Maybe it’s just me, but I found 2016’s Doom to be a Psalm 18-style power fantasy, brimming with opportunities to creatively slay Hell’s legions.  I ripped, I tore, and I beat them fine as dust before the wind.  But four years later in Doom Eternal, it was I who was cast aside like the mire of the streets.  Eternal’s more restrictive and demanding mechanics wore me out, and I dropped it.  The soft spot for Doom’s brand of fighting evil never really goes away, though, so when it became clear Doom: The Dark Ages would depart from Eternal’s stricter gunplay and acrobatics, I was ready to don the Slayer’s helmet again.  Or, rather, his helmet, his shield, big ol’ robot suit, and more.

Overall, I’m glad I gave it a shot, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I might’ve been wearing a knock-off spartan suit instead of the Slayer’s armor.

Doom: The Dark Ages pits the Slayer against Hell’s demonic hordes once again, this time as they’re led by Ahzrak on his quest to obtain the “Heart of Argent”.  The Slayer is apparently a tool of the “Maykrs”, angellically coded aliens who protect the “Night Sentinels”, the beleaguered warriors of Argent D’Nur, where the Heart of Argent is kept.  Full disclosure…I tuned out after a while.  A bad guy wants a thing, my friends have that thing, therefore I’ve got to protect my friends – got it.

It may be ill-advised to critique the story of a game where the plot is clearly not the focus.  However, Doom does not demand plot complexity, and Doom: The Dark Ages seems to want to be an action epic.  Between the multiple alien factions, new characters, and new realms, it wants to show it has more meat on the bone, but I found it undercooked.  Doom seems at its best, to me at least, when it’s one guy’s bad day.  The multiple alien factions and worlds confuse the nature of the enemy, and the new allies dilute the Slayer’s legend.

Still, the focus here is the combat, and The Dark Ages tries a few new things that I felt worked pretty well.  There are several new systems in play, with the most important being your Saw Shield.  On defense, the shield can be used to reflect certain projectiles or parry certain melee attacks.  Eventually, you can upgrade those projectile reflections with Shield Runes which grant various knock-on effects.  On the offense, the shield can be used as a projectile weapon – or can turn you into a projectile with a shield charge.  

Coupled with new melee attack options, these shield systems encourage you to get up close and personal with your fiendish foes – and the encounter design essentially requires it.  You’ll have to quickly prioritize targets and race to take down the big guys while also chipping away at the smaller enemies who pose threats in groups.  Breaking down armor and energy shields prompts you to switch up your gun selections, but I never found that as exacting as Doom: Eternal.

There are some odd choices, though, such as the shield’s cooldown.  Why does an ostensibly unbreakable physical object have a cooldown that prevents it from being held up after a few hits?  It’s a regular source of frustration in certain fights, because one slightly mistimed parry will count as regular defense, bleed your whole cooldown, and leave you open for the rest of an enemy’s attack.  Also, having Shield Runes trigger only on projectile reflections seems like a missed opportunity to grant more varied bonuses which would prompt the player to switch runes on the fly based on enemy composition.

On the plus side, even with the marketing material’s emphasis on standing and fighting, the Slayer remains quite mobile.  The shield charge has a generous range, which enables you to dart around the open battlefields with ease.  There are also a handful of late-game boss fights that lean into the bullet-hell nature of the new combat system, forcing you to dodge dense projectile patterns while simultaneously watching for and maneuvering towards parry opportunities and getting in hits along the way.

The structure of the campaign itself is familiar in a broad sense – you progress through a series of levels as the story unfolds.  Most levels feature large, open battlegrounds as opposed to close interior spaces, which is a bit of a blessing and a curse.  The open spaces are necessary for the combat’s design to function, since you are functionally only mobile on a horizontal plane, and you need space to dodge projectiles.  They also allow for impressive environmental artwork.  However, when the combat’s done, there’s a lot of peaceful strolling, particularly if you’re interested in finding all the secrets.  (The secrets are a combination of meaningless collectibles and upgrade materials for your weapons.  Once I found all the upgrades I felt I wanted, I started to ignore the secrets, and my assessment of the game’s pacing dramatically improved.)

