Doom: The Dark Ages

Eternal was a platformer with guns. Every fight was an arena you crossed in three dimensions while a timer of resources ran down, and it was exhausting in the way the best action games are. The Dark Ages takes the double jump away, gives you a shield, and tells you to hold the line. It is the correct next move and it took me about eight hours to stop resenting it.

The shield is the whole design

It blocks, it parries green-flashing attacks, and it can be thrown to chain through a group and come back. Every enemy in the roster is written against it — some attacks must be parried, some must be dodged, some must be shot out of the air — so combat becomes a reading exercise at close range rather than an escape puzzle at altitude.

When it works, in the larger mid-game arenas, it is the best crowd fighting id has built. You are standing in the middle of forty things, parrying one, shredding another, and the shield is coming back to your hand at the moment you need it.

Difficulty

Nightmare, first run

Deaths

203

Shield parries, estimated

Thousands

Guns with weight

The arsenal is deliberately heavier and slower than Eternal's, and the shotgun in particular is the best-feeling weapon in the series. Ammunition is generous, which removes Eternal's constant resource juggling — a change some people will read as dumbing down and I read as picking one idea instead of four.

Where it slips

The mech and dragon sequences. There are several of each, they control loosely, and they are mechanically unrelated to everything the game trained you to do. Every one of them stops the campaign dead. Cutting them entirely would improve this by half a point.

Level design is also flatter, literally and structurally, than either of the last two games, and the secrets are less rewarding to chase.

The verdict

Thirty-six hours on Nightmare and the combat carried all of it. Not the best Doom — that is still Eternal — and a genuinely bold rethink rather than a retread.

Turn the parry window down if the timing does not click by hour six. It is not a lesser way to play.