Doom Returnal | Doom: The Dark Ages review: Cleave and reave till it be finished
Doom Eternal wrapped up Doom 2016’s story pretty well with its second DLC. That made Doom: The Dark Ages all the more exciting because it freed up idSoftware to take the franchise in an entirely new direction. And it did. Spectacularly. It feels like three games squished together in a neat package, and I’m all for it. Right from the get-go, Doom: The Dark Ages makes it abundantly clear it is nothing like Eternal. You start out with a shield. A shield. In a Doom game. And that shield will be your best buddy because it is a core part of the gameplay. It does everything. Gives you mobility, clears trash mobs, blocks damage and parries enemy attacks. That, and melee weapons will be your best friends for most of the game, and initially, weapons almost feel like an afterthought. More on that later.
One of the first changes you’ll notice is that the Doom Slayer feels a lot more girthy. He has a real heft to him and every time you fall from a height, fodder demons disappear in a radius around impact. Double dashing and the general verticality found previously is gone. Stand and Fight, the game’s motto, is borderline false advertising because if you stand in one place, you will die. The annoying tutorials are now gone, and now you can field test new weapons on live demons instead of being stuck in a limbo.
Performance
Unlike standard AAA games that regularly take up north of 100 GB of hard drive space, Doom: The Dark Ages only asks for around 70 GB. 66 GB would have been an iconic number because, you know, Doom and all. On paper, it is one of the more demanding games launched this year. My experience with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has been nothing short of butter smooth. With everything cranked up to Ultra Nightmare, I could easily average 80–100 FPS with DLSS Quality enabled. It uses the company’s new idTech8 engine, the same one that powered Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Path Tracing was not switched on in our review copy, but should be available at launch. We’ll have a dedicated piece on how Doom: The Dark Ages performs with everything cranked to max shortly after it drops. For now, here's how it ran on a bunch of laptops we had at hand.
You should be able to run it on lower-end systems with relative ease. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it running on my Steam Deck, but that’s probably because it lacked the proper drivers. It isn’t Deck Verified, and its minimum system requirements suggest it will probably not make the cut officially. Nevertheless, idSoftware continues to show why they’re one of the best in the industry. In my playthrough, I encountered just one annoying bug where a monster spawned slightly out of bounds, effectively stopping me from finishing that encounter. Some quick thinking later, it was dispatched off, and the game continued as usual. Doom: The Dark Ages is an Nvidia-adjacent title, and here's how it fares with DLSS. While Frame Generation undoubtedly gives it a performance boost, it comes at the cost of input latency. However, in Doom: The Dark Ages, that doesn't seem to be a problem at up to 1440p on a laptop RTX 5080 GPU. It gets noticeable at 4K, but realistically speaking, you're better off with a desktop GPU or a RTX 5090 at that resolution.
Gameplay
You’ll have to completely reprogram your Doom Eternal muscle memory to get in Doom: The Dark Ages’ groove. It isn’t all that bad, and you’ll be ripping and tearing in no time. The core gameplay loop remains the same. You progress from area to area, fight a mob of demons, unlock the next region. Rinse. Repeat. As the game progresses, segments are broken up with traversal puzzles. These aren’t nearly as difficult as the ones found in previous games, but hey, the god-awful platforming sections are gone at last.
Most of the game is a linear experience—as it should be—but there are a few ‘open world’ type segments where you can complete objectives in any order you see fit. On regular difficulty, there’s no reason to prefer some areas over others, but that dynamic could change at Nightmare because upgrade materials obtained in the open world could give you a much-needed competitive edge in slightly harder encounters.
The ‘lives’ system from Doom Eternal carries over, but you can only have three at a time. If you check your map and explore thoroughly, you shouldn’t run out because each map has a few lying around. You probably won’t die much in the early game on lower difficulties, and if you’re out of lives, you can always replay older levels to grab any lives you left behind.
