izigame.me

I enjoyed this DLC more often than I didn't, but I think this was the wrong direction to take Doom Eternal. For whatever it's worth, I beat this DLC on Nightmare, although I probably wouldn't be able to go through with doing it on UN.
The base game was designed to encourage (if not force) the player to use their full arsenal of weapons, which is an aspect some people took issue with, and the silly tooltips might lead the player to believe that they MUST use X weapon/mod/strategy to deal with Y demon. However, although it's true that you'll have a hard time beating Eternal with only your favorite weapon on higher difficulties, you're still given the freedom to handle most enemies in many different ways. Eternal was riding a fine line, and I think it struck a great balance between having a fun combat system while also providing a level of challenge via the potentially annoying AI/limited resources/environmental hazards that nudge the player to play a certain way, while still allowing them to express their creativity in combat. The Icon of Sin fight is maybe the one exception, but it wasn't too bad, and it did okay considering the scale of the boss and all.
TAG 1 doesn't try to straddle that same line; it decides to trip willingly over onto one side of it. Spirits are one of the worst things in this game. Making them immune to all but a single weapon mod that most players didn't find useful in the base game is the wrong way to encourage (read: force) players to use their full arsenal. Killing spirits is just tedious, and the only other way to beat them is to kill all other demons nearby so that they don't re-possess. Making possessed demons immune to faltering and ice bombs is also a lazy way to make them more difficult (you can still cc them with the microwave beam, though; probably another way to get you to use that mod).
Blood Maykrs are also a lame addition to the "red light, green light" style of gameplay that the Marauders introduced, and they're designed so that there're nowhere near as many creative ways to take them out as there are for Marauders; just wait for the green light and shoot. They're typically not that annoying to beat, I just think they're a poorly designed enemy. The Marauders have their detractors, but I think they're a much better take on the idea.
The bosses suck. The Blood Swamps boss(?) where you just wait to shoot the eye inside the cubes was just plain boring to me. The Samur fight is like a tedious checklist of things you have to do before the fight ends. The first phase is okay, but the rest are infinitely more boring and uninspired compared to even the Khan Maykr or Icon of Sin fights (man, the bit with the respawning Cacodemons is incredibly dull).
I also wasn't fond of some of the level design, but this review is long enough already so I'll leave it at that. A lot of the arenas were still pretty fun.
Anyway, I still liked this DLC overall. It's still more Doom Eternal, it plays like Doom Eternal, and Doom Eternal is really good. Some of the arenas can be a bit too long maybe, especially with the bullet-spongy possessed demons running around, but I did generally enjoy the higher difficulty, just not how some of it was designed. Having said that, I can't think of anything new (on a conceptual level) in TAG 1 that improves upon what the base game already had, but I can think of plenty that I don't care for, so it's a step in the wrong direction for me. Still worth trying out if you liked Eternal.