Doom The Dark Ages Combat: Redefines the Series with Shield and Mace ⚔️🛡️

Doom The Dark Ages Combat: Revolutionize the fight! Find out how! 💥🔥

Doom: The Dark Ages represents a much bigger change for the series than I initially thought. It's not just a Doom in ancient times with a new design – Doom with a shield, a mace and a black cape Jon Snow style 🛡️⚔️ – but a complete overhaul of how the series works.

Ironically, considering the context, it's also the Doom game that feels most modern, with a much more pronounced story than we've had before 📖, a vastly expanded character upgrade system that borders on skill tree territory 🌳, and open-area sandbox levels you can come back and explore at your own pace 🏞️.

This strikes me as an experience built from a more robust proposal document than we've had before. While I admire the desire for change and recognize the need for it—Doom Eternal didn't leave much ground unturned—I'm still not entirely convinced about The Dark Ages. There's an undeniable Doom magic here, but there are also questions. 🤔

At the heart of the new game is the shield, your new spinning-bladed tool, which you receive from the start and acts as a conduit through which all the game's new ideas flow. The mantra of The Dark Ages is "stand and fight," and it's the shield that lets you do that. You can block with it, repel attacks, reflect projectiles, throw it, break walls, and solve environmental puzzles with it, and it also helps propel you forward like a devastating missile. It's a tool you always have at hand and around which everything is built. 🛡️💥

The shield introduces a different rhythm to the game. Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal focused on movement, outsmarting and dodging enemies while choosing the best weapons to take them on. But Doom: The Dark Ages feels more like Resident Evil 4, as you survey the battlefield with your shield raised and feet planted, prioritizing which targets to take out first. What are the weak spots? 🎯

Where are the green-glowing enemy attacks you can bounce off with your shield, making a loud metallic "bong!" if you time it right? Where are the large enemies whose powerful melee attacks you need to counter? Where are the superheated metal shields and armor you can destroy by hurling your shield into them? Are there large enemies you want to stun by embedding your spinning shield within them? Do you need to close a gap by ramming your shield into someone, or take out a group of weaker enemies the same way? The shield is at the center of it all. ⚔️

And since the shield brings you closer to enemies, there are more melee combat options available. ⚔️ The chainsaw is gone—gone (sorry!)—so your trusty punch has been buffed to fill some of the gap. It's now a gauntlet that attacks in a three-hit sequence, just like the delightfully wicked mace you'll pick up later. (I think there are even more melee weapons I haven't seen.)

Its three attacks allow it to charge at an enemy, attack it three times, and then do a 'glory kill' if it's damaged enough. That means a sequence of five devastating melee attacks, which feels radically different from the attack patterns of other recent Doom games. 🔥

The melee combat in Dark Ages actually reminds me more of the Batman: Arkham games and their rhythmic battles as you move around, parrying, and destroying enemies. 🥊💣

Glory kills return, though they've changed a bit here. They still cause enemies to give you ammo and health, but they don't lock you into animations as rigidly as before, sometimes because the attack won't directly kill the enemy in question. There are some beefy opponents; with better defenses come tougher enemies, it seems. 💪

All of this is accompanied by a revamped arsenal that shows wonderful imagination, and an expanded upgrade system for customization. The most fundamental pieces of equipment, like the shield, gauntlet, and mace, can support multiple upgrades—the shield can do things like bounce around enemies if you want—but weapons typically only have a choice of three or four. This is partly because there's no longer an alt-fire, as the shield occupies that button, so weapon choice has become a matter of build synergy. 🔫🔧

Do you want your rapid-fire bullets to bounce off an enemy you've shielded, impacting a nearby crowd, for example? Or would you rather have your bullets superheat enemies so they explode when you throw your shield at them? There are some tantalizing ideas there, and as a Diablo player, the concept of builds excites me. ⚡🔮

A quick mention about some of the weapons: there are some you'll recognize and some you won't. Of course, there's a super shotgun 💥, and it's wonderful, as id Software's shotguns always are, bursting forth with thunderous force. But there are also more unusual weapons, like my early favorite, the chaingun (that's not the official name). This looks harmless enough when you're using it, but boy does the barrel impact hard, tearing chunks of flesh off enemies it collides with! 😱 It's incredibly fun and feels almost like another melee weapon in use.

I'm also very attached to the nail gun 🔫, which fires metal stakes at enemies' heads—if aimed correctly, they'll actually go straight through them. And I'm morbidly drawn to the gun that crushes skulls into ammo and sprays a wide barrage of bullets at close range, both because it's creepy 👹 and because it seems to cause enemies to drop health. Very useful.

