What'd you guys think of Doom Eternal?

[cave hermit]

So I built a new PC (first time building, booted up first try like a champ!), and after some 3dmark benchmarking and stress testing, I went ahead and bought Doom Eternal.

So gameplay wise, I think the emphasis on constantly using all your abilities could be seen as either a strength or a weakness. On one hand it promotes dynamic character action-esque gameplay, on the other it misses some of the gung-ho simplicity that defined the earlier games.

The emphasis on platforming is a bit frustrating to me, but again I think it's a YMMV thing, some people might say that it's a natural extension of FPS movement, others might say it's frustrating trial and error.

Then the presentation of the game, with everything having comic-book levels of cartoonish over the top ham, again very much a personal preference thing. I simultaneously love it and roll my eyes at it. Basically Doom is a superhero comic now. You've got this heroic superman in his fucking floating space fortress complete with mancave, the hell priests are hammy underlings under the control of a supervillain, everybody in the universe knows about Doomguy, etc.

All I can say is, playing it is a very stimulating experience that makes you think on your toes, and maybe that's all I need from what claims to be a throwback FPS.

Also the music is banging.

[Durandal]

My issue with the platforming is less with the fact that it exists and that it exists inbetween all the shooting, but that it's very shallow. It only tests you on figuring out where you need to go, not how you go about doing it, and the former is very self-evident because of all the impossible-to-miss green strobe lights telling you where you need to go. After the second level (or perhaps the Doom Hunter Base), none of the later platforming challenges ask more out of your moveset. Once you know how to extend your horizontal jumping distance with dashing, double jumps, and the magnetism on your wall grab, you're basically set for the whole game. The hazards that test your timing and precision tend to be very rare, such as the platforms that fall if you stand on them for too long or the spinning Mario firewheels, which mostly leaves you with Uncharted-style climbing puzzles with no sense of time pressure. The fact that the Meathook isn't utilized at all in the platforming is a massive travesty.

The platforming's made worse by Eternal's lack of speedtech save for the occasional platforming challenge skip, so on replays you're always going through everything at about the same speed.

[Durandal]

The new DLC is good and shows some glimpses of Doom Eternal's true potential whereas the main campaign was tame in comparison, the same way that Plutonia started going all out with the (new) enemies in Doom 2. Here you start fully upgraded, so there are no RPG systems and trawling through pause menus to fuck with the pacing. You don't get the Crucible either (you left it in the Icon of Simp's head at the end of the base campaign), so now you have to actually engage with Archviles and Tyrants in earnest instead of using your delete button (although the BFG still exists and the Ice Bomb and Lock-on Burst deletes them about as easily, but oh well).

The first level in the DLC, the UAC Oil Rig, is the most straightforward of the bunch, and mostly exists to serve as a warm-up for those who haven't played DE for some months. The encounters here start to ask much more out of you: Cyber-Mancubi start appearing as often as regular Mancubi, Barons start appearing on the regular, Carcasses and Shieldguys feel like they are in every encounter. Superheavies just start appearing even in the small corridors inbetween the arenas. But more importantly, the arenas get a lot more cramped. You don't get as much room to run/dash circles around enemies, environmental hazards such as electrified floors appear more frequently, and heavy demons are able to more effectively pressure you now that you have less space to work with. Hell, the second Marauder fight in this level takes place in a janitor closet. A trend that will be more apparent in the later levels is that the outer rims of the arena now tend to provide less sightlines on the center of the arena (where most of the enemies and fodder are). So whereas in the base campaign you could often peck away at enemies from the outer rims of the arena, now you have to move towards the center if you want to farm resources off fodder and don't want to encounter a Hell Knight around the corner.

There is only one new enemy type introduced in this level (not counting the shark) in the form of the Turret. It's an Ambient Enemy that serves to be a nuisance, but not necessarily in a good way. Much like the Tentacles you can only damage it when it pops up, and it pops down when you hit it/when you're too close to it/when you look at it too long. It takes at least two high-power shots to kill (like a Precision Bolt or a Ballista shot), so you'll inevitably be forced to wait for it to pop back up. The underlying idea behind this design is that because the Turret itself isn't a major threat and because you usually have ten other more threatening demons to worry about, you're better off focusing your attention on them instead of waiting for this lowly Turret to pop back up. But usually you can find a safe moment where you can focus on the Turret, and eventually can do nothing but wait to kill it, which isn't very engaging. It would be nice if there was a way to immediately bait them into popping up, or if they could be instantly destroyed with a Blood Punch regardless of their state.

