#DOOM ETERNAL REVIEW FULL#
#DOOM ETERNAL REVIEW MODS#

But at the speed Doom Eternal runs at, it can be easy to forget you have some of those abilities at your disposal, or lose track of which ones are off cooldown, when the game is forcing you to make one split-second decision after another. I honestly found myself short of breath at the end of a couple of the Slayer Gates, after 10 frantic minutes of feeling like I was just barely hanging on before finally eking out a victory.

#DOOM ETERNAL REVIEW FULL#

This full loadout of new and old abilities offers you an amazing range of tactical options in a heavy firefight, and in an ideal setting, such as the Slayer Gate challenge arenas that constitute the purest and most intense combat sequences in the game, they lead to a level of intensity that's above and beyond possibly any other first-person shooter I've played. The sheer range of interesting locales you'll visit far exceeds the last game. Both of these are great ideas on paper that add to the variety of the action early on in the campaign (although the game does have a penchant for utilizing the air dash in occasional jumping puzzles that aren't really its strong suit). Blowing off the mancubus' arm cannons or the back-mounted gun on the arachnotron, or shoving a sticky bomb down the gullet of a cacodemon, is an immediate priority whenever those enemies come on the scene, purely because of how dangerous those attacks are and how urgent it is to disable them as a result. And dealing with the weak points is crucial for threat management.

Much like the double jump, the dash lets you pop off two quick horizontal movements in any direction, on the ground or in the air, which has obvious implications for getting around the combat space quickly. In addition, the two new elements that have the biggest impact on the flow of the combat are the double dash and the addition of weak points on heavier enemies that let you suppress their deadlier attacks. All of these have meters and cooldowns to keep an eye on in the corners of the UI.

Your basic melee turns into an area-of-effect 'blood punch' when you charge it up with enough of the health-yielding glory kills. You get not one but two types of grenades, concussive and freeze, that you can rapidly toggle between. There's now a flamethrower that works for armor the way the chainsaw does for ammo. The sequel picks back up with the same template-shoot demons to kill them, chainsaw them when you need ammo, rip them in half when you need health, double-jump and mantle away from them when you need breathing room-and then builds outward in every conceivable direction. The 2016 Doom reboot, or reimagining, or whatever you want to call it, left such a profound impression on me that I can't help filtering my thoughts about Eternal through a direct comparison. But then, when all the machinery is humming along just right and everything works in harmony, Doom Eternal offers some of the most frantic and overwhelming shooter action in history. That kind of escalation is arguably appropriate for a franchise as over-the-top and self-awarely absurd as Doom, but there are just so many pistons and gears whirring away under the hood here that you sometimes start to feel them grinding against each other a little when the action heats up.

#DOOM ETERNAL REVIEW MODS#

That means more mobility, more demons, more weapon mods and upgrades, more resource management… The list could go on and on, and frankly it's hard to think of a single aspect of Doom 2016 that hasn't been absolutely red-lined in this sequel. This followup to id Software’s no-nonsense 2016 revamp of that most seminal first-person shooter franchise takes a more-is-more approach to building on the brutal elegance of its predecessor.

There are a few reasons it took me three weeks to finish Doom Eternal, and not all of them are related to Doom Eternal, but then some of them are. Get ready to shoot this guy's arms off, a lot.

Doom eternal review