An even quicker, bloodier, somewhat erroneous shooter reboot that goes a little too far.
John Carmack, the creator of the first Doom, famously said, “A story in a game is like a story in a pornographic movie.” “It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” narrative, after all, tends to contain chemistry, mood, suspense, and all the other feelings that separate intimacy from the act of hammering on genitalia to ignite a human person. A sleaze aficionado may argue that narrative frequently makes for hotter porn. In any case, if video games are to be compared to pornography, and if you’re looking for the more dynamic sort, I highly suggest Doom Eternal, which is a looping video montage of enormous weapons and fists shooting at squelchy orifices at a speed of sixty frames per second.
With its intense metal music that never stopped rising to a crescendo and its leering close-ups of impaled hellspawn interspersed between the intense firefights, 2016’s brilliant remake was already quite the debauch. You may sprint and flip your way through arenas that are now focused on the vertical axis as Eternal cranks up the heat even further. Demon torsos are pulled apart and then their dripping organs are shoved back in; charged alt-fires cry out to be let go; health orbs splatter the chokepoints and ramps like — well, you get the idea. The settings often resemble the creations of a teenage H.R. Giger who has just become interested in AC/DC. Apart from some really grotty office buildings and gleaming, Protoss-like strongholds, you’ll explore mazes of writhing flesh, using your shotgun to split pop-up tentacles in two and runes to loosen teethy sphincters.
Naturally, others may sternly assert that this is all simply pure, respectable gaming violence—completely devoid of any overtones or undertones—and that’s all that it is. And to these individuals I respond, well, it’s hard to deny that there’s a metaphor at work when I find myself going down the shaft of a massive spear, down into the gaping, reeling belly of a giant. “Rip and tear” ? Better yet, tear and splooge.
Carmack’s lewd comment, which he has since clarified a bit, perfectly captures the idea that storylines in video games are often forced into them, like a foreign body imported from literature and movies. This viewpoint has been thoroughly refuted. To be sure, Eternal has a plot tucked away in amid the procession of demon O-faces, but even if it’s small by Zenimax game standards, it seems very forced. After foiling Hell’s assault on Mars, the fabled Doom Slayer must drive away evil intruders from Earth. Departing from a gothic orbital station transformed into a customs center, she travels to a number of destroyed towns, factories, and temples that seem to be borrowed from Gears of War. During the process, he has to go back in time and endure a stunningly dramatic past filled with memories and arguments with former comrades.
A significant decision made by id was to include a substantial narrative component written by co-founder Tom Hall in the original Doom game, but instead, the 2016 game magnified Doom’s narrative trappings by adding cutscenes, audio diaries, codex entries, and mid-mission dialogue. This was an odd reversal of one of id’s key decisions. Eternal increases the burden even farther by increasing the cast and emphasizing lore twice.
Instead of being two massive fists twitching under your aiming reticle, the Slayer is now a completely real human figure who you can style up with various clothes and weapon skins in the first-person cutscenes. Instead of feeling like a guy who is playing Doom and shares your contempt for everything that gets in the way, as Christian Donlan once said, he seems encased by the fantasy. A scientist tries to explain the character’s superhuman abilities by saying that you stand for humanity’s will to live rather than its enjoyment of seeing Cacodemons explode in slow motion. Even the Slayer has a voice these days, but I believe he only says five syllables at a time.
It’s true that the guy in green never seems content with all the attention, marching angrily through the cinematics as other people, if they’re fortunate, give him monologues as he retreats (the majority of speaking parts in Eternal end up crushed up like tuna). It’s also not necessary for you to peruse the codex or listen to the audio diaries. However, these features hold you down, much like the purple goop lakes that prevent you from leaping or running in other stages. They serve as a depressing reminder that you aren’t here to give in to your baser desires. On the other hand, the world-building is thin and repetitive, consisting mostly of cliched allusions to extinct races, legendary conflicts, and destroyed cities, as a result of the developer’s regretful realization that players don’t play Doom for the story.
Nevertheless, Eternal provides enough of visceral enjoyment if that’s the aim. Once again, the fight involves constantly switching between assault and retreat, taking advantage of the chaotic battlefield environment to rip ammunition, health, and armor refills from your opponent rather than just looking for first aid supplies or a place to cool down. When you stun an enemy, you may take them out for a little health. When you finish changing your victim’s body, other demons will ease off, making these executions serve as windows of relaxation. You may use them to hide from a crowd or make an escape since they can be activated from a distance of just a few meters, warping you to your destination without the benefit of a transitional animation. Meanwhile, if you use your reliable chainsaw to dispatch demons, you’ll be rewarded with a fountain of ammunition that will refill all of your weapons at once. The larger demons will need a lot of chainsaw fuel to cut down, but you’ll always have enough to cut down the smaller “fodder” demons, who respawn continuously throughout each combat until the larger ones are eliminated.
