If there’s a series that could be helped along by vibes alone, it’s Doom—particularly since its reinvention in 2016. You can’t spell Doom without “mood” of course, and for a series that has been from Mars to Hell and all the way back, Doom: The Dark Age is perhaps the moodiest the franchise has ever been. This prequel treatment places the fabled Doom Slayer into medieval times, which, of course, means lords, sublime fur-trimmed armour, and fucking mechanised dragons.
It’s the biggest and most badass Doom has ever been, and I cut my milk teeth on the series with the first game literally as soon as I knew what a keyboard was.
Now, fortunately for Doom, it has never needed any help breaking through to the mainstream. Its ultraviolent brand of first-person shooting effectively put the genre on the map and kicked off what would be the medium’s “attitude era”. With its big reboot, Doom re-established itself as an arena-combat powerhouse with a considerable uptick in pace and flow. It’s an ultimate power fantasy, and no other game made you feel like Hell’s worst nightmare quite like Doom did. Its sequel, Doom Eternal, which introduced a grappling hook, shifted focus to mobility and verticality through platforming, which seemed to sacrifice some of that patented in-your-face brutality the series is famous for.
Doom: The Dark Ages, despite having its share of new gimmicks, keeps the Doom Slayer’s boots firmly on the ground while arming him up to his absolute eyeballs to raze hell’s army. Put frankly, he’s up to his knees in the shit.
Our hands-on with Doom: The Dark Ages, to give us a breadth of experience, trimmed a lot of the fat and context from the levels we sampled so it was hard to get a gauge of what it’s doing narratively, but what’s exciting is they’re pouring resources in to make this campaign like a big action-film with an actual focus on plot. Not that it hasn’t been there in the reboots, though it’s often hidden in codex entries and lore dumps. Here, it’s at the forefront with some lovely, very expensive-looking cinematics to get the point across.
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Being a prequel, The Dark Ages seems to explore the period in time when Doom Slayer, while being referred to as the “Outlander”, took up arms against the legions of hell after they invaded Argent D’Nur before going on to ingratiate himself with the Night Sentinels, the world’s noble militia force. What’s interesting is the game’s framing of the Slayer as a hunting dog who’s kept on something of a short leash—let out to rip and tear when it suits those in power. Although the lore does run deep, The Dark Ages is being considered as a good jumping-off point with regards to the story, so if you’ve never really paid attention, don’t fret.
Straight off the rip, I found it particularly interesting that Doom: The Dark Ages introduces open-world areas for you to explore and wreak havoc. Given that Eternal was considered by many to be a bit too demanding and relentless in everything it threw at you, to keep moments to somewhat compose yourself in these big, still relatively non-linear sections feels inspired. But first, we were thrust into the game’s first one-and-a-half missions, which feature the corridor-shooting most of us signed up for. With the village of Khalim under attack, Doom Slayer is deployed to fuck shit up. After his undeniably cool superhero landing, the level played out like you’d expect. Each arena skirmish flowed into the next, and weapons were introduced at a reasonable clip.
Throughout the four vertical slices we got hands-on with, I sampled plenty of the game’s guns and I found that each of them has a worthwhile use case depending on the situation you’re in. Both the regular and super shotguns need no introduction, they’re just short-range blunderbusses that’ll reduce most demons to a pulp. There’s also an automatic rifle-like that’s great for chipping away armoured shields, while the plasma rifle does likewise for shields of the energy variety.
While guns are the game’s bread and butter, The Dark Ages introduces a couple of era-appropriate melee options that, as it turns out, are insane amounts of fun. Of the two I toyed around with, being a spiked gauntlet and a flail, they hold three charges in total and unleash a devastatingly powerful blow to whoever’s on the other end. Like ammo, health, and armour, you’ll find drops in-world to replenish the charges quicker, although they will tick up on their own. The flail, in particular, packs a wallop as its simple, old-world design of a spiked ball on a chain satisfyingly tears flesh from bone.
The single coolest new addition to the arsenal, however, has got to be the shield saw. It’s exactly as it sounds, a lethal mix of offense and defense that also feeds into parts of the game’s platforming and problem-solving. While it’s most often used to activate gate mechanisms, staggering bigger enemies to buy yourself a precious second to think, or dealing the shattering blow to already weakened shields, evidenced by their red hot glow, its application on the battlefield is even more exciting. To further emphasise the Doom Slayer’s bloodlust and thirst for wanton destruction, he’s armed with a charge attack, which can also be used with enormous efficiency as a dive bomb that reverberates through the ground as though a tank has fallen from the sky.
