Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part One Review (Zippy)
This expansion to Doom Eternal is pretty good, and by and large if you liked Doom Eternal than you'll like this as well because it's more of the same. Whether it's worth the cost is going to depend on how much you like it, so let me give you...
The Breakdown
It's three additional levels for Doom Eternal. That said, each level is about one-and-a-half to two time as long as the base game levels, so by measure against the original it's closer to five or so levels long.
You start with every upgrade from the base game, and it continues from where the combat challenge left off in Doom Eternal. For the most part: great arenas and great fights.
No new weapons (in fact, you're one weapon down because the Crucible Blade was lost at the end of Doom Eternal and does not make a return), but there are a tiny smattering of new enemies. These new enemies follow the law of the expansion packs of yore: re-used and re-purposed old content. They take something old, give it a paint job and a new mechanic, and throw it back at you. It's not bad though; the spirit-possessed demons are a particularly interesting twist that throws a wrench into the usual combat situation.
There's also the addition of three new rune powers and an additional rune slot, though you are restricted to using the new slot for only the new powers, and the new powers can't be employed in the old slots.
I considered the story to Doom Eternal to be 'good enough' but a step down from the original Doom 2016. The story here, in general, is better than Doom Eternal but still less than the first game's. It picks up where Doom Eternal left off and focuses more narrowly on more interesting things than medieval Space Europe's political situation.
If that sounds enough for the price, go for it.
Hm? Criticisms?
Only one big one: it feels like the people who designed a few of the encounters, most particularly the final boss of the DLC, didn't seem to fully grasp the design of their own game's playstyle. There are a small few encounters where the spacing is incredibly, aggravatingly tight to the point that you barely have much room to move, and it runs counter to the whole fundamental design of the game's combat: extreme high-speed mobility through open arenas for push-through combat. Disappointingly, the final boss uses this setup, with a small arena with a lot of tight walls and little room to maneuver about.
Outside of that, I found the flaws to be minimal, safe-to-ignore, or otherwise just issues that shared with the base game.