Doom: The Dark Ages nails the gameplay, the tone, and the gore

Doom: The Dark Ages is so much fun to play. I could really stop there and let you get on with your day, because my feeling on the game is quite simply that.

It’s incredibly fun. It’s uncompromised, energetic, brutal, and rewarding. It is everything that I’d hope and expect from a Doom game, pulled off by a team that’s clearly full of confidence.

Doom 2016 was an amazing surprise. Doom Eternal was technically a more accomplished game but perhaps strayed too far from 2016’s path for some. Doom: The Dark Ages threads the needle to create something that retains the first game’s viscera and the second’s flair without the platforming that was so Marmite for so many.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel. The game begins with intergalactic/inter-dimensional wars breaking out all around, all while the Doomslayer waits for his orders. He’s a weapon of war. When things are going badly, he’s projected down to earth at top speed, and thus begins the game.

Watch our exclusive Doom: The Dark Ages gameplay video…

The biggest difference that veteran players will feel straight away is the speed of the game. I played the game’s opening few hours, which reacquainted the player with the joy of disembolwing demons. Classic weapons return, but the guns take a backseat to what’s in the Slayer’s other hand that really stole our hearts.

The Doomslayer’s shield (think Captain America for the Kerrang! generation) is the catalyst for the majority of the movement, strategy, and laugh-out-loud moments in Doom: The Dark Ages. Much like Kratos’s similar piece of hulking metal, it can be used to stun enemies, it’s used for some puzzle solving, and it’s also used for movement. Using the shield to charge into enemies and blow them to pieces is now central to the game’s movement system, now that the Doomslayer has left his Heelys at home.

I was amazed by how quickly and effectively I was able to incorporate it into our gameplay. While I could throw it into a hulking enemy and stop his reign of fire, that would leave me exposed and unable to parry smaller enemies. In a later mission, I used my guns to shoot enemy shields until they had become white-hot, only to shatter them with the shield.

The flail, another melee weapon, adds a lot of speed to the action and largely replaces the Glory Kill system. While in Doom and Doom Eternal, it could feel like you were trying to jump from Glory Kill animation to Glory Kill animation, The Dark Ages is much faster. There are still bespoke animations, but it’s also now possible to simply flail your stunned enemy once and watch them explode into resources.

All of these combat changes come into their own in the game’s more open maps. One level I played saw me attempting to secure the perimeter of a castle. The area outside the castle was made up of a small open world, including hundreds of enemies.

These enemy camps served as mini-levels, each with its own terrain challenges and hordes to destroy. These were linked by areas to explore and secrets to find. While it could be easy to imagine all of these areas being segmented off into levels, the open-world approach gives the world far more depth and conveys the scale of the war well.

The game’s mech and dragon sections are the only ones that gave me pause. The mech level, while novel, was pretty basic and lacked the grip-tightening excitement of the traditional levels. These feel like pauses for breath. It’s funny to watch your massive mech destroy the planet and send small demons flying, but they feel like they’re mostly here to reset your heartbeat before you go for another set.

The dragon, which is visually spectacular, is somewhat awkward to control. It’s essentially a flying turret and makes for a great visual showpiece, but it’s not something I was clamouring for more of. It made for a good transition between several bases that I was taking down, but flying around and shooting with the dragon was far, far below the level of fun to be had on the ground, ripping and tearing.

While I may not be instantly convinced by some of the game’s more gimmicky elements, the gameplay of Doom: The Dark Ages is unimpeachable. The changes made to movement and weapons make for a game that sits comfortably between 2016 and Eternal, and I think it’s set to outshine both of them.

I can’t say enough things about the shield, which might be the best in-game accessory since God of War 2018. When I’d finished playing the demo I was genuinely disappointed that I couldn’t sit in the darkness for the rest of the day and no-life the game. That’s a feeling I last had with Doom in 2016, so I certainly think it’s on the right track ahead of its release in May.