Doom: The Dark Ages Is Hellish Fun

With the release of Dark Ages, these modern Doom games have cemented themselves as some of my favorite games of the last decade. In fact, I’d probably say that this is my favorite trilogy since Batman Arkham.

You could even make parallels with the Atlan and dragon sections in Dark Ages with the Batmobile in Arkham Knight. I guess the good news is that id Software didn’t cram its dragon or mech sections down your throat as hard as Rocksteady crammed the Batmobile down everyone’s throats back in 2015, despite how great Arkham Knight was.

So, while the dragon and Atlan levels in Doom: The Dark Ages are a bit superfluous, at least they aren’t integrated like the Batmobile was. They’re just featured in a few levels, provide a quick shift from the normal flow of the game, and then you’re back rippin’ and tearin’ in no time.

Back to the Dark Ages

For anyone whose reaction might be, “Wait, there’s a new Doom game?” the Dark Ages is a prequel set in the distant past—and the separate world of Argent D’Nur, for that matter—which helps to explain that while Doom is a prequel set in the “dark ages” it’s still very much a sci-fi game with guns and ships and shit.

To be honest, I haven’t really paid super close attention to the lore of Doom, but from what I understand, the Doom Slayer as we know him is originally a dude from Earth who got thrust into the past somehow, either to a different world or a different dimension altogether (fuck if I know). I guess it’s sort of like what happened to Ash in Army of Darkness—which is a great fuckin movie, by the way.

I would also be remiss to not at least mention music once—and only once. Mick Gordon’s mark is sorely missed from this game, and it’s a shame what happened to him. The music in Dark Ages is fine, but it’s not nearly as novel or original as what he did in the previous games, or what he would’ve done. The best advice I can give is to just crank the volume up.

Ultimately, all that really matters is that there are demons to kill, and the slayer proceeds to do his fuckin’ thing—only this time he has a shield, and it sure seems like he’s having a fuckin’ blast the whole time throughout this game, which is good because …

So Did I

After about 25 hours, I have now completed Doom: The Dark Ages on Nightmare, 100%ed the game, and thoroughly enjoyed every fuckin’ minute of this game. I did find it a little easy—but they also proceeded to increase the difficulty basically right after I finished it, so I guess I’ll have to replay it again in a few months.

One cool thing that Dark Ages does is that in addition to the typical difficulty levels, there are also sliders to either make the experience harder or easier. It includes stuff like bigger or smaller parry windows, more or less damage from enemies—stuff like that. I didn’t touch any them, but it’s great that they’re there for anyone who wants to tweak their experience.

Having said all that, I would still say that, for me personally, Eternal is still the best modern Doom game, but Doom 2016 and The Dark Ages are both also great in their own ways. If I were to slap arbitrary numbers on them out of 100, I’d say Eternal is like 93, 2016 is like 89, and Dark Ages is like 87. So like, still great, but probably not quite as great as the other two.

A lot of this, of course, comes down to personal preference, because all three games play very differently. While Eternal has you jumping around and dashing and grabbing onto bars—it’s acrobatic as fuck—Dark Ages has you parrying and blocking shots, and shield charging left and right and all over the place. Doom 2016, by comparison, is “just” a solid fucking shooter.

After 2016, Eternal felt like an evolution of the formula. And you know what? Dark Ages also feels like an evolution, but not over Eternal, but a separate evolution over 2016. Regardless, I wouldn’t be surprised if those who didn’t like Eternal but loved 2016 probably look more fondly on Dark Ages.

Where I’m standing (and fighting), I love each game on its own merits—but it’s Eternal whose merits I love the most. That said …

Shields Are Fuckin’ Fun

In a word, combat in the Dark Ages is exhilarating, and a different kind of exhilarating than Eternal was, and that’s all thanks to the shield. You use it to block and parry, shield charge from a surprisingly great distance, or even throw it to outright kill fodder demons or stun bigger ones. You’re basically a Space Marine version of Captain America—and that’s cool.

It’s a surprisingly satisfying tool in the Slayer’s arsenal.

Parrying is a bit easy (unless you tighten those windows); simply block as the green projectiles or melee attacks hit you, time slows, and you can follow it up with a melee attack or a super shotgun blast to the face.

Considering how fast the game is, and with as many attacks as there are coming your way, the green highlight works pretty well, and it’s probably good that the parry window is generously large by default. However, on Nightmare, when things get hairy, and everything just flows, it is a beautiful rhythm of clangs and melee whacks.

However, I do wish there was a way to turn off the slow-mo, or reduce it. I know there’s a mod out there that can do that, but it’d be great if id added a toggle or a slider.

But of course, shields and melee weapons aren’t the only tools in your arsenal; Doom wouldn’t be Doom without a plethora of weapons.

