4/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Doom The Dark Ages is a really good game. that kind of goes without saying if you've played the other two recent Doom games. And while it's not as good as the others in the trilogy, it's still a very solid entry. The combat in particular is some of the best you'll ever experience in a video game and I don't say that lightly. Even if it's a little heavy on the story side than I would have preferred and maybe there's some levels that I found to be somewhat mediocre. One thing I love about the modern Doom games is the flow state it manages to put you in. While it's not as strategic as Eternal was, the combat is much more in your face here, making it feel a lot faster as a result. Almost every scenario requires you to parry and once you get the hang of it, it just feels amazing overall making it a really hard game to put down. The level design is also great too, even if I wish the secrets were a little more... secret. The enemy designs taking inspiration from the older doom games was a perfect match too, especially the environments of the hell levels. My biggest complaint however would have to be with the story. Now I know nobody plays Doom for it's crazy storyline, but the amount of uninteresting cutscenes and characters that are barely built up is kind of shocking to be honest. Nowhere before in the Doom franchise has it really tried to push the story as much as this game has, and my only question is why now? What was so good about this story that you needed so many boring cutscenes to take away from the actual gameplay? I don't want it to sound like I'm nitpicking but it really bothered me with how much this game expects you to care about it's story. One thing I gravely missed however was Mick Gordon's soundtrack, as the soundtrack found here is just nowhere near as good as anything from Mick Gordon's catalog. I was expecting something a little more medieval feeling, but instead we just get generic metal, which felt like a wasted opportunity. I heard a lot of negative discourse around the Dragon levels, but I personally kind of liked those, even if they weren't as good as the normal sections. But unfortunately I didn't feel the same towards the mech levels, which on paper sound like they would be awesome, but as it turns out they're quite the opposite. Pretty much all you do in these levels is dodge and left click and it gets really repetitive real fast. I don't have a ton else to say, so I'll just leave it at that. I know I spent a lot of time harping on the negatives, but Doom the Dark Ages is anything but a bad game and nothing I've complained about ruined the experience. I highly recommend checking out all three games from this trilogy as these are some of my favorite games ever made. It's really hard for a studio to achieve one of my favorite games of all time, let alone three in a row, so please, do yourself a favor and check these out as they're truly something special.