One rather annoying thing about this level is the underwater swimming sections, which are just a waste of time and involve even less player interaction than the platforming sections. Doomguy's oxygen is suddenly limited now (lol) and you have to get a wetsuit to breathe underwater, which is just a repurposed radsuit. At least the radsuit offered interesting possibilities by creating a limit to how long you could stay on acid floors without taking damage (even though the base campaign never really tried to play more with this idea in big encounters), but the wetsuit has no such flexibility unless underwater combat ever becomes a thing.

The second level, the Blood Swamps, is where shit gets real. First you get these plants everywhere that detonate after a second or two if you get near them, and leave behind some acid on the floor that damages and slows you down; making you stay airborne and move around more. The second is that there's now cloaked Whiplashes and GIANT Tentacles. Whiplashes aren't as threatening as they were at first if you know how to quickswap a little, so cloaking them so they can sneak into your face does help make them more threatening. Giant Tentacles are just scaled-up Tentacles, but it does fill an extra role in the bestiary by being able to prevent you from safely approaching a much larger area. The third is gimmicks, And That's A Good Thing! I've always argued that nuDoom and Eternal should have employed way more gimmicks for their arenas, because it allows arenas to be more distinct. The new Doom games cannot create variety through different monster placement and level layout to the same extent that the old Doom games could, because the enemy AI in the new Dooms is simply too chaotic and unpredictable to create handcrafted levels around without the enemies doing something you never intended. In old Doom the levels had to compensate for the simple AI, and in the new Dooms it's sort of the other way around. Obviously the arenas in the new Doom games aren't literally copypasted. Elements like heavy demon placement, how much fodder demons there are to farm resources off, and the layout of the arena do affect how you play, but not necessarily in a noticeable way. If you can get by in an arena fight using roughly the same strategy of the last arena, it can't help but feel repetitive.

But here you've got gimmicks that affect how you have to strategize on a macro-level. So you get fog that doesn't let you see more than five feet ahead of you, making long-range weapons unreliable and having you try and get the high ground (by Meathookjumping) so you can see clearly above the fog, all while the high ground is littered with the aforementioned plants. So you get a section that passively damages you unless you stay in the protective bubble of a wolf familiar, all while enemies come from every direction to invade your tiny safe space, especially demons like Shieldguys, Pinkies and Barons that are especially a massive pain to deal with in close quarters. There is also a section with a Buff Totem that is locked until you kill a buffed Marauder. I honestly wish arenas would more regularly use Buff Totems in this fashion where you are forced to fight buffed enemies, instead of how they're normally used, where on your first try you ignore all the enemies and are looking around the arena to find the damn thing, and on subsequent attempts you just beeline towards wherever the Buff Totem is.

The biggest gamechanger so far is the Spirit. It's the Summoner from nuDoom, except now it possesses enemies, which: quadruples their health, makes them immune to any kind of faltering or Ice Bombs, buffs their movement and attack speed, and removes their weak points. What's great about Spirits is how they allow the entire enemy roster to be recontextualized into essentially new enemies. Possessed Arachnotrons force you to deal with their turret and make you rely more on the arena layout to break line of sight and avoid having to play Touhou with it. Possessed Hell Knights and Barons of Hell will simply deal unavoidable damage if you do not keep your distance at all times. Possessed Tyrants and Pain Elementals are the closest thing DE has to a Chaingunner. Fighting these makes you realize just how easy you had it up until now by being able to control enemies with falters and destroying their weak points, so enemies that can ignore all of your bullshit really pushes you to improve your fundamentals, and allows other nuisance enemies like Carcasses and Shieldguys to be even more relevant threats.

