3.5/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part One.

Spent the whole DLC whispering "the only thing they fear is me, the only thing they fear is me" over and over as I quietly sobbed entering another giant battle arena with a ton of health, ammo and armour pick-ups that signalled it would inevitably be descended upon by 40 of the toughest enemies from the original game stacked on top of each other. Let me tell ya, I'm starting to think they didn't fear me. That song lied. They kicked the living shit out of me. Just left me crying in the corner, lunch money well and truly gone, until my ADHD went god mode and I ascended to Goku-level reflexes. This shit's ruthless. It kinda just assumes you played the original game two days ago and you're ready to continue going from exactly where you left off, which I was definitely not. But I won't knock it for me just casually strolling back in and being like, wait a minute, why's there TWO of the big axe man that shoots piss dogs now? It's a direct continuation that flows from the ending of Eternal, and there are some absolute sicko fans out there that I'm gonna presume lapped the difficulty ramp right up, and good for them. But I will say the little demon dudes who buff enemies were overkill. Why'd they do that to me then, huh? It's a game about movement. The first lesson you learn in Eternal is move or die and then you create an enemy that makes you pause the entire fight and tank hits until it blows up. And if you don't kill him ASAP, bro just floats away and pilots another enemy simply to piss you off. Fuck that dude. Other than that though, yeah, it's more Doom Eternal, which is to say every time anything happened I was like "oh, hell yeah 😎," and tried harder to ignore the rad music blowing up my eardrums as I jammed out at full volume.