Doom: The Dark Ages review: Adding a new dimension to demonic destruction

For the longest time, I would’ve called first-person shooters my least favorite genre in video games. The modern military shooter absolutely bores me to tears, but thankfully, that started to change around 2016 when the rebooted Doom series began, bringing with it the revival of the boomer shooter and my realization that it wasn’t first-person shooters I hated, just Call of Duty’s insistence on making me hide behind cover all the time.

The fundamental ideas that made Doom 2016 and Eternal so much fun are still here in full force. This is a game about charging in, shotgun in hand, and blasting away at anything that moves, staying on your toes at all times to avoid the onslaught the denizens of hell throw your way.

The biggest addition is the shield, which somehow makes the frantic action of the series feel even more fast-paced. Despite traditionally being a defensive item, The Dark Ages turns it into one of the most aggressive tools in your arsenal. By holding it up to block, you can lock on to a demon in your sights and then charge at it at full force, doing a big chunk of damage to the demon you hit and any others that are unfortunate enough to be nearby.

That alone is already brilliant. Lunging into a fight and immediately turning a pack of weaker demons into red mist with your shield is a brilliant feeling, and it enhances the game’s movement, as you can also use it to dart across the battlefield in an instant. Then, in the game’s second level, you get chainsaw blades attached to the end of it that let you launch it at enemies, instantly slicing weaker ones in half and stunning the stronger ones.

Its best contribution is the new parry system. When an enemy’s attack glows with bright green energy – be it melee or projectile – you can raise your shield at the right moment to parry the attack, negating any damage and momentarily stunning the enemy. Don’t think this is some slow-paced Dark Souls-style system, though, as the parrying here keeps pace with the rest of the action.

Most demons will give you very little time to react to their parryable attacks, so you’ll need to use the same twitch reflexes that the rest of the game’s action trains you for. It makes for some great encounters, like one of the stronger demons that absolutely shreds you with bullets from range, forcing you in close only to throw a barrage of parryable attacks at you, making for an intense face-to-face encounter where you need to stay on your toes and strike in the small windows between each parry.

It enhances the intensity that this series is already so good at producing. Surviving an encounter by the skin of your teeth is one thing, but having to quickly parry a series of attacks while on the brink of death – eventually being rewarded with one of the game’s classic glory kills that showers you in health and ammo – elevates that feeling to another level.

The team knows exactly how to pitch the many different difficulty options. If you want the pure power fantasy experience of the Doom Slayer that they all fear then you can blast through the game in a mode where barely anything will pose a threat, or there are some truly punishing modes that will destroy you if you make even the smallest mistake. It’s all extremely customizable, though, as there are sliders for all sorts of options like the aggressiveness of the enemies, the size of the parry window, or even the overall speed the game runs at.

You won’t want to slow the game down too much though, as the game now has some big open areas to play around in. While the game is still linear overall, some levels are now big open spaces full of side objectives and secrets to discover. These are fun, but it can slow the pace down when you’re poking at every nook and cranny just in case there’s a secret, or you have to traipse back across the entire map because you realize you missed one secret area and you can’t stand to see “98% completion” on the summary menu. That said, if you chose to ignore all of the side stuff, these levels are still pretty well-paced, as you can sprint between the objectives with ease and just deal with those big encounters.

There are two new types of gameplay in The Dark Ages, the Atlan and Dragon levels. The Atlans are big mechs that you use to punch giant demons to death and their gameplay is pretty straightforward, which is why the game doesn’t use them much. It’s just a matter of dodging enemy attacks and spamming the punch button until you can use a finisher. It’s not particularly interesting, but the game only uses it a few times and for relatively short sections, which help it feel like a nice change of pace instead of a drag.

The dragon sections are more enjoyable, though still pale in comparison to the regular shooting gameplay. Blasting through a large area in pursuit of a ship while unloading on it with a machine gun is fun, though that comes to a halt when you encounter a larger ship. There, you instead go into an aiming mode where you must dodge incoming attacks to power up your machine gun and break through shields, which – like the Atlan gameplay – is fine in small doses. Unlike the Atlan stuff, the dragon sections do get mixed in with the traditional shooting gameplay, like one of the early levels where you’re repeatedly using the dragon to disable airships so you can blast through them and destroy them from within.

I like that The Dark Ages adds something to occasionally break up the onslaught of shooting and the fact that they’re used so sparingly helps them feel special, but I don’t think they particularly enhanced the experience. They lead to a small handful of cool moments, but both styles of gameplay are definitely inferior to the shooting. They don’t detract from my enjoyment of the game, but I can’t say it’s better for having them.

Doom: The Dark Ages is yet another hit from a series that can’t seem to miss. It keeps the core of intense fast-paced shooter gameplay, actively enhancing it with new mechanics that alter the moment-to-moment action while keeping the pulse-pounding feeling the same. Like Doom 2016 and Eternal, I’m left craving another hit already, but I’ll happily wait another five years for it if this is the result, unlike CoD’s exhausting annual release cycle.