New Cinematic Filter Mode Available Now for ‘KARMA: The Dark World’ [Trailer]

While I may have never made mods or been competitive in its multiplayer mode, I have a long history with the Doom series. After my dad uninstalled Wolfenstein 3D from our first computer when he found out how violent it was, I would go over to my friend’s house and get my fix of first person shooter ultraviolence by playing the first two Doom games.

When Doom 3 came out, I appreciated its change in tone to something more moody and spooky, and then celebrated its return to classic form with DOOM (2016). DOOM: Eternal was the first game that I bounced off of, not really enjoying all the extra bells and whistles of complexity they added to the extremely streamlined 2016 version.

All this history was in mind when I booted up DOOM: The Dark Ages, a prequel to the most recent games that again reinvents the franchise after the divisive reaction to Eternal.

DOOM: The Dark Ages plops you in the middle of a medieval war against Hell. The Doom Slayer is under the control of the Kreed Maykr, being dropped into missions alongside the Sentinels of Argent D’Nur as they battle against the demon forces of Prince Ahzrak. Even though it’s medieval-inspired, there’s still a cool mix of technology and fantasy imagery, so don’t worry that it’s going to be entirely swords and sorcery.

You might ask why I’m starting a Doom review by talking about story and characters. That’s because The Dark Ages really seems to want you to care about what’s going on. Game Director Hugo Martin mentioned in interviews leading up to the game that one of the three core pillars of the new game would be “story,” and there’s a surprising number of cutscenes in the game’s 15 hour campaign. Personally, this focus was off putting to me; anytime I see the Doom Slayer in third person, it feels strange to me after years of seeing exclusively through his eyes.

I’m sure people who have fun putting together the timelines of the series might enjoy the tale that unfolds, but everything here is pretty bland to me, with paper thin characters and not much going on narratively. I know you’re probably rolling your eyes at me for criticizing Doom for its story, but like in a cooking competition, if you put it on the plate, I’ve gotta judge it. The 2016 game had a fun tone, where it was almost antagonistic to the concept of even giving you exposition, so for the story to become one of the pillars of the Doom experience is a bit puzzling to me.

But that’s not why most of us are here – we’re here to rip and tear until it’s done, and the changes that DOOM: The Dark Ages makes to combat simplify the experience while adding a new layer to it, and for the most part it’s successful. The analogy the team at id Software has been using is that if DOOM: Eternal had you moving around like a fighter jet, The Dark Ages is more like a tank. The key behind this new design philosophy is the addition of a shield, which adds both a focus on parrying as a defense and new tactics that will keep you on the offensive.

In Bloodborne, when you find the wooden shield, the description mocks the very idea of shields, saying that they “engender passivity.” I was worried that its addition to Doom would change the aggressive, push forward style of combat that Doom is known for, but I’m happy to say it actually makes it feel even more aggressive. The shield has four basic uses in the game: throwing it like Captain America, blocking enemy attacks, parrying, and a shield charge. Of these attacks, I found myself using the shield throw the least, but it does act as this game’s version of the pistol, a way to kill fodder enemies without expending any ammo for your other, better weapons.

All the other shield options transform the game into feeling different from its predecessors. If an Arachnotron is shooting machine gun rounds your way, you can block with the shield to negate damage until you find cover to break its sightline. Or, if you just want to deal with it quickly, you can shield charge at it, slamming into it at high speed and putting it right in range for a blast from a Super Shotgun. This charge can also be used to zip you around the battlefield as you regroup, destroying some fodder enemies as you try to collect some precious health so you can get back into the thick of it. Even though you’re a bit slower than in Eternal, it still feels like you can be purposefully mobile when you need to be in a way that’s super satisfying.

I was fully expecting parrying to be a useless addition, but it contributed to the most important feeling Doom can give you: feeling like a badass. You can’t parry all melee or projectile attacks, just ones that are green, so spamming the parry button doesn’t make you invincible at all times. It adds one more thing for you to pay attention to as you assess the battlefield, but its bold color coding never makes it feel hard to read. On the default difficulty setting, the parry maybe feels a bit too generous, but not to the point where it felt like a cakewalk. It’s all extremely video game-y in the best way, but it makes squaring up against a specific enemy a bit more engaging. Nothing felt better than seeing a Cyberdemon across the way, dodging its red projectiles, hitting the parry on its green projectiles, then shield rushing into its face, parrying its melee strike, then smashing it with your mace, all with excellent hit stops to emphasize each moment.

There’s some good twists on classic weapons here, along with some new ones, but it feels like they lost a little something along the way. My go-to weapons were the Plasma Rifle and Super Shotgun, which feels appropriately devastating given the ease at which you can get into close range, but some of the new weapons also felt pretty great too. There’s one that grinds up skulls and blasts out the shrapnel in a wide pattern, allowing you to take on big hordes at a distance. Another clever addition to your arsenal was one that launched a ball on a chain, which leans into the melee-range combat The Dark Ages excels at. I did miss the alternate fire modes for the weapons that were featured in DOOM (2016) and DOOM: Eternal, which have been replaced by a series of passive upgrades that can be purchased. These never feel quite as exciting as the alt fires, but you can definitely feel your weapons getting more effective as you advance down the upgrade paths.

It surprised me how little I was switching between weapons, because previous Doom games always felt like they were limiting your ammo in order to keep you cycling through things, but I quickly fell into a rhythm with my loadout and only changed things up to force myself to experiment. The glory kill system is a bit stripped down in this game; enemies will still flash in a staggered state when you get them low on health but executing them is no longer tied to a long animation, and you’ll still get ammo if you do melee finishers on them. Using the shield to get in close made it easy for me to always have ammo, so I was never really scrambling to find a new weapon when my mains ran out.