The only way to kill a Spirit is to kill its host and then lock it down with the Microwave Beam. If you don't kill it in time, it will possess another nearby enemy and make you go through the same dance all over again. Having an enemy only be killable with one weapon is particular is certainly controversial, especially if it's the weapon that most considered to be the worst in the game, but I think in this case it is a net positive and not just a matter of color-coding to force variety. While you use the Microwave Beam you are slowed down, which makes you extra vulnerable to enemies around you--especially melee-focused enemies. This forces you to ask whether finishing off the possessed demon in this time and position is a good idea, and whether you shouldn't first create a situation where you can take care of the Spirit without getting interrupted. The other aspect is that it makes you be more mindful of your cell ammo in particular, because by the time the Spirit pops up you want to have enough juice in the can to take care of it in one cycle before it possesses something else. So now you have to be more careful about using the Ballista in your quickswap combos. These dynamics wouldn't be as present if you could just shoot down the Spirit with any weapon while being able to move freely and not having to worry as much about ammo. Paradoxically, limiting you to one weapon in this case results in more interesting gameplay than if you could use anything.

However, I do have one issue with this implementation of Spirits, which is that it puts a ceiling on how many possessed enemies you could reasonably deal with at once. Enemies being able to spawn pre-possessed allows for way more variation in level design, but because you have to make yourself vulnerable with the Microwave Beam to kill the Spirits, you can only have so many possessed enemies at once before things become bullshit overwhelming, whereas without the need to microwave Spirits the level designers could be a lot more flexible in this regard. And because you can only have so many Spirits at once, you probably don't want to waste them on fodder demons, even though there is some potential in having to fight larger groups of possessed fodder demons.

The third level, The Holt, is less overtly gimmicky, but it still has enough in terms of unorthodox surprises and set-ups to keep things fresh, such as an arena interspersed with pylons that damage you if you touch them, an arena where the floor is lava and you're surrounded by flying enemies, and a fight against a possessed Tyrant which is a MAJOR pain since you only get 1 (one) respawning fodder enemy to work with. That's a common theme with The Holt, where a large part of the difficulty stems that there's way less fodder spawns for you to farm resources off, as opposed to the UAC Oil Rig where fodder would often clump together for you to easily ignite and detonate into a flaming ball of +100 armor. It means you can't rely on your generic fallback strategies as much and have to be more mindful of doing unnecessarily risky shit. The lack of fodder to Chainsaw for ammo is compensated for with the presence of Makyr Drones. Speaking of them, on launch shooting their head wouldn't drop any health, but only ammo. But id later "fixed" this to drop both. I find this unfortunate, because it does away with the dynamics of 'do I headshot them for ammo or do I set up a Glory Kill for health' and keeping them alive as floating ammo packs for when you really need it, whereas in a level with a draught of fodder and health items, going for a Makyr Drone's head is not even a question.

This level also introduces the Blood Makyr, which is basically a Turret that can fly around, except it fires damaging AoE zones that also slow you down, so it's more of a relevant threat. It's invulnerable to everything until it attacks, so damaging it again involves more waiting. At least it dies in one shot to the head instead of two. Like I said before, I could tolerate them more if there was a way to sidestep their immunity by playing proactively, such as being able to bait them into dropping their guard (f.e. by deploying a mod that slows you down like Mobile Turret or Auto-Fire and then quickswapping to a weapon that can oneshot them) or by hitting them with a fully charged Destroyer Blade or something. That said, I do like having a supporting enemy that you simply cannot swat away in the middle of a fight while there's more threatening enemies around. I just wish dealing with it wasn't largely outside the player's control.

The boss fight against Samur is the best in the game, the best in the franchise, and honestly one of the best of the genre (an admittedly low bar), for it is one of the few FPS bosses I can describe with full confidence as being truly... average. What makes it so average is that it actually tests you on your mastery over the core gameplay instead of forcing a different and more limited playstyle on you at the eleventh hour. So the boss fight heavily relies on spawning in regular demons to pressure you from multiple directions and lock you in, and the boss actually challenges your aim by constantly zipping around every which way. The constant teleporting also has the added benefit on making the Lock-on Burst unreliable, so you can't rely on that crutch for this fight. All this is in stark contrast to the Khan Makyr fight where you could just spam Lock-on Burst or your other favourite weapon at a static target, the waiting game that is the Gladiator fight, or the clusterfuck that is the Icon of Sin. That said, the first three phases of the fight are a total doozy.

