It’s been five years since the last arrival of the Rock Executioner.
Doom Eternal made a huge splash, splitting the fan base in half. Some insisted that it was no longer Doom, but some kind of Mario game, while others were ecstatic and wanted more. I’m not going to start an argument here. I’ll just say that id Software decided to solve all the problems in a pretty radical way.
How? They reworked everything they could, damn it! So much so that both fans of Doom (2016) and fans of Eternal risk sitting in front of their monitors in bewilderment, scratching their heads. It’s a very strange game — it seems like a first-person shooter, but it also seems like a slasher. It seems like a game about brutal, huge, imaginatively designed guns — but melee weapons play an equally important role here (and sometimes even more so).
Doom: The Dark Ages, like the previous chapter in the saga of the Rock Executioner, turned out to be very unusual and raises many questions. What kind of questions? Let’s figure that out.
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The shield is everything
As the hint in the previous two games suggested, life is movement, because Hell consumes the idle. The Dark Ages is quite true to this precept. You’ll have to run back and forth across the arenas a lot, and that’s probably the only thing id didn’t touch when creating the new Doom game.
Hugo Martin, the game’s development lead, once mentioned that the philosophy behind the combat was “Stand and Fight” — although standing still is definitely not an option here. A standing target is an easy target, and the demons will happily take the opportunity to bite off a piece or two. So forget about this “philosophy” and don’t be shy about using your legs to their fullest.
One problem: compared to Eternal, the Executioner has lost some of his acrobatic skills (or rather, he hasn’t acquired them yet — this is a prequel, after all).
So at the very least, the statement that the game has become “more down to earth” should be taken literally. No more crazy somersaults in the air, no noscope 360s or anything like that. The executioner has become more massive, slightly heavier, so double jumps and dashes are now unavailable to him.
The verticality of the levels has also been toned down: whereas multi-story arenas where you had to jump around like a workaholic rabbit used to be the norm, in The Dark Ages, almost all arenas are strictly horizontal.
An average battle in The Dark Ages looks something like this. You rush into a demonic party, flattening a couple of unlucky zombies with your shield right at the start. Then you rush into the nearest heavyweight, like a mancub, fire a couple of shots from a shotgun at point-blank range, jump back (or parry) from an attack on the ground, treat them to another shot, and finish them off.
Turn around, deliver a tasty blow to the head of a demon running up to you with your mace, throw your shield into the ranks of enemy shield bearers, and rush towards the next fat guy who has been thrown at you.
Cumbersome? At first — yes. But it’s all a matter of getting used to it. Once you understand what the game expects of you and stop ignoring your shield and the possibilities it offers, it becomes easier. And everything described above takes literally ten seconds.
Welcome to Hell
Another interesting change is an attempt to make the game more “free.” Not in the sense that Doom is now a non-linear RPG with a branching storyline, God forbid. No, it’s just that some locations are now open rather than strictly linear. Well, it’s still basically a set of interconnected corridors, but there are a LOT more of them now.
Another issue is that there are still only a few of these maps in the game. And they don’t really offer anything new. Yes, we used to have corridors and arenas, but now an arena is essentially a large location with scattered decorations such as mountains, forests, and buildings. You run around and beat up demons as usual. The difference is purely cosmetic.