izigame.me

The third game in the Doom renaissance, much like the third game of the original trilogy, is technically quite impressive, but overall disappointing in its highest moments, and downright frustrating in the lowest.
I'll get this out of the way immediately: The game is far too easy, and though that's a problem I find myself having with a lot of games, it's the reasons why Dark Ages is so easy that really drag it down when compared to prior entries in the series, and make it kind of dull even if it was its own entirely new IP.
From the start of the game you have access to a shield bash attack - It has about a second's worth of cooldown between uses, and it launches you full speed into whatever enemy you have targeted while rendering you seemingly invincible for the duration. Upon impact, you explode with enough force to kill 20 of the random fodder demons around you, and they all drop health. You can also toss the shield as a boomerang that pierces through fodder demons and kills them instantly, and you don't even need to wait for it to return to use it as a regular shield again, it just teleports back if you press the button.
Sometimes the fodder demons have shields, but if you shoot them a couple of times (or once with the Super Shotgun, even at range - Or hell, sometimes you don't even have to shoot them) they get "Superheated" and a single toss of your own shield will not only destroy the superheated shield, but will explode and kill all the fodder demons nearby, making them all drop armor.
You can turn the game up to a higher speed, you can increase enemy health and damage, you can play on Nightmare with all the sliders turned up and it doesn't make a bit of difference - The fodder demons pose no threat, they die immediately and drop so many resources that it's difficult to actually die in any encounter that includes them (which is most of them.)
Heavier demons aren't quite so weak, but the number of them that get instantly killed (or put into an execution state) from a single shield bash into their face (which stuns them) with a follow-up blast from the super shotgun is frankly ridiculous.
Hell knights, Revenants, Mancubi and Arachnotrons spawn in just to get bonked on the head and shot once constantly. Sometimes the heavier demons are armored, which means you might need to bonkshoot a second time with a shield toss thrown in the middle, but every now and then I find myself shooting off the demons' armor plating anyway.
The shield also allows you to tank damage while it's up (as expected) but there's rarely a reason to do this outside of the few enemies that have a hitscan-ish attack that don't die in one hit. It also has a parry that completely obliterates everything in the game-
-To clarify, the parry is unbelievably easy to pull off (even with the parry window turned down to its shortest) and as soon as you get a shield rune that gives you an attack on parry, doing it to an oncoming projectile is almost guaranteed to kill everything around you, and stun/maim even heavy demons. Parrying melee attacks will stagger bigger demons too, which would be sensible if they didn't all die in two seconds immediately after.
It introduces different melee weapons but each one renders the previous one completely pointless. The third weapon is a big hammer that refills ALL of your ammo for ALL of your guns when it hits anything, and does absolutely absurd damage to the target and even hurts things around it. The downside is that it has a longer cooldown but since you can recharge melee cooldowns by parrying things and melee pickups are everywhere, you're never really hurting for it.
There's waaaay more guns than in previous entries, but you swap so slowly between them that you're almost disincentivised to use them. Each gun seems to have a different purpose but the majority of them are outclassed by the shield:
The enemy has an energy shield that will explode if you shoot it with a plasma weapon?
Too bad, the shield toss (after a couple of cheap upgrades) will bounce between targets if it hits an enemy shield, killing them all much faster.
There are lots of enemies and you need crowd control?
The shield explode whenever you use one of its infinite dashes.
Single big targets?
The shield toss can stun bigger demons in place for a while.
HUGE enemies?
Just parry their attacks - Some of them you never even have to shoot.
I started out trying to use a lot of weapons on my Nightmare run, and it eventually devolved into a Super Shotgun-fest, since I was never running out of ammo and it does absurd damage to anything it hits. It's almost the only weapon worth using since you can close the distance to enemies in an instant at any time.
The rocket launcher was also pretty useful for two reasons: Parrying an attack makes it so splash damage from the rocket launch heals you for a short while, which makes most encounters trivial on its own - But much worse than this is all down to the enemies' awful, awful, awful AI.
Doom 2016 and Eternal used the roster of demons so well that I genuinely can not find any fun within the senselessness of Dark Ages: Demons will spawn into the arena 50 metres away from you, far enough that they can't actually shoot you, and then just STAND STILL. You can lob rockets at them all day until they die and they won't move, and I cannot understand how this enemy behaviour made it into the game.
I cannot defend Dark Ages on novelty alone.
Yes, it is very different from all previous entries in the series, but its differences are not what makes it bad.
The terrible design choices and compromises made to the level, enemy and player design are what make it bad.
You are too strong at all times but only need to use 10% of the tools you are given.
Maps and enemy counts are bigger than ever, but they're mostly just open wastelands with hordes of fodder demons that provide no meaningful challenge nor cathartic satisfaction when defeated.
The game has no idea which of its enemies are actually threatening and which aren't, so it will repeatedly throw you into cramped arenas with lots of Hell Knights and expect you to have trouble these trash mobs that die immediately, or put Arachnotrons and Mancubi in places where they are very easy to shield bash.
The dev team seems to have no confidence in their ability to balance all this crap so they didn't even bother to try, hence the addition of fine-tuning difficulty sliders - You can call it player choice, but I'm calling it a cop-out. The only way you can make the game slightly challenging is by playing it at 150% speed.
This is to say nothing of the writing, which is about as stock as you can get.
The game's universe has interesting ideas to explore, but there's no overarching themes, none of the characters actually develop in any meaningful way, the one entire female character they have is the most Mary Sue thing in Doom history and she spends most of the game either doing nothing, getting kidnapped and needing to be rescued, or being so overly powerful that she could probably fight Doomguy, all whilst having no emotive reaction or growth to anything that happens in the plot - Nobody does.
Doomguy himself is a moron throughout most of the game.
The mech sections were fun - Once.
The dragon sections were fun - Once.
The less said about them the better because they show you everything they have to offer within the first 5 minutes of either.
All the secrets are displayed clearly on the map and aren't at all secret.
There are wide open underwater areas with invisible walls.
There's a weird amount of backtracking that was fixed by Eternal's fast travel but isn't included here.
Keys are marked clearly on the map, but locked doors aren't??
It has around 5 bosses, by which I mean it has 2 bosses but the second one is reused a bunch of times for the last two missions.
I could keep going, but I've ran out of space.
Don't buy this garbage.