Doom Eternal - The Evolution of id

The Only Thing They Fear is The Player

It's hard to know where to start with Doom Eternal. It's the culmination of a near 4 year wait after the cliffhanger ending of Doom 2016, a game that significantly and brutally ups every ante placed by its precursor game. It also represents something deeper than a bigger, brighter, louder, even more violent sequel to a game that was such a sensory overload, people were putting out a lot of legit writing talking about how it emotionally engaged the player through sheer intensity: it represents id Software taking back something that was once pushed to the forefront by that name. The team is all different now, but that's the thing: it's not the originals working on Doom Eternal, it's the people that were inspired by the original Doom games. This is what makes the difference: this is not a game about what Doom was, it's a game about what Doom can be.

If Doom 2016 was a game that took Doom gameplay and feel- the high speed movement, the right-tool-for-the-right-job combat design, the progressive exploration of sprawling environments, the demons, the gore -and updated it for more modern sensibilities, then Doom Eternal takes that as the foundation and builds on it. Builds an unholy temple of pain on it.

Doom 2016 was a game of astonishing speed and aggression. What does Eternal add to such a formula? It adds a high speed double dash that can be performed in the air, a shoulder-mounted flamethrower, a grappling hook that can be upgraded to light enemies on fire, the ability to charge up an explosive punch that turns lesser demons to a tangy red smoke, and an anti-demonic power sword that Doomguy holds first holds aloft like Prince Adam turning into He-Man. All of these things sound like superfluous, wouldn't-it-be-cool-if additions, just there so there can be some new verbs for the player to play with in the sequel. Instead, the game's been retuned, finely, to fit these new additions.

Ammo capacity is down, so the pressure is on you to use your chainsaw on enemies, which like in 2016 causes ammo to spawn. To facilitate this, the last pip of chainsaw fuel regenerates constantly, allowing you nigh-constant mechanical ripping and tearing. Like the saw, which remains family, Glory Kills are back- for folks who didn't play Doom 2016, dropping an enemy to critical health puts them into a stagger state, where if you approach them and hit them with a melee attack, you instead kill them. With your bare hands. Violently and often hilariously, like the hybrid of Three Stooges and Evil Dead 2 you've always wanted. Beyond being incredibly cathartic, especially when dealing with the game's harder demons, doing this heals you. This is because the Doom Slayer is an overunity machine of ultraviolence and defense of the innocent; killing demons heals him. This makes sense.

New to the mix is burning and freezing enemies, with burning demons generating armour pickups- I dunno, just go with it, it works from a gameplay standpoint -and freezing enemies momentarily holding them still. Trust me, getting demons to calm down and stand still in this game is important, the AI's got the aggression of a komodo dragon stampede, and every demon is capable of getting a hard shot in on you if you let it get its best swing off. Then there's The Crucible, Doomguy's death metal energy-claymore, living proof that Kylo Ren was only a half-measure of edgelord by a comparative measure of lightsaber design. The Crucible is a one hit kill on virtually anything in the game, and more to the point, it dispatches them with this incredible knife-through-butter feel that only adds to the tactile sense of satisfaction in all of the game's animations. There's just a sizzling WUSH of red that flashes in front of the screen, and whichever enemy you hit with it flies apart in two halves, often with at least one of the halves disintegrating to ash before they hit the ground.

Combine all of these new combat and mobility tools with level design that shows the experience of the team, and you've got pretty much exactly what I wanted in a sequel to Doom 2016: More. Bigger. Faster. Deadlier. They've leaned into the black comedy of a major corporation literally ushering in Hell on Earth, and on top of that, there's even more comedy in the actual violence. This sounds kind of ridiculous, but that's the thing, the violence is itself ridiculous- you hammer-fist a zombie on the top of its head, and its head telescopes into its chest, causing it to make an audible "DOOpphh!" and go cross-eyed as it keels over. Cacodemons will now instinctively swallow grenades launched at their open mouths, causing them to, a second later, expand with a muffled bang, then deflate and emit smoke from their orifices before going into their stagger state. Arachnotrons, the big spider-nerds from Doom 2, make their return by getting dispatched with a variety of hilarious "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" attacks, just like the huge demonic geeks they are.

2016 saw the supposed apotheosis of Doomguy into a demigod figure, a being Hell has come to fear called the Doom Slayer. Eternal goes so far as to confirm that, as of this whole time, we've been playing the same character since 1993- only Doom 3, the horror game spin-off of the series, features a different protagonist. A character who was once a blank slate, save for the fact that he was a marine demoted to functionally a security guard for refusing to fire on a riot and that he assaulted his superior officer over it, has become a hellforged guardian of humanity, a man who fought through having his sanity shattered by multiple one-man campaigns against the netherworld and became a divine weapon, a demigod destroyer of the demonic under a vow of silence, his madness quenched into a tempered fury, focus and love for his planet Earth. If this sounds like the sort of figure that would be at the core of a really incredible work of progressive metal, congratulations, you have nailed what the soundtrack of this game is like.

This is because composer Mick Gordon has once again outdone himself and shown that there's no bottom of his skill and imagination, not to mention his ability to make you feel through sheer sound. Gordon's ability to amplify any of Doom's moods and atmospheres, be they the high intensity of combat or the low foreboding of exploration and platforming, is well on display here, once again providing that same sense of melding into the game that Doom 2016 did. You move when the soundtrack does in Doom Eternal, and vice versa, and so many of the combat tracks are quite literally hard for me to not headbang to while playing, if not just start grooving to. The brutal and heavy sound of the music is once again back, with the primary instruments again being a 9-string electric guitar, a Soviet-made Polyvok synth, and a mess of effects pedals and modules connected in arcane patterns. Like Doom 2016, you have the same sense of manic and bonecrushing power in the combat tracks, and the same sense of evil foreboding in the ambiance. What has changed from 2016 to Eternal is an increased emphasis on melody and more electronic components to the music, which as a result makes the soundtrack even more in-line with the vibe of the original Doom soundtracks, just with the incredible sense of aggression and wall-of-sound loudness. Also new is the edition of the Metal Choir, an assembly of over 30 metal singers from across subgenres, recorded in an opera house. It's difficult to describe the sheer power this has added to the sound of Doom Eternal, this combined and beautiful animal roar that is collected humanity. The Metal Choir is also the last work of the late Nature Ganganbaigal, frontman of Tengger Cavalry and Mongolian throat singer, a man with an incredible voice, the echoes of which will be your most notable companion in Eternal's most desolate places. Knowing this adds this unearthly sense of weight and importance to the music. 

In other words, Doom Eternal represents the next step, if not for first person shooters as a whole genre, then for id Software as a creator of games. Where 2016 proved that a classic-styled FPS can find mainstream success in a world of Call of Dutys, Eternal represents the next phase of what an FPS game can be in terms of how it moves and controls. Doom Eternal is as much a contemporary of games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, a character action game from a significantly different angle, a wild, hypervelocity ride of shattered bodies, cheesy jokes and album-cover landscapes. Perfection is not attainable, and Doom Eternal is indeed not perfect in any sense. It's just very good at making you think it is, while you're completely dazzled by brilliant, bloody fireworks show of things id Software got right. It is an absolute game of the year candidate for me, based on sheer gameplay and aesthetic choices. At this point, what remains to challenge for the title is going to need to seriously connect with me emotionally, because I literally do not know what action games can do this year to top what Eternal does. It's like we're back in the 90s again, and the whole world is trying to figure out how to respond to this new sensation- who knows what we'll see come out of first person shooters as a response.