They all support this ongoing idea in Doom that there is a right tool for every job, though it seems less pronounced as a concept than in Doom Eternal. 🤖⚔️

An aspect of The Dark Ages What I'm not so clear about are the sandbox levels, which represent a big deviation for Doom because they deliver the tight pacing of the series to the player. 🎮 I noticed the tempo was noticeably different in the level I played, Siege, while exploring and facing groups of enemies, solving environmental puzzles, and fighting new mini-boss events. 🧩👾 These have you clearing groups of enemies that are effectively protecting a boss, meaning you need to get rid of them before you can damage it, and these encounters were difficult. 💥🔥

So while there were moments of high intensity, there wasn't the overall focus or pace that scripted levels have. And I don't mind this. 👍 A break from the relentless grind of the campaigns Doom It's very engaging, as is the opportunity to search for upgrade resources and test new builds. ⚒️✨

It's also worth noting that these sandbox levels are optional—we were told that in a presentation before playing—but how optional, I don't know. 🤔 I'm guessing maybe you'll play part of the level and then be able to leave, with the option to stay or return if you wish. It's an interesting development, but I'm concerned that if these sandbox levels are overused, they could bloat the game. ⚠️

Similarly, I wonder how often we'll be riding dragons and piloting mega-mechs in the game, because from my brief experience with them, neither was particularly fun. While there was a great deal of satisfaction at first, they're incredibly wish-fulfilling, introduced in a very Doom-esque way—the arrival of the dragon, in particular, had me laughing with glee—but after 10 minutes, I was ready to head back to the ground. 🐉

The problem with these sections is the lack of detail compared to Doom's intense ground-based action and the incredible toolbox of brutal destruction you have there. 🎮 They feel a bit like mini-games. The dragon section plays as a limited shoot-'em-up, where you fly forward and fire a rapid-fire cannon mounted on the dragon's back, though it limits you to a 'lock-on' mechanic and dodges their projectiles in most combat encounters. 🐉

And the Atlan mech feels like a brilliant limited mobile action game, restricting you to hitting or dodging and, occasionally, launching an Iron Man-esque laser. ⚡️ Even equipping a giant machine gun doesn’t change the pace much. There aren’t enough ideas in either to keep them feeling fun for long. Their inherent sense of scale also fades quickly throughout the game; the dragon loses size as the camera zooms out to reveal it, and the Atlan mech, because it’s played in first-person, feels like the rest of Doom, but less exciting. 🦾

Perhaps these sections will evolve over the course of the entire game—I don't know. But if they're overused, they could quickly become tiresome. 💤

I'm also not sure what to think about the abundance of story yet. I've been fascinated by the growth of the Doom Slayer as a character since 2016's Doom, and this idea that Hell, the most terrifying place humans can imagine, is filled with creatures scared of it. But the story has never been this explicit before. In Doom Eternal, cutscenes were used as a way to show off a boss before a battle, or to drop in bits of lore here and there. But in The Dark Ages, Story has a capital S, and you'll see longer cutscenes where named characters present a narrative. 📖

Much of this is very enjoyable. The cinematics are beautifully rendered, and the characters are glorious in their twisted design, all firmly cementing the fantasy that you, the Slayer, are a terrifying weapon (audio shouts like “We need him!” and “Deploy the Slayer!” made me smile), but it feels remarkably different to have a story told this way, and once again, I wonder how it will feel over the course of the full game.

Another concern I couldn't shake about The Dark Ages stemmed from a sluggish feel to the controls, which I didn't expect after the smoothness of Doom Eternal. Some of this is due to the weight of the new Doom Slayer, whose footsteps are thunderous and land like meteors, but I suspect some of it is related to the fit. Given id Software's experience, I'm confident any fit issues will be resolved by the game's May launch, and I haven't heard of anyone else having similar problems. Still, I'd be remiss not to mention it.

In fact, it’s the id Software experience I keep coming back to, and how great it is that not only did it successfully resurrect Doom in 2016, to the surprise of many – including mine – but it’s had the time and resources to develop it, to reimagine it, ever since. This is a bold reinvention, a brave departure, and while I have reservations about some things in The Dark Ages, I have no reservations about id. 💪🔥

In conclusion, Doom: The Dark Ages is a bold reinvention that challenges expectations and pushes the traditional boundaries of the series 🎮🔥. With its focus on the shield 🛡️, one more hand-to-hand combat strategic ⚔️ and a more prominent narrative 📖, the game offers a fresh and modern experience that, however, maintains the essence brutal and satisfying that characterizes Doom 💥.

While there are still questions about the pacing in the sandbox levels ⏳, the integration of vehicles like the dragon 🐉 and the mech 🤖, as well as the feeling of control, the talent and vision that id Software has put into this installment is undeniable. The Dark Ages not only represents an evolution for the saga, but also a testament to the desire to innovate without losing the identity