful, damaging enemy in an FPS: I put distance between us and started circle-strafing. It was a disaster. I found myself unable to dodge their projectiles and unable to return any meaningful damage.
Whether by returning projectiles from whence they came or just by getting John Doom Guy totally amped, enemies that felt impossible at a distance turn into pussycats when you go mano-a-mano.
It was only by getting up close and personal that I succeeded. Most if not all of Doom: TDA's enemies have two varieties of attacks—red and green. You block the red and, by timing it right, parry the green. Even on Ultraviolence, those parry windows feel downright generous (and the game's ultra-tweakable difficulty settings you adjust them independently if you like), which is handy, since parries can be the difference between megadamage and no damage. Whether by returning projectiles from whence they came or just by getting John Doom Guy totally amped, enemies that felt impossible at a distance turn into pussycats when you go mano-a-mano.
Or flail-a-mano, or shield-a-mano or, hell, super-shotgun-a-mano. Your destructive toolset is plenty varied: you've got your fists and feet, sure, but also a flail, a flingable shield that doubles as a chainsaw, and who-knows-what else. Using them feels good, weighty and crunchy in all the right ways, while Doom Guy himself feels like he's been on a centuries-long bulk as he thunk-thunk-thunks his way around the map and wipes out legions of enemies with the lazy wave of a meaty paw.
But here, also, is my main point of contention with The Dark Ages. For all its newfound emphasis on whacking demons with your hands, glory kills have taken a backseat. Enemies will still enter vulnerable stun states when you do enough damage, but your execution moves will more often than not be a plain-Jane canned kick or punch, rather than the brilliantly creative animations of old. It's such a strange misstep that I wondered if my build of the game was bugged, but it looks like true glory kills are now reserved for bigger boss demons rather than every hellish Tom, Dick and Harry. I miss them already.
Anyway, for all the focus on melee, our hero still bristles with guns, from old favourites like the super shotgun to a flak cannon that works by crushing skulls. This is still Doom and guns are still very important, it's just that the role they play feels different. I found myself using ranged weapons either to quickly clear up aggravating packs of weaker mobs to let me focus on the bigger guys, or else to soften up the tougher enemies before I closed the distance—a lot of foes have armour or shields that you can superheat by dealing sustained damage. Once they get hot enough, a quick fling of the shield will destroy their defences and detonate anyone nearby, turning them into a pile of armour shards you suck up with a fulfilling brrrrp. This never stops being satisfying.
Get in the robot, Doom Guy
Between the bouts of more familiar Doom-ing, id has some new, ridiculous toys for you to play with. These are gigantic 'Atlan' mechs and a literal dragon, which I can only imagine were products of a particularly enjoyable brainstorming sesh at id's offices a few years back.
My first taste of these was the mech, a skyscraper-size goliath that you use to take on enemies that are too big even for Doom Guy to tackle by himself. Using it means stomping across entire battlefields—ant-sized demons and space Catholic soldiers duking it beneath you—and destroying any chunk of the level you happen to brush up against. Pure power fantasy.
The mech trades out the shield for a dodge move. Your enormous enemies have the same mix of red and green attacks that their tiny comrades do, but now you're trying to avoid them rather than take them on the chin. Dodge a green attack at the precise right moment and, hey presto, your handheld gatling gun the size of the Chrysler Building goes into overdrive, doing mega damage and taking literal gorey chunks out of your foes until they finally collapse.
The dragon, meanwhile, is a tad more involved. Imagine an alternate universe where the Panzer Dragoon games became one of the most influential series of all time and you're pretty much there. The dragon riding I did alternated between linear sections and open ones. In the former, you race down tunnels, dodging obstacles as you pursue your enemies, and making sure to pass through trickily-placed rings that restore your health along the way. The latter was wider, more open, and I was one participant among many in a battle in the sky.
All good fun and suitably ridiculous, but maybe a tad underbaked (though Bethesda tells me that these dragon sections will have a lot of work done on them in the time id has left). My job in the later, open dragon-riding area was to take down a series of hellships, which meant first taking out all their turrets to send them crashing to the ground. It wasn't difficult, but where other sections of the game had parry windows that felt naturally understandable, I could never quite pin down just when I was meant to dodge to get the damage boost the game all but demands you have. Not because you'll die without it, but because the turrets just take a tediously long time to die otherwise.
Another issue, possibly localised to the press build I played that quickly shuttled you from one section to another, is that I got muddled. The mech and the dragon both require you to dodge attacks, while the more traditional Doom bits want you to block/parry them. Perhaps I'm a little slow, but it was easy to get mixed up as you shifted from one section to the next: attempting to use a non-existent dodge in the on-foot, Doom Guy sections before trying to block punches with my face in a subsequent mech bit.
I'm curious to see how prevalent these sections will become in the final game. As I experienced them, they acted as entertaining, distracting, and relatively short palate cleansers in between longer, deeper on-foot sections, which were by far the meat of the demo. That's the best place for them, I think. There's just not as much there to sink your teeth into, mechanically, as there is in the more traditional gameplay bits, and they could easily become fatiguing if id tries to cram them in every other level.
Dark mode
It would have been easy, in the wake of the split fan response to Doom Eternal, to play it safe with Doom: The Dark Ages, to slap a vaguely medieval skin on the widely beloved mechanics of 2016's Doom and call it a day. I gotta say, I admire id for deciding it was gonna make Doom Souls instead.
I think it's an experiment that's paid off. Doom: The Dark Ages was not what I expected, but it was still a great, ridiculous power fantasy in the few hours I got with it, trading in running-and-gunning for rocking-and-socking in a way that still makes perfect sense for the series. It wasn't perfect and I still have questions, but I came away from my hours with The Dark Ages a lot more eager to play the full thing when it releases on May 15 this year.
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