3/5 ★ – SilverScroll's review of DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Got better the more I played but still the weakest of the new doom games, mainly due to its focus on a truly abysmal story. It was just about bearable in eternal, it is not here. This might be a controversial opinion but stop trying to force this shit into doom, 2016 had it perfected and they pissed it up the wall for cutscenes with characters who you don't care about and a villian who has absolutely no motivation at all, with a plot centered around chasing a macguffin. It just all feels so fucking soulless. One of the main characters, the daughter of the king ( I forgot her name) has some truly terrible voice casting. Like, Debra Wilson is a good actress but her voice does not fit here at all. The combat is just as satisfying as ever, it did take time for it to click, but when it did I had a blast. Centered around a shield this time instead of weapon swapping the parrying isn't the most satisfying, neither is blocking attacks and it feels like they massively overcorrected from eternal here because I used the plasma rifle like 5 times at most. The audio design here is top notch aswell, weather its the crunchy sounding super shotgun or stomping a demon beneath your boot or sawing it in half with your shield. Exploration is alot easier here, the secrets aren't really that secret and the collectibles are easier to find than ever but when the levels are this big I think this was the right decision. The massive levels do give a sense of scale and truly do feel like you are a superweapon on a battlefield. The dark ages aesthetic is brilliant as well, seeing all the guns look this different is a good change and seeing the different enemy designs is really good. The music here is not it, unfortunately, and Mick Gordon's absence is very much felt here. None of the tracks are as good or iconic as Micks and while it was always gonna be a tough act to follow, this is not good. This one really didn't get me as much as the last two, I'd just about reccomend it but due to a myriad of issues and my own personal preference, I'd say this is comfortably the worse of the three modern doom games, and with doom now (probably) back in the vault for a while it might give me time to appreciate it the second time round. This is definitely not worth 70 quid, though so if you are gonna check it out, do it through gamepass.