DOOM: Eternal

Playtime: 16.2 Hours

Played through the base game on UV. Managed to get most of the collectibles in the game - Sentinel Crystals, Perks, Batteries, finished all Challenge missions and Slayer Gates, all cheat codes, albums, toys, codex pages, got the Unmaykr, etc. Did not get all weapon mods maxed out - I'm not wasting my time using shit upgrades for completionist points. I'm also not interested in doing any of the DLC - even though I quite enjoyed the game, I've had enough of it and don't have any enthusiasm for playing more of it.

This game seemingly follows pretty closely to the overall vision of Doom 2016, focusing on big demons, heavy weapons, and plenty of blood and gore. However, where I appreciated Doom 2016 for its aggresive brevity of plot, Doom: Eternal falters in its new interpretation. I really liked how Doom2016guy made it clear to the player how irrelevant the plot was; how he would interrupt characters and push away "plot"-important items, all showing how little restraint he had when there were demons to kill. Meanwhile, DoomEternalguy feels like an edgy self-insert character that I would've dreamt up in middle or high school. Inexplicably exposed arms and spiked biker shoulderpads compared to the sleek yet imposing Praetor suit of 2016, while patiently waiting for every character to tell you how cool you are for playing this game before Doomguy shoves around some stuff rudely to look hardcore. Eternal guy is basically a poser version of 2016 guy in my opinion; the writing and some of the visual design of the game just feels incredibly lame; I can't tell if this direction was dictated by some random midlife-crisis executive or their adolescent child. I don't need long cutscenes of people telling me I'm some universe-level threat or being scared of me romping around, or constant intercom voices warning everybody that I've been detected in the vicinity. Just let me kill demons! The pile of demon corpses I leave behind in each level is all I need to know how badass my character is.

The ultimate irony of them leaning into the badass-ness of Doomguy is that I feel like he's been nerfed significantly in this game, for the sake of the "optimized fun" gameplay loop they tried to implement, reducing the amount of ammo and also making most of the guns feel weaker. While I didn't run into serious ammo problems too often, the few times that I ran dry only annoyed me; it didn't really make me play differently, since I would just end up running around waiting for the chainsaw to regen or scrounging for ammo on the ground before going back to the same loop of weapons that I had in D2016. I think this mechanic was really meant to target more casual players that tend to use only a few weapons - since I had the mentality of weapon switching and target prioritization from the Serious Sam games, Eternal felt kind of like a baby version of that with fewer enemies and more tools to dodge or otherwise mitigate damage. Still don't like the limiting of options though, since it further railroads gameplay into spamming glory kills and chainsaws, which are animation-locked moves that I absolutely hate in a fast paced shooter. Enemies weren't bad in general; I heard a lot of shit about the Marauders, but I didn't find them to be much of a problem - you actually get a pretty big window to shoot and counter them, and they're also very easy to dodge. Maybe they're a lot harder on Nightmare or on console... arch-viles were pretty annoying though. Other enemies don't really register for me, none of them were really major threats. All in all, I still think this game was mechanically a step down from 2016 - in an effort to deepen the gameplay, Eternal falls into a classic design trap of overcomplicating things with too many cooldowns and niche mechanics that have little to no real purpose being in the game. It's far from unplayable, but gets old quickly because of how constrained the game feels, and I've got no interest dealing with more of it.

Even with the other issues that I've had with the design of the game, the technical side is pretty much rock solid. Performance was incredibly smooth and stable on a 1440p 144Hz monitor, with almost all settings maxed, and I didn't notice any significant visual aberrations during my entire experience with the game. Speaking of which, the visual fidelity is great, as is the audio design - including weapons, demons, and other environmental effects. The music is kind of forgettable, just like Doom 2016 - djent just isn't my kind of genre, everything sounds pretty much the same to me. I think I ended up muting the music and listening to other stuff while I played. At the end of the day, I think I'd find this game quite forgettable, as long as people don't keep bringing it up. It feels like pretty much everyone's drank the "rip and tear" Kool-Aid these days, but that's what superhero culture will do I guess.