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UPDATE: I have now finished Doom: The Dark Ages. There are 2 levels in the late-teens that are pretty fun! I will give the team props for their creativity. However, the last 3 levels are truly abysmal. You fight a series of boss encounters at the end of the game that are egregiously bad. One of them you fight four times (with minor twists each time) so I guess the team was proud of it. I also believe they stealth patched the ability to block in some windows you previously couldn't, which alleviates some issues with how difficult it is to weapon switch in combat when damage avoidance is so dependent on parrying. However, my criticism of the problems with the combat around weapon balance and skill expression still holds true. Later in the game upgrades eliminate the need to swap to a specific gun to deal with chaff, and there are a couple of weapons that are so good at taking out the larger enemies that swapping to anything else is not necessary.
I also found the level design (outside of 2 levels I don't want to spoil) very uninspired. Exploration is laborious and combat arenas rarely feel like they impact the encounter design much. The game extremely rarely makes interesting use of terrain or jump pads or anything in combat.
Overall it does not get better later, for whatever that is worth.
I hate to say it, but this game ain't it, at least not at this price point. It breaks my heart to be writing this. If I had to give a score, I think Doom: The Dark Ages is a 3/5. So it's not a bad game, but why would I spend so much money on a 3/5 Doom game?
The first 5 levels of this game (of which I've played 9) are truly horrendous. They should remove every dragon, mech, and turret sequence from this game because I've never been more bored in my life. I would tolerate them if the core gameplay was good, but unfortunately it's very uneven.
First off - the difficulty ceiling of this game in comparison to Doom Eternal has been lowered way too much. The tightest parry window is almost a joke with how generous it is. The lowest setting is two levels more strict than the default setting on the hardest difficulty mode, which is actually a joke. An enemy can be standing 20 feet away from you and you parry the projectile as it is coming out of their gun. This is the default for *the hardest difficulty mode*. I applaud all of the accessibility options the game has, but should this not justify allowing for a sky-high skill ceiling for players to master and express themselves with?
The core problem with the combat comes down to how many tactical decisions you actually get to make.
Weapon swapping is the primary culprit here. Swapping weapons is extremely slow - but you also can't use your shield or melee attack while doing so. Couple this with the fact there are 3 or 4 weapons that clearly stand out as high performers among the rest and you end up not really making that many interesting decisions in the combat. Chaff enemies have so many efficient ways to deal with them outside of using the guns explicitly designed to kill them that swapping off of one of the weapons you need to use to kill elite enemies to deal with chaff is objectively a terrible idea.
You often can't even reasonably swap weapons while fighting elite enemies either. Many enemies in the game heavily encourage you to parry them. Some of these enemies actively punish you for standing too far away from them; some to such a degree such that one miniboss-type enemy is literally immune to damage if you are too far away from them. When you stand near these enemies they frequently repeat high-damaging, parryable melee strikes. Remember how you can't parry while weapon swapping? You can't parry during the "backswing" of firing your gun either so the dance you do on these enemies is parry->shoot or melee-> parry-> shoot or melee until they die. This is supposed to be less prescriptive than Doom Eternal?
Doom: The Dark Ages is still decently fast-paced, though more on an accelerated Doom 2016 scale than comparing to Eternal. This is fine. In fact, I'd prefer The Dark Ages *not* be Eternal 2. I like Eternal and I already have it, so I applaud the developers for trying something different. However, I do think that tying all of your mobility to the sprint key (which is such an obviously correct thing to do you can turn on auto-sprint in the options to always be sprinting) and the shield charge (which requires an enemy and has a cooldown) was a mistake. Movement tech is fun, and would help a lot to keep you mentally engaged when you aren't directly barreling down on an enemy. Maybe the shield charge should have been slightly more committal but not require a target and let you bowl over smaller enemies so you're more like a wrecking ball and less like a missile?
I won't make many comments on the music or story, mostly because the mix seems embarrassed the music is there so I can barely hear it and I find the idea that a Doom game wants me to care about literally anything that is happening outside of the gameplay a little offensive.
The turret, dragon, and mech sequences are so bad that simply removing them from the game entirely would make this game better. Each of these 3 minigame modes are just that: lesser versions of the gameplay that already exists. The turret sequences are especially egregious, as they might as well be cutscenes. You hold down the mouse button and vaguely point your crosshairs at enemies and hit the special attack button when the meter fills, because surprise! A threat that justifies using the special attack spawns right when you deal enough damage to charge it (or my favorite, a big monster will smash you with his big club and you charge the meter just in time to stop him!!) It's so dull it's borderline infantilizing that someone would be entertained by this.
Overall, I think Doom: The Dark Ages is just Fine. The combat is good, but has some glaring issues. This in combination with some baffling decisions about the structure of the game means you never really get to enjoy a good flow state where you are making interesting decisions and get your blood pumping.
Unfortunately, Fine does not meet my expectations for this franchise, so I do not recommend it. Not at this price.