Doom: The Dark Ages

The Doom reboot that began nine years ago is a masterpiece of modernization—a thrilling and current game that retains the soul of the source material. This revamp started with Doom in 2016, continued through Doom Eternal four years later, and now we enjoy the next chapter in the franchise with Doom: The Dark Ages. 

If anyone is at all confused about where this game takes place in the timeline, this is a prequel of sorts to Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. After Doom 64 in the late '90s, the Doom Guy, later renamed the Slayer, locks himself in hell to keep fighting demons. In Doom 2016, the Slayer wakes up from a sarcophagus on Mars in the hour of humanity's need. Apparently the minions of hell couldn't kill him, but they did eventually manage to lock him up for a time.

There are a lot of blanks to fill in there and this game takes place many years before Doom 2016, before the demons were able to finally subdue and imprison the Slayer. The Slayer has left hell from the conclusion of Doom  64, and landed in another world/dimension, Argent D'Nur. This is the home world for the Argents and their warrior class, the Sentinels. Argents are a humanlike race, technologically advanced yet still fashioned in medieval architecture, fashion, and weaponry to an extent. The Maykrs are also present—non-humanoid creatures mistaken for angels but greedy for the argent energy produced between this world and hell.

The story of the Maykrs and the Argent technology plays out between Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. This game addresses some of those blanks of a time when the Slayer fought alongside the Sentinels before their world was ultimately conquered by the forces of hell, with the lone surviving Slayer finally confined to his tomb. 

You don't need to go deep into the lore to enjoy this game. There is a plot and a coherent story that moves along with the levels. There are even a few cameos that those who appreciate the deep cuts will be very pleased to see; but the game absolutely stands on its own both narratively and as an insane action FPS. I do think your enjoyment will be enhanced by diving through some pages somewhere like the Doom Wiki if you have any questions or want to dig into the Sentinel/Maykr/Argent D'Nur backstory, but no homework is required beforehand.

As a matter of fact, the storyline is one of the more impressive strengths of this game; not so much in a way that it weaves some compelling tale together, but in the way that every cutscene ramps up the adrenaline to jump into the next section or level. A good bit of the narrative is almost less storytelling and more posturing, but it makes you want to run through a brick wall back into the fray.

I never wanted to put this game down and would be pushing through late into the wee hours of the next morning every evening I picked it up. The passion behind Doom: The Dark Ages isn't so much for what the game tries to say, but for how it makes you feel. There are many games that stand tall with a captivating story backed by competent gameplay. Here the story is well competent, and the gameplay is tight, but it's the emotion of playing through it that stands out.

The cutscenes, the world building, the weaponry...so much of it is just that posturing, an attempt to be uber-cool; but it's posing to great effect. It's not just trying to be "fake it until you make it" cool. It is cool. You don the helmet of the Slayer, "the only one they (the very demons of hell) fear is you." You step into the stirrups of a freaking dragon, fly alone headlong into battle against a horde of hell's worst, and the metal guitar riff that sees you off just accentuates the feeling of  "f*** yeah I can do this." 

Every running step the Slayer takes is a resounding thud. Every leap lands with a crash so vicious the area of effect damage can take out a mob. You carry a chainsaw shield on your left arm, a spiked ball and chain or mace in your right, and an arsenal of weaponry on your back including a gun that eats up skulls as ammo and spits out the bone fragments as shrapnel. There is a brutality to the Slayer that's maybe best exemplified every time he clambers up a vertical section of the map. He claws at the cliff like a rabid animal lifting himself by bare fingertips and rage. It feels so visceral, and then you drive into a combat section and it gets even better. 

A real hallmark of this rebooted series is how fluid the actual fighting is. This is a big part of how the game stays true to the soul of the series. It adopts modern visuals, sound, and design principles but keeps the combat grounded in the roots of classic first-person shooters and this series itself.

Ammo isn't unlimited but you do not need to manage it clip by clip. Shields and health tick up and down on a clearly displayed scale of integers. Pickups litter the floor to replenish all of it. Doom Eternal got some stick over time by making the game more vertical, creating too much movement of zipping around the battlefield confusing some part of the Slayer with Spiderman. I took no issue with it, but some did. The Dark Ages grounds the slayer once again—no vaults, no grappling hook, no zip lines. There are many sections where you have the opportunity to drop into an arena with one of those minion-clearing ground slams, but once in the thick of it you mostly stay grounded.