Medieval Guns … Best Guns?

In previous Doom games, you could definitely feel the lineage of each gun that came before, and I guess, in a manner of thinking, this is supposed to be the arsenal that inspired all the guns. There’s still a rocket launcher, but it’s a cannon—like literally. There’s also a grenade launcher, which is basically a cannon that shoots bouncing balls.

Speaking of balls, there’s also a gun that shoots a ball on a chain—for when you really want to slap your foes in the face with your balls (and it’s highly effective).

Balls aside, like any good Doom arsenal, Dark Ages also includes two plasma weapons: one that serves as a sort of fast-firing submachine gun, and another that kind of fills the same role as the Chaingun, the Cycler.

Perhaps the coolest (at least thematically) guns in the game are the skull crushers, which, as the name implies, crush skulls up in a grinder and spit them out at enemies. There are two of them, the Pulverizer and the Ravager. The former is great at clearing fields of fodder demons, and the latter is great at killing the tougher enemies, although it’s a bit overpowered at the moment.

My personal favorite gun, next to the Super Shotgun, was one of the “Railspike”-class weapons: the Impaler. This thing is basically Dark Ages’ version of a sniper; it fires large nails that destroy most enemies, but it’s got some pretty serious drop, so you have to account for that with every shot. The other Railspike weapon is called the Shredder. It shreds—I hardly used it.

So, there are quite a few weapons, about twelve (not counting the melee weapons). For each weapon “category,” you can only have one equipped at a time, so you can either have the Cycler or the Accelerator, or the Combat Shotgun or the Super Shotgun, or the Rocket Launcher, or the Grenade Launcher … you get the picture.

This time around, rather than a BFG, we have the BFC—the Big Fuckin’ Crossbow (or actually the Ballistic Force Crossbow). It’s exceedingly cool.

There are also three melee weapons, a power fist, a flail (my personal favorite), and a big-ass mace. They’re all pretty great, and each one has slightly different pros and cons.

While some weapons, both melee and guns, are certainly better for certain situations, the entire arsenal is viable—and very fun to use. My least favorite was probably the grenade launcher, but with the cluster upgrade (we’ll talk about upgrades shortly), it was still a blast to grenade entire groups of enemies.

The Forces of Hell

Enemies in the Dark Ages feature a nice mix of some old classics, new foes, and clever remixes of old enemies. Take, for instance, our old friend the revenant. He went from airborne rocket jumper to something more befitting of his name: a ghostly floating reaper who fires magic skulls at you and can briefly become invincible. Quite the glow-up.

There are some other clever takes on enemies: the Cacodemon is quite different now, and the Baron of Hell became a Cosmic Baron.

Otherwise, Imps are still fun to squash, Hell Knights have evidently remained relatively unchained, and someone at id thought it would be cool to give a Komodo Dragon a gun and a spear, and they were right.

Gold, Rubies, and Wraithstones

Like any good modern Doom game, the Dark Ages has bountiful upgrades for both the Slayer and your arsenal. While Doom Eternal might have arguably overcomplicated the upgrade process, the Dark Ages streamlines it in ways that I personally find a bit more preferable.

Most upgrades require a simple currency: gold. How very medieval, right? With it, you can bolster your weapons, shield, and melee weapons. Beyond that, you can also collect Rubies and Wraithstones to upgrade your weapons even further with even more powerful perks. The upgrade system is really where you can come up with some interesting builds, and it also helps to make the melee weapons a bit more distinctive.

Separate from this, there’s also a Rune system for the shield, which provides four different effects that occur when you parry ranged attacks. Each of these is pretty cool, although you don’t get the first one until fairly late into the game.

What About Modifications?

While Dark Ages does away with the modification system found in 2016 and Eternal, there are still upgrade choices for each weapon, although for the most part, one upgrade seemed a hell of a lot cooler than the other, for nearly all weapons. But your mileage may vary. I found that generally speaking, each mod for the weapons in Eternal was pretty dang solid, and you could swap between them situationally. In Dark Ages, I picked my favorite one and never switched.

As for health, ammo, and armor upgrades, there are special “leader” enemies throughout the game, and killing these foes allows you to tear out their heart and consume it for an upgrade. So, you basically get all of these in a specific order, as the game wants you to; gone are the days of stacking all of your upgrades in ammo and ignoring health and shields because you’re a badass.

Overall, Dark Ages provides pretty constant power boosts, and those power boosts are typically a little more streamlined. The Wraithstones to get the final upgrades are pretty scarce, so you have to decide which weapons you most want to upgrade. I went for the Impaler and Super Shotgun first.

