4/5 ★ – Bebus's review of Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part One.

If anything, I have to applaud the developers for really going for a Plutonia Experiment-esque experience with a modern day dlc. This is INCREDIBLY tough, and will really test your knowledge of the game. There are some very creative fights in there and a double marauder is only the tip of the iceberg. To give you an idea of the difficulty, the double marauder fight is not only not the hardest fight in the game, it's not even the hardest Marauder fight. I don't want to spoil too much, but there are tons of very creative and interesting fights. It really does remind me of final doom and it's thorough knowledge of how to screw over the player. Unfortunately, it also reminds me of the weaker aspects of Final Doom too. While much of Ancient Gods is challenging fun, some of it can be tedious. The first level is pretty tame at first, but the arenas can run very long. This results in some pretty boring fights that drag on. This ramps up later but it doesn't make a very good first impression. Spirits are by far the worst addition. There are ways to make a creative interesting challenge, and then there's making enemies tedious bullet sponges with invulnerable weak points that can't be frozen with grenades. Learning how to fight these things was grueling and frustrating, but once you get the hang of it they aren't hard, just boring. Lay into them with your most powerful guns over and over, make sure to chainsaw a zombie when they're close to death, freeze the enemies around you, then microwave beam the spirit. It's a repetitive boring challenge that isn't satisfying to pull off once you learn and is pointlessly frustrating while you learn it. Aesthetically the first level is a little bland. Just a standard UAC facility. The other 2 are a lot more interesting though. The second swamp is riddled with traps and hazards and the final level has that really interesting Maykr aesthetic. The difficulty curve is really strange. Levels 1 and 3 are pretty manageable but 2 is absurdly hard. Despite the high difficulty I only think 2 or 3 arenas are just outright cheap garbage. One in particular puts you in an arena where every square inch is an environmental hazard or trap and the fog is so thick you can't even see a couple feet in front of you. I played this on Ultra-Violence just like the base game and it felt like a pretty natural evolution of the difficulty for the most part. If you haven't played Doom Eternal in a while it might rock you pretty hard though. The final boss is too easy aside from the second time he summons two spirits. The ending is cool I guess but I think Doom is getting a little too lost in the Saturday morning cartoon shit. Overall this dlc is a no-brainer if you're a fan. It's tons of fun and is designed around utilizing a fully upgraded Doomguy intelligently. It's good value too, depending on your difficulty choice it'll probably take somewhere between 4 to 6 hours, and this is only part one.