Where the Dark Ages creates its combat dance is the interplay between the shield, the melee abilities, and the guns—all while managing health, armor, and ammo pickups. You are forced into rotating through your various guns not just by necessity of ammo scarcity, but also because of the opportunity to optimize the demise of the demon in front of you. 

When you can smell the breath of a Komodo a double barreled shotgun can be devastating, while a longer range spike might be a better answer to a Mancubus. However, if you choose, you could opt for a shield, charge in close, and follow up with a quick melee to stun and set your escape before that Mancubus rains fire from his close range flamethrowers. Each encounter is unscripted but each arena is littered with enemies big and small to weave in and out of, flowing from one attack to the next. It's exhilarating.

There are also a number of upgrade options to your arsenal. While choice enemy encounters upgrade your overall health, armor, or ammo reserves. Your weapons, shield, and melees all follow upgrade trees funded by various world pickups you collect along the way. The endgame can really benefit by some of these choices where some single target weapons can achieve area of effect bonuses or other upgrades that better manage their ammo economy.

I'm sure that a few niches I found by prioritizing some of my favorite weapons and planning ahead to spend my resources into their upgrade paths really assisted with overcoming those final battles. If you want more of a challenge, there is more than just being daft with your upgrades. There are a number of game modes and sliders that effect both Slayer and enemy damage as well as enemy aggressiveness, as well as the hardest modes that not only dial up the difficulty but also limit the number of revives you can use or whether you can use them at all for the entirety of the run. There are collectible revive sigils that, rather than just let you restart from a previous checkpoint, actually bring you back to life to continue right there in the middle of the fight you just fell short in.

There are also the levels where the Slayer steps into a giant robot titan, or into the saddle of a flying dragon mount to change things up. It's not just a gimmick either. The titan sections are a large part of the game feeling larger than life by literally putting you into a mech that actually is. And the dragon sections are actually some of the heavier plot-heavy points of the story to introduce new locations, characters, and move the story forward. 

Unfortunately, the game does miss the mark in two significant areas. First of all, the music is a big step back from 2016 and Doom Eternal. Look, there was a rather public and ugly falling out between Mick Gordon who was behind the soundtracks to the last two and the Executive team over at id Software. I'm not going to go into that backstory here but there is plenty written about it online in other forums. But one fact that should not be in dispute: the music from Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal is a true high water mark for video game music. The tracks drop so hard that they inspired behind the scenes mini-documentaries like this one from 2016 or this one from Eternal. The music is so good it inspired an entire series of incredible video memes: when the doom music kicks in.

It's not that the music in the Dark Ages is bad. I mentioned previously how it usually does a good job in the cutscene of amping the player up to jump into the next level. But in the previous installments the music was almost a character of its own, adding so much to the overall package. Here, it's just an afterthought, unnoticeable and bland once the cutscene fades into the gameplay. It falls well short of the pinnacle the previous two game soared to. 

The other downside almost feels like a bug. A hallmark of this reboot is in the glory kills—times when the player gets an opportunity and an on-screen prompt to unleash a brutal finisher on a weakened or stunned enemy. These kills are gory and savage. They do occur in the Dark Ages, but only so very rarely. Most of the time when I moved in for one I was instead met with either a standard melee animation or even worse, an uninspiring side kick. For a game that otherwise feels so fluid and satisfying in its combat, it's a let down every time you see see the onscreen indicator but end an enemy with a meek side kick where previous games would routinely treat to your saw viscerally splitting through a skull. As Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road would put it: "Mediocre."

Doom: The Dark Ages is every bit a worthy successor to this rebooted franchise. It’s a joy to follow the narrative into the backstory of the Sentinels and the Slayer. The combat is incredible and intense. The game just feels good—a hyper-cool expression of badassery. It's not a perfect game, but nearly so; and shows this franchise has a lot of life left and story to tell. Rip and tear, until it is done.