Parrying is a core mechanic of the game, and the sooner you master it, encounters become significantly easier. Of course, not everything can be parried, but anything that can, is shown in a bright-green colour. If that doesn’t sit right, you can change the colour from the settings to something that suits you aesthetically. Both melee attacks and projectiles can be parried, with the former requiring some quick reflexes. You’ll often find yourself in bullet hell-like situations with a million different projectiles flying at you. More like Doom Returnal.
Doom: The Dark Ages breaks the monotony by letting you pilot a gargantuan Atlan mech. While piloting it, you’re exclusively fighting Titans scattered throughout the map. Mech combat felt a little clunky and their movement wasn’t as fluid as other sections. Most of your encounters are hand-to-hand, but the game does throw you an occasional weapon or two. And yes, there’s parrying here, too, in the form of perfect dodges. Thankfully, there aren’t too many mech levels and they and get over relatively quick.
The dragon segments, on the other hand, are way more fun. Flight controls are impeccable, and there’s some morbid satisfaction to breathing fire down a Titan’s throat. Far more than beating one to submission with your fists. While the Titan portions are largely linear and leave no scope for discovery, there’s plenty you can miss here, so make sure you explore every nook and cranny.
Upgrades and Loot
Speaking of upgrade materials, you no longer have to scour every inch of the map for Sentinel crystals/keys. Health, armour, and ammo upgrades are now tied to specific in-game mini-bosses that show up from time to time. You’ll encounter most of them relatively easily, but some can only be acquired via optional encounters. This new system makes upgrading a lot less cumbersome, but it is not without caveats.
For one, you don’t get to pick what part of your character you want to upgrade. Want that extra bit of health to survive longer? Nope. Here’s an extra ammo upgrade for a gun you seldom use. From a balance point of view, it makes sense because it dissuades players from becoming too powerful too fast. Personally, I’m not a fan of this change, but your mileage may vary.
Gear upgrades also got a massive overhaul. You now have to hunt for gold to upgrade your shield, melee weapons and guns at Sentinel shrines. While most levels have gold places around in convenient locations, most of it is stashed away in hard-to-find places. Once again, the mini map is your friend here. Check it often and you’ll never fall short of gold.
At higher tiers, upgrades require Rubies and Wraithstones. Unlike gold, they’re a lot harder to come by and will almost always require you to find secret areas. Wraithstones are often locked behind challenges that involve destroying a set number of objects scattered throughout the map. Unlike gold and other collectibles, these don’t have markers, so you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled.
As the franchise that started the trend of secret hunting, Doom: The Dark Ages has its share of collectible knick-knacks such as lore entries, weapon skins and toys, strewn throughout the map. Some of them are placed in plain sight, taunting you to find them, while others will require some serious backtracking. I’m not the best at finding secrets, but I was able to get most of them on my first try, and you should be able to do so, too.
Weapons and Monsters
Moving on to weapons, the core component of any Doom game. Weapon mods are now gone, but live on in spirit as weapon classes. As you progress, you unlock different weapon variants, each suited for specific tasks. For example, you start off the game with a normal shotgun and get its companion, the legendary super shotgun, a few levels later.
Barring one, each weapon class has two variants. And yes, there’s a BFG, but it isn’t called that. Bethesda showed it off in the second trailer, and if you’re eagle-eyed, you already have an idea what it is. It is now a crossbow and it packs just as much of a punch. And yes, it has limited ammo scattered in nooks and crannies, so don't squander it all at once.
Once you fully upgrade a weapon, you unlock optional challenges that involve performing specific tasks with the said weapon. You don’t have to unless you plan on unlocking all achievements. Weapons that seemed underwhelming initially start to feel overpowered a few upgrades in. And like in Doom Eternal, quick switching is absolutely necessary because you will run out of ammo.
Doom: The Dark Ages has the regular cast of quintessential Doom monsters with a few notable absentees that you’ll figure out on your own. Trash mobs still have imps, zombies, soldiers and two different types of shield wielders. Then there’s the Mancubus, Arachnotrons, Cacodemons, Cyberdemons and a few others. No Marauder this time, unfortunately.