There are also a handful of levels that offer the player a different perspective – either from the back of a dragonlike mount, Serrat, or from the pilot seat of an Atlan, a massive robot suit.  These sections are not complex, but they are infrequent enough as to still be fun diversions.  Flying around in Serrat’s levels ended up being a pleasant addition to the game, and I grew more emotionally attached to my dragon buddy than I expected in a Doom game.  As for the Atlan, perhaps it marks me as possessing simplistic tastes, but I can’t sit here and pretend like I didn’t have a big grin on my face while punching demons with big robot fists.  

There are some systems I should note that I did not engage with much, but are available.  Doom: The Dark Ages is commendably configurable, permitting you to granularly tune your experience.  You can adjust parry windows, the slowdown effect after said parries, projectile colors, and more.  These are available to you both in the campaign as well as in a side mode called the Ripatorium.

In terms of its presentation, The Dark Ages impresses more in the visual side than the musical side – but I’m not very versed in metal in the first place.  The music all fit, but I’m not schooled enough to detect one pattern of pounding rhythms from another, especially when I’m preoccupied with target prioritization and survival amidst countless foes.  The artwork, however, is impressive in the way it communicates scale – there are times when you’ll feel invincibly gigantic, and times when you’ll be woefully aware of your insignificance.  The environments are varied, too, since you’ll be visiting sci-fi medieval structures, hellish landscapes, and the eldritch geometries of the Lovecraft-inspired cosmic realm.

Overall, it’s difficult to recommend Doom: The Dark Ages without qualification.  If you’re willing to skip secrets in favor of pacing, and get a kick out of combining medieval melee weaponry with your sci-fi guns, you’ll probably enjoy it.  However, it’s a marked departure from Doom: Eternal, so one must calibrate expectations appropriately.  Similarly, if you’re playing with eyes of faith, the story’s shortcomings may be frustrating.

Spiritual Value Rant (spoilers)

Why can’t I just fight demons?  This is Doom, after all.  One of Doom (2016)’s strengths was its simplicity – a hero rises out of a grave and cleans up the hellish mess wrought by pride.  In The Dark Ages, we’ve now got two brands of enemies, which instead are functionally just aliens from different planets with slightly different agendas.  There’s also the Maykrs, who bring the Slayer into the conflict.  They’re designed to look like the holy foil to Ahzrak’s hellish hordes, but because we can’t have nice things, they’re just another alien faction, ultimately meant to communicate the idea that participation with anything “divine” or beyond humanity necessarily means self-obliteration.

In the end, having been burned literally by Ahzrak and figuratively by the Maykrs, the people of Argent D’Nur conclude there’s really no one worth listening to outside of themselves.  While the Sentinels acknowledge they are a people of faith, who will need to watch who they put their faith in, they’re not going to watch too carefully.  They’re just going to put that faith in themselves.  

Where does that lead?  Are we to believe there are no competing conceptions of the good amongst the sentinels of Argent D’Nur?  Given the number of cultists’ circles I toppled therein, that would come as somewhat of a surprise.  Was the cultists’ sin a lack of faith in themselves, or might it be said it was their unwavering faith in themselves that kept them from considering the consequences of their actions?

If the sentinels conclude, on account of the Maykrs’ failures, that there is no standard to which they can appeal outside of themselves, how does their society function?  Take divinity out of it for a second – just consider how replete our lives are with transcendent standards.  Law, contracts, scripts, orchestral scores, even the interface documents that govern the signals in the various cables adorning your PC or console.  It is through participation in these standards that we are free to act and work together, not in spite of them.  It should not, therefore, be so controversial to suggest that in the moral life, participation in a transcendent standard is freedom, not the obliteration of free will.

Not that anyone at id asked for my opinion (nor should they), but if we’re not going to think through the consequences of the heroic sloganeering we’ve inserted in an attempt to deepen Doom’s lore, can we just return to form?  We’d all be better served by me silently quoting Psalm 18 while ripping and tearing than doing another rant about transcendent thirds.

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