The range of enemies feels great, and they have expanded move-sets to match your parry abilities. It’s a cool escalation that matches your capabilities, and many of the new enemies are designed to be very in your face with melee attacks that test your timing. Each of them has a very distinct look, which allows you to know exactly what you can expect at all times, a very important fact given the speed of combat. All the horrible demon creatures are gorgeously rendered and show some really gruesome battle damage as you blast away at them, giving you a tangible sense of progress as you run through them.

There are a few bosses near the end of the game, which I think feel appropriately complex and exciting, but most of the time when they want to ramp up the intensity of a fight they throw in leader enemies. These are stronger versions of standard enemies that have shields protecting them until you kill a certain amount of other enemies to make it vulnerable. It’s another really video game-y element, but it works by adding complexity to the encounters, forcing you to dance around your invincible foe and take out the others. Even with this wrinkle, it still feels like DOOM: The Dark Ages runs out of new tricks about sixty percent of the way through the campaign, making some of the later half feel less exciting.

There are 22 missions throughout the game, with a variety of level sizes. They’ve promised to deliver their most expansive levels to date, which has resulted in more open world-esque spaces to explore. Some of the levels drop you on a big battlefield where you’ve got three to five objectives scattered about that can be completed in any order, which feels unique but not exactly transformative. Many of the spaces you explore are just outdoor areas, which sometimes feel a bit barren and lifeless. This might just be a taste thing on my part, but one of the things I always appreciated about Doom was the juxtaposition between the sci-fi space station and the demonic infestation of Hell imagery, so the medieval setting, with castles and forests and the like, isn’t as interesting to me. While I definitely didn’t find all of them, I wasn’t as intrigued by the secrets hidden around the levels, and the puzzles to reach them were rarely super satisfying.

Doom loves putting you in arenas as you tear through waves of enemies, and The Dark Ages features good, if uninventive, spaces for these types of fights. Given the extra mobility from the shield, they build impressively large arenas for you to fight in, which gives you space to bounce between different little pockets of enemies that litter the landscape. Arenas feel good to traverse, littered with health and ammo pickups to keep you in motion, but they all start to blend together, as none of the arenas are really built around unique or memorable locations or moments.

There are some unique additions to the world of Doom that have mixed success at being additive. The game introduces a new area called the Cosmic Realm, which is very Lovecraft inspired, that you’ll spend a few missions in. It provides a well needed change up to the levels, sometimes leaning into more strange and mind bending spaces, but for the most part it’s still a lot of rocky areas that don’t do much to distinguish themselves aside from a different color tint.

Throughout the missions, you’ll run into two massive additions to the gameplay: sequences where you pilot either hulking mechs or powerful dragons. These feel designed to deliver epic moments, but don’t really hold up as much gameplay-wise. In a mech, you just punch and dodge melee-focused enemies as you stomp through the areas, without the same complexity you’re used to in the rest of the game. While on a dragon, you’re basically just flying around shooting at specific points on the map, locking onto targets and dodging as you continue to pelt them until they explode.

Both of these sections have little meters that fill up before allowing you to do the cooler big-damage moves. The dragon parts feel particularly annoying, forcing you to dodge green attacks to fill up the meter before being given the stronger weapon that can actually do damage to weak points. It feels like an artificial way to force you to engage with the dodging mechanic, making the dragon parts feel pretty weak overall. While I wasn’t over the moon about either of these additions, it does offer a break from the standard gameplay and provides some good large-scale spectacle, if that’s something that works for you.

On a technical level, DOOM: The Dark Ages looks and runs incredible. I played on the PS5, and it was smooth as butter while rendering some gloriously large areas with ease. While I think it looks great, I do wish that it wasn’t so dark in its color palette, which again may come down to the trappings of its new setting. Enemies felt less vibrant than they did in the previous games, causing them to get lost among the landscapes of darkly-colored rock. Since a big part of the combat is focused on being able to quickly scan the battlefield and make tactical decisions in the moment, being able to spot enemies at a glance is critical, so I wish they just popped a little bit more to help out with that.

The sounds of the game are good, building on what’s already been in the series so far without adding much new. You still get really satisfying sounds as your guns blast and your enemies are being eviscerated, with the same heavy Doom soundtrack propelling you through it all. That being said, I don’t really feel like the music felt as memorable this time around, and I couldn’t tell if that’s because it didn’t feel novel or because it actually wasn’t up to the standards of previous games. I suspect it’s the latter, given that this score was done by Finishing Move, rather than Mick Gordon who did the music for the 2016 reboot, but I’d have to sit down and listen to the soundtracks side by side to figure it out.

All the changes to the Doom formula in The Dark Ages proves that id Software knows how to continue to evolve the gameplay of the series in ways that still emphasize the feeling of the original. The new shield and parry combat focus manages to align perfectly with the classic aggressive and kinetic battles in ways that I didn’t expect would work, allowing you to deliver the game’s signature brand of over-the-top and crunchy violence in brand new ways. While the change in setting didn’t work for me as much aesthetically, it seems like a welcome change that keeps the series from stagnating. I wish they would reconsider their shift to story and ‘epic moments’ like the mech and dragon section, because I felt like some of the fundamentals of level and encounter design were lacking a bit compared to previous entries, despite having a satisfying combat feel overall.

I’m glad we can see this type of fast-paced, reflex-based shooter on such a huge budget, because id knows how to make a thrilling shooter that is as satisfying mechanically as it is visually.

Review code provided by publisher. DOOM: The Dark Ages arrives May 15 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Xbox Game Pass.