When the reboot introduced things like glory kills to its big arena battles, Doom became a rather rhythmic kind of shooter. There was a certain, understated beat that moved each fight along, and being fleet of foot was, and still is, key to survival. Dark Ages, through its shield parry, doubles down on this design philosophy. Incoming attacks, whether they’re projectile or not, are read by the player as either orange or green. A well-timed trigger pull on anything that’s green acts like a return to sender, sending any potential damage back the demon’s way. It’s yet another plate to spin for players, but I can’t help but love how it turns defense into offense so quickly. Under the right circumstances, it’s a tide-changer.
Doom: The Dark Ages has its share of “holy shit”-inducing set pieces, including a beachfront defense against wave after wave of demons and a titan while sat precariously on a turret, but none come bigger—literally—than piloting an Atlan. Imagine an enormous, piloted mech similar to those seen in Pacific Rim, that’s exactly what we’re getting here. Armed with a to-scale minigun, you run through titans and infrastructure alike, causing so much damage it sells the sense of scale. It wasn’t quite on my bingo sheet that id Software would deliver the most bitching rock ‘em-sock ‘em experience of the generation.
The only other feature that might be cooler is riding the dragon. After the game’s original reveal last year, all I’ve wondered is how these winged monstrosities might feel in-game. Admittedly, I’m not entirely sold on wanting to keep one as a pet just yet, they’re a bit of a pain to pilot through some of the tighter caverns I was funneled through, though as finicky as their handling can be I do think the team made a smart decision with “assault mode”. In short, pulling the left trigger will see you hover steadily in the air, locking you onto your nearest target, which lets you focus on both shooting and dodging incoming attacks. Had we been forced to juggle these while free-piloting the dragon, I expect it would have been a nightmare. I do think there were some exceptional parts within the dragon level, however, including the systematic scuttling of several enemy airships which had you destroy their on-board defenses before boarding, exploring the inner workings, and obliterating the core. It gave me distinct memories of taking out Scarabs in Halo, and like it was in those games, it’s exciting while serving the enormity of the conflict.
The aforementioned open-world section is where I spent the majority of my time. If you’re wondering whether it’s even possible to retain the feeling of Doom by trading corridors for a giant battlefield, teeming with demons to vanquish, portals to close, and anti-air guns to dismantle, the answer is most surprisingly yes. It retains many of Doom’s level design sensibilities, like secret areas and key-carded doors, while ushering you through an enormous space, objective to objective. Despite its openness, I did get the impression it was still linear to a degree as it’d continually point me toward the next objective like a guiding star. While I don’t expect this is id toeing the water to see how a fully open-world Doom might fare, but I am curious as to how many of these areas the final product will deliver.
Of course, the computers we played on were utterly scary in terms of their power output, so The Dark Ages looked and ran phenomenally. The game might have a distinct tone, however, it’s surprisingly varied in what’s put on screen. The initial siege, which took place under the cover of night, is full of gloom and flame-cast shadow, while the dragon-ride took place in an enormous aerial, sunkissed vista among the clouds. Whether it’s due to id Tech 8, the team’s in-house engine which was spruced up after Doom Eternal, the team can let us loose in these bigger, scoped-up playgrounds, but I’m thankful for the pivot.
I adore Doom Slayer’s look this time around, the fur-collared suit and saw-edged shield look as tough as a two-dollar steak and, as an aesthetic, it cements the game within this historic, pre-Doom era. Just like the other games in the series, the wet gore and model damage, which sees viscera, pulp, and pounds of flesh torn from a demon’s frame piece by piece, is so gratifying. There’s nothing quite like dismantling a Hell Knight limb from limb, putting a stop to its ceaseless advance, or blowing the arm cannons off of a Mancubus, leaving it utterly vulnerable.
On one side of the game’s sonic spectrum is the original soundtrack, which still follows Mick Gordon’s blueprint of dropped tunings and open-string chugs so dirty that it’ll make anyone scrunch their face up in disgust. It’s an absolute thump that had me almost throwing down a mosh while watching a dragon spewing fire down a titan’s throat. The other side is just an incredibly meaty sound design that’s felt through every movement, there’s a heft to Doom Slayer that’s sold wholesale.
From my time with it, Doom: The Dark Ages is shaping up to be an unmissable Doom game and a candidate for one of the year’s very best. Eternal was anything but a disappointment, though some of its design philosophies were questionable, with certain parts of the game not speaking to what I’d want from Doom. Not only is Dark Ages bigger, bolder, and more badass than ever, but it’s an even more ambitious game than I’d expected—and we knew about the mechs and dragons beforehand.