This very aggressive resource management approach compels you to catch up to opponents who are skilled at dragging you down. Though the underworld’s legions are weak on snipers and artillery, some, like the minion-summoning Archville, are more prone to topographical hazards; in fact, almost every character, from the podgy Mancubus to the serpentine Whiplash, is determined to get in your face. Although the fight in Eternal appears chaotic and often is, there is a great deal of science and skill in the way the important elements are presented second by second. Drops of ammo, health, and armor are color-coded; adversaries who are staggered glow blue at first, then orange when they are close enough to hit you. The game’s audio is equally readable, after you acclimatise to the booming heavy metal music. You’ll become skilled at listening for cues that indicate the status of a combat, such as the howl of a charging Pinky, the tink of a cooldown gauge, or the belch of a Cacodemon that has just consumed something explosive and is about to be executed.
One of the new variables is an ice grenade that may be mapped to the trigger and used to flash-freeze whole groups, stopping otherwise deadly offensives. Using your shoulder flamethrower attachment, you may also set enemies on fire, forcing them to spew out armor pieces and encouraging you to engage in close combat while you’re wounded. But the biggest adjustment is your increased agility. In addition to using launchpads, the Slayer may now swing from monkey bars, climb laddered surfaces, execute airborne dashes, and tug himself past or towards opponents using a grappling line attached to a Super Shotgun.
This promotes ostentatious behavior akin to the anti-gravity fights in the tragically lost Lawbreakers. You could grip someone, throw yourself past them while shooting a shotgun point blank, double-jump to a monkey bar, launch yourself at a Pain Elemental that is dazed, and then land cleanly onto a launchpad to cover the arena with micro-missiles while switching to your Heavy Assault Rifle. With two interchangeable alternate-fires per gun that support various strategies and opponents, the weapons are mostly fun remakes of Doom 2016. For example, your shotgun may be used as a buckshot-firing Gatling gun to control crowds or as a sticky grenade launcher to attempt to take down a Cyberdemon’s turret.
The more you go away from these firefights, the more likely it is that Eternal will lose its allure. Aside from its more elaborate narrative, the game’s customization options are a little overwhelming. In addition to finding weapon modifications throughout the levels, you’ll equip runes for benefits like slow motion while aiming in midair and upgrades to the Praetor Suit that allow you to suck in health drops from a greater distance. A skill for mixing Rune bonuses exists, particularly when taking on “Master” versions of levels with more punitive opponent spawn patterns, but the role-playing elements lack originality, and the accompanying menu-diving drags down a shooter that excels during intense combat.
The campaign’s typical division between battle bowls and platforming sections that resemble they were taken straight out of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is what truly depletes Eternal, however. There are secret combat chambers and trinkets to be found, some concealed in high alcoves or behind walls that may be smashed, but the overall sequence of shoot-out followed by a jumpy part and then another shoot-out remains the same. The largest shift in tone occurs during boss bouts; your opponent hovers over the battlefield like the world’s most irate D&D player in this intense two-phase fight. However, some of them are merely bothersome; they’re just a matter of repeating a strategy to reduce a health bar. The fact that the game gives you a layer of virtually unbreakable Sentinel armor after a particular amount of deaths is revealing, but other than that, Eternal’s accessibility is welcome: lowering the difficulty doesn’t affect your progress, and you resume on the earlier difficulty after the bossfight concludes.
It’s important to keep in mind that classic Doom included more than simply isolated killings. It could be menacing and unsettling. It had hidden partitions that may suddenly slide open and creatures that you could hear through the walls and shambling about in the level’s interior. It had a story, kind of, but it didn’t attempt to ground the strangeness of its idea or places in mythology, and its mysteries had as much to do with taking use of virtual architecture’s potential as they did with getting a power-up. It was a world of perilous nooks and turns, of optical trickery that bent and altered just because they could. Even if Doom Eternal has a ton of stuff, the experience isn’t exactly the same. Occasionally, it seems as if the levels were created backwards from the finish screen, complete with shopping lists of extra encounters and riches. You might argue that, overall, 3D worlds are just less startling in 2020 than they were in 1993, but that would be ignoring the labors of many Doom modders whose creations, produced with the original id engine and tools, still shock and wow us to this day.
The assessment is incomplete without discussing multiplayer, which is currently unavailable but seems to be an improvement over the unfinished online mode in Doom 2016. One player takes on the role of the Slayer, while the other players take control of one of the five demon breeds from the campaign. It’s a totally asymmetrical affair. With the D-pad, you may call AI-controlled hellspawn as a demon, thus winning probably comes down to mob tactics as much as skillful damage-dealing. Which, after you’re sick of the steamy hug of a campaign that, while defying Carmack’s age-old dictum, has a chance to be among the greatest you’ll play this year, seems like a nice way to cool down. Still, I’m not sure about Doom Eternal. With new props, the game is essentially a relaunch of 2016; its unwavering dedication to Doom’s story world is as perplexing as it is thrilling, especially during the intense firefights. Is really all Doom can possibly be these days, a never-ending stream of memorabilia, pointless cutscenes, and the visual treat of a gurning demon face?