4.5/5 ★ – NoahIsAHuman's review of DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Doom: The Dark Ages - Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up; THIS is my BOOMSTICK. Aw man. This delivered. I don't think I've ever been both this excited AND nervous for a game at the same time. Doom Eternal is my absolute favourite game, I've played it to death on PS4, PS5, Switch AND PC. And this prequel to both Eternal and Doom (2016) is a departure from those two, but one thing is undeniable; THIS IS DOOM. The gameplay feels excellent! Stepping back into the shoes of the Doom Slayer, this time early on in his time with the Night Sentinels, feels great to control and experience! The addition of the Shieldsaw is great, a vastly more fun weapon than the Chainsaw it replaces! The melee system is fun too, with the flail being my personal pick of the three options! Although I do miss the Blood Punch from Doom Eternal, the Shield Bash just doesn't hit the same (literally). There's a lot I miss from Eternal, and not in a BAD way necessarily, just in the way of that Top Gear bit, "This is brilliant... but I LIKE this." The devs really reiterated how this game was a boots on the ground, feel like an iron tank gameplay experience, and it works! While I still prefer the "fighter jet" rapid movement with lots of verticality, The Dark Ages expanding the horizon by keeping everything on equal footing was really fun! I'd say 80% of my muscle memory from Doom Eternal worked here, but that 20% that didn't work still felt great to work around! The level design feels like a mixture of Doom (2016) and Doom 64's overall feel. They aren't as long as either of the last two games' levels were, and that's because we get a LOT of chapters that break up parts of the story, leaving some levels FAR shorter than others. But there are some really memorable ones too! In the officially revealed so it isn't TECHNICALLY spoilers part of the game taking place in the Cosmic Realm, there are some really mind-fucky moments, with neverending corridors and spaces that don't make sense, felt very Stanley Parable or Superliminal. The two-part Siege level is probably the most memorable, a wide open battleground to explore with four objectives to do in any order! It's a great playground to try out the weapons and abilities you have at that point, and with secrets now showing on the map without a need for runes, it's a treat to explore too! There were two level types that broke up the regular gameplay; the ATLAN Mech levels, and the Serrat dragon levels. The ATLAN levels are kinda fun, it's essentially Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, except you're 500ft tall. I liked these enough, especially when you get the big boy bot weapons! It's a shame they aren't used more though. The dragon sections though... eh. Coulda done without them. Flying controls aren't my cup of tea to begin with, and when I'm playing a Doom game, I wanna be walking, if not running, around with big ol' guns blasting demons, not flying around cities on a cyborg dragon. It's genuinely more boring than that sentence made it sound. The guns are great, although I wish I found myself using more of them! The only guns I used for the last handful of levels were the Super Shotgun and the Reaver Chainshot, and EVERY SO OFTEN the Ravager if I wanted to mix it up visually for five minutes. I don't think I even used the Accelerator, Shredder or Grenade Launcher beyond the levels they were introduced in. Mostly because instead of having two very different guns with the same ammo pool like Doom Eternal had, for example the Plasma Gun and Ballista, the guns here act like straight upgrades of each other, to the point there's a button to swap between them without bringing up the weapon wheel. And because of that, half the weapons fall by the wayside. There's also this game's equivalent of the BFG-9000, a mystical crossbow called the BFC (Ballistic Force Crossbow). It is ok. I forgot I even had it. It's a bit of a shame that my biggest critique with a DOOM game of all games, is that the firearms are lacking. The story is far more cinematic on the whole, even in the face of John Carmack's infamous quote on stories in video games. It feels like it's trying to go for a Dune kind of scope, and doesn't really waste time establishing things we already learned in the last two games. We know who the Maykrs are, we get a new one, and that's more or less it! All the cutscenes are excellent, I believe they're all prerendered, but I've not tried another skin on the Slayer to see if it changes. It's also letterboxed too, which is a tad immersion breaking, but what can ya do. The story isn't massively important, especially when the main focus of the Doom games is to essentially be a cheesy action movie mixed with a power fantasy, and this does both while throwing in some medieval flavouring. Essentially, it's Army of Darkness but with a mute instead of a loudmouth. I really enjoyed the characters on the whole! I was eager to explore characters we've only seen in passing, namely King Novik. We've only seen him as a spectre (or maybe a hologram?) in Doom Eternal's second level, and also as the disembodied voice at the beginning of both the other modern Doom games. He gets a decent amount of characterisation, and despite his little screentime, I'm satisfied with what we got! There's also Commander Thira, Novik's daughter, who ends up getting far more entangled in the story than I expected. She's pretty neat on the whole, I like how she leads the Sentinels arguably better than Novik does! There's some stuff with her later on that I have questions about, maybe DLC related questions. We'll see. There's also Prince Ahzrak, the big bad for this game. And he's fine... but my least favourite of the modern Doom villains so far. Not bad at all, just lacks the same presence that both Olivia Pierce and the Khan Maykr had. The Kreed Maykr is funny, he's like Baron Harkonnen if he was a robotic angel. And last, but certainly not least, is the Doom Slayer himself. A man of SINGULAR word ("run."), but he has become such a likable character! I was vocally spurring him on at points, saying "go on, you deserve it" as he's about to mow someone down in a cutscene. He goes through a LOT in this game, it's probably the story that's directly impacted him the most since Doom 64. Love the Doom Slayer, no notes. Doom: The Dark Ages isn't perfect. BUT. It is DOOM. It's a NEW Doom. Not just in that it's recently released, but it's an evolutionary step that feels so right. Compared to the rest of this trilogy, it's bang in the middle at second for me, between Doom Eternal in first and Doom (2016) in third. Compared to the entire series? I don't know, I'd need to consider that. But currently, Doom: The Dark Ages is a triumph and my personal Game of the Year. Obviously. 9/10!!