I played Doom 2016 a couple of years back and I enjoyed it mildly. I didn’t think it was the best thing since butter, but it had its moments. The design was lacking and the gated arena battles got quickly out of date, but it was fun for a while.
I figured they would fix these things for Doom Eternal. Maybe the had improved the recipe and made this game a little bit more like the original Doom franchise from when I was young?
Eh. Who am I kidding.
This game manages to piss me off from the get go by having a ton of reading for their tutorial but with a typeface so small that you impossibly can decipher it from a sofa. In order to read anything they write on the screen you have to constantly run forward to the TV, read it and get back to the sofa. Not once or twice, but for every kind of interaction. It’s almost like they never even cared to test their game in the most common scenario for a console gamer? It’s almost like they’ve made a PC game, ported it to consoles for the bucks, but couldn’t be arsed to actually make it playable.
The game starts off fine but soon it turns into some kind of platform puzzle game. A really bad one, because first person is not ideal for doing complex platforming. I die and die and die again from falling, and I don’t think this is what I signed up for!? I was expecting to shoot some monsters but instead I find myself stuck at platforming puzzles.
I don’t find the arena battle have improved much either. I don’t like they new mechanic to gather ammunition and health from monsters. You run out of ammo extremely quickly and have to find a monster to chainsaw to get back to shooting. It’s not as fun as the previous Doom game was. Some monsters are really powerful and you need to hit them in their weak spots, and the game wants me to invest in upgrading my character in the Tiny Tina user interface, which just pisses me off.
At level 3 I got stuck on a platforming puzzle where you have to complete a couple of advanced moves on a timer, and I got so mad that I rage quit. This game is garbage and I hope I never have to play it ever again.
I rate this game as bad.
Replay 