While each level has ammo dumps scattered throughout, your main source is still low-level mobs. But the lack of a chainsaw makes the ammo requisition process feel a lot less intense. One can argue that a chainsaw isn’t thematically accurate for something set it medieval times, but then, neither are shotguns and giant mechs.
Music and Story
Ever since Mick Gordon blew everybody’s mind with the soundtrack for Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, it has become an archetypal part of every Doom game. Tracks like 'BFG Division' and 'Rip and Tear' are forever ingrained into internet history. Mick’s unholy amalgamation of Djent, metal, dubstep, industrial tools made you feel like the Doom Slayer. Literally too angry to die. In 'Cultist Base', you feel primordial rage you didn’t know existed when the lawnmower hits (yes, really). And that blends in perfectly with all the ripping and tearing you’re doing on screen. 'The Only Thing They Fear is You' does the same thing. Puts you in the Slayer’s shoes mentally.
Finishing Move Inc had to pick up Mick’s mantle and, unfortunately, they didn’t make the cut. Yeah, the game has a distortion-heavy metal soundtrack playing in the background, but it just doesn’t make you feel the same unfettered rage like some of Mick’s creations. If anything, it sounds like it was conceived in a boardroom. It’s edgy, but corporate edgy. You’ll know what I’m talking about after a while. Given how badly Mick was treated last time, one can understand why they’ll never work together. But I can’t help but wonder why Bethesda didn’t go with someone like Andrew Hulshult, who did a stellar job with scores for The Ancient Gods.
Let’s face it, until Doom 2016, the plot didn’t matter. But now that idSoftware created a whole new universe with rich lore, you can’t really ignore it. Doom: The Dark Ages, like its name suggests, is set before the events of both prior Doom games. You start off as a puppet of the Makyrs (the ones you completely annihilated in Eternal), aiding the Sentinels with fighting off demons. King Novik, a borderline irrelevant character from Doom Eternal, is a pivotal figure here. You start off running a few errands for the Sentinels, one thing leads to another, and you find yourself, once again, at the gates of hell fighting. But this time, it doesn’t involve destroying an entire facility just to open up a portal. There are two main antagonists: Prince Azhrak and the veiled Witch, both of whom make multiple appearances in the trailer. The game is confirmed to get standalone DLC later, and that should hopefully explain how we ended up in a coffin at the start of Doom 2016.
Verdict
Coming in at around 20 hours, Doom: The Dark Ages is a fitting sequel that was well worth the five-year wait. It is an unquestionably stellar game, and everyone should experience it at least once. Many would argue its $80 asking price is a tad high, but in this case, you are getting your money’s worth. And you can play it on Xbox Game Pass at launch. Yeah, there isn’t much in the way of replay value because you’re going through the same familiar maps again, but you can make things progressively harder thanks to the myriads of difficulty sliders. If you’re feeling adventurous, the entire HUD can be turned off for a true Doom Slayer experience. idSoftware hasn’t revealed what it has lined up for Doom: The Dark Ages, and I sincerely hope it gets the love and care it deserves.
With GTA VI effectively pushed back to 2026, Doom: The Dark Ages would have had a shot at winning Game of the Year, but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 exists, and that game has captured hearts like no other. Besides, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei and maybe even Half-Life 3 (copium) are on the horizon. Considering all that, Doom has a steep hill to climb. But it can easily sweep up accolades in other categories, and it deserves every one of them.
Doom The Dark Ages has the potential to be one of the more divisive games of the franchise. There will be a not-so-insignificant portion of the fanbase that prefers Eternal’s speed over The Dark Ages, and frankly, that’s fine. Others will argue that it is afflicted by the open world Souls-ification that everyone is fond of nowadays. Never did I think idSoftware would make a concoction out of Doom, Sekiro and Returnal, but here we are. In conclusion, go play the game, even if you’re not a Doom fan, because this one, much like the 1993 original, will make you look at FPS games like never before.
Pros
Cons