The first phase doesn't have many heavy adds (or many adds at all) to keep you on your toes, and Samur isn't that big of a threat himself with his easily avoidable projectile spread, so you can get away with just focusing down Samur for most of the fight. Samur does spawn Eyes that move in a fixed path and deal damage if you're nearby, which are neat and make focusing down Samur a bit more complicated, but unfortunately he only spawns these when you get him down to about 50% health, so you won't notice their presence that much for this phase. The second phase has Samur become invincible and make you fight a Possessed Mancubus and Hell Knight at once, but this phase is hamstrung by the fact that there's a pillar in the middle of the arena which you can use to break line of sight between you and the Possessed Mancubus while you go deal with the Possessed Hell Knight first, so you're not even really fighting both at once. The third phase certainly has the setup to be good, what with turning the floor into lava, having giant lasers comb the arena, and electrifying two of the four platforms every 8 seconds so you can't stand in one place for the whole fight, but the problem is that the Cacodemons don't spawn in at a fast enough rate/high enough amount to really put pressure on the limited amount of space you get in that phase.

The fourth phase is when things actually start getting good. It's a repeat of the first phase, except now you have lasers slowly combing over the arena to give you a macro-level threat to keep in mind, there's a constantly respawning Blood Makyr to complicate things further, and the new layout of the arena is more vertical in a way that no longer gives you a clear oversight over the whole arena, which makes getting a line of sight on a speedy Samur way more difficult. Because of the raised platforms you also have less space to deal with Samur's attacks without falling to the bottom where the Blood Makyr and the rest of the adds are. The fifth phase now has you deal with a Possessed Pain Elemental and Possessed Dread Knight on top of a Blood Makyr, which is something that cost me a good half hour to beat. You really have to try this without crutches like superweapons or the Lock-on Burst to appreciate how intense this phase can be. A Possessed Pain Elemental is ridiculously accurate while the Dread Knight is being ridiculously aggressive, and all the while you're trying to find an opportunity where you can take care of the Spirit without the other Possessed enemy interfering. It really shows the potential of having to deal with multiple Possessed enemies, but I suppose we'll see more of that in TAG2.

I suppose having to predominantly fight minions in a boss fight instead of the boss itself may not be thematically satisfying, but for a game that's all about fighting multiple enemies at once it is only logical to incorporate this into your boss design. That said, I would have preferred there to be one last phase where you fight against Samur himself instead of more minions.

Overall, the DLC was great and highlights that there's still plenty of potential to be had in Doom Eternal's formula. I'm looking forward to TAG 2.

[Dawn111]

I like Doom Eternal, though not as much as Doom (2016) because I find it to be more difficult to play, and it feels too arcade-y compared to other Doom games. The weapons and item pickups look much less realistic, like the floating weapons that Doomguy doesn't actually pickup like he did in Doom (2016), and other item pickups just look out of place like the 1ups and question marks. I do really like the Plasma Rifle's design better than the one in Doom (2016) though, and the monsters like the Zombiemen, the Arachnotrons, & the Mancubi look badass as hell (pun intended). Not to mention the gameplay feels just as satisfying as in Doom (2016). I do have Doom Eternal on my PS4, and I might play it again whenever I have time.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Doom Eternal is neat, so long as you approach it from the mindset that it's more of a character action game with detailed weapon switching mechanics and maneuverability, basically a Devil May Cry kind of take on a first person game. It's very, very differently mechanically from the earlier Doom games, and as cave hermit said, "it misses some of the gung-ho simplicity that defined the earlier games" so it really is a different breed of game. It's not so much a Doom sequel as it is a spinoff game set in the Doom universe, but it's a good one.

[scrilla4rella]

Just finished Doom (2016). Great game. Don't know how anyone could hate on it too much. Obv one could never surpass the original but a worthy entry for sure.