Big Ole Levels

For the most part, each of the Dark Ages’ 22 chapters contains some pretty open spaces and loads of secrets. Some of them are more linear, with small branching paths to find the occasional secrets; others are more open and provide you with a big open space to run around and complete objectives.

The game never really got stale, but toward the end, one of the later chapters was basically just a slightly different version of a chapter from earlier in the game. This one could’ve been either cut or redesigned not to be so similar. It’s a good thing that killing demons never got boring.

The secrets themselves were all relatively easy to find, and I quickly decided I was going to try to 100% the game, and by keeping an eye on the map, I didn’t really have to replay much to accomplish this. The only achievement that took any bit of effort was the one for the all-weapon mastery challenges.

And, as promised, the game has a bigger focus on story, and aside from some basic radio chatter, most of that plays out through bookended cutscenes at the beginning and end of a chapter. I don’t really have much to say about the story, but for all intents and purposes, it’s fine.

The actual writing is formulaic and a bit goofy—and not necessarily in a bad way—and the cutscenes at least allow you to marvel at how great this new version of the id Tech engine is.

An Ode to id Tech 8

To truly appreciate id Tech, I guess you gotta start with Unreal Engine, which has become nothing short of pervasive, and with it, so too does the endemic #stutterstruggle that plagues so many games built with the engine. It’s not impossible to create a good Unreal experience—plenty of games do it quite well. Plus, the engine is just so damn prevalent.

The modern Doom games, on the other hand, are all running on the id Tech engine, with Doom 2016 running on Tech 6 and Dark Ages running on Tech 8. And boy do I love this engine; it’s just so damn performant, with impressive frame rates and nary a stutter.

It helps that id Tech is really only used in a few games, mostly the Doom ones (as well as the newer Wolfenstein games and Indiana Jones), so it’s not like many other games have had an opportunity to provide a bad id Tech experience. Regardless, it’s hard to argue about how good id Tech is.

And the 8th version is no different, although that comes with a big caveat, because …

Ray Tracing Has Arrived

This time around, Doom: The Dark Ages requires a ray-tracing capable video card, much like Indiana Jones did. That means, on PC, unless you have an RTX 20 series or later Nvidia card or a RX 6000 series or later AMD card, you’re shit out of luck—unless you try to bypass the game anyway, and doing so completely breaks the lighting.

I know ray tracing, in general, is a pretty controversial feature, but I love it. Or at least, I love it when it’s been well-implemented and you can still get a decent frame rate with capable hardware, and while the Doom: The Dark Ages framerate might not hit the heights of Eternal, it still runs really well.

However, I might be a bit biased because I just bought a 9070 XT a few months ago, with XeSS on Ultra Quality Plus, I was getting right around 110 FPS, give or take. I’d use FSR, but the old version is utter garbo, and FSR 4 isn’t supported in any Vulkan game, even with Optiscaler, but with any luck, that will come with time.

For what it’s worth, id straight-up built Dark Ages with ray tracing, so simply turning it off isn’t an option. They’d need to redo all the lighting in the game, which would probably take another few years of development.

I’ve seen some people on reddit—a bastion of people who know what they’re talking about—spouting bullshit about a non-ray tracing patch, but I believe they’ve confusing that with the upcoming path tracing update. And path tracing is like ray tracing extreme.

I’m not even sure my 9070 XT can play the game with path tracing in a manner that would be enjoyable—but I’m definitely going to find out!

Even without path tracing, the Dark Ages looks great. Eternal had ray-traced reflections, which are very cool and far better than the old way of doing it, with screen space reflections. Those basically just “reflect” anything that you can “see” in the screenspace, whereas ray tracing reflects everything on the level, and does it well. It helps that Eternal just has so many damn reflective surfaces. Dark Ages really just has … puddles.

The game does, however, take ray tracing a step further with global illumination, which basically simulates how light illuminates (and shadows) everything, and it’s really striking. While talented artists can definitely approximate the look that ray tracing can provide (as evidenced by Eternal still looking fuckin’ great after 5 years), ray tracing just does it faster (as in development time) and better.

Time to Stop Talking

I realize now that I’ve been waxing poetic for far longer than I thought I would, but I really did love this fuckin’ game—as well as all the Doom games that came before it.

Like I said, overall, Eternal is still peak Doom for me, personally, but more Doom is good Doom. Eternal also has a lot more replay built into it, but a lot of that came after the game launch, so I’m sure that the Dark Ages will also get plenty of post-release content, including, of course, the story DLC.

But Master Levels, Horde Mode, or a full NG+ would all be really welcome here. Because, as it stands now, once you finish the Campaign, all that’s really left is to hunt any collectibles, secrets, or achievements you missed.

Ultimately, it’s just crazy to me that 33 years and running, Doom games are still just … plain … fun. And who doesn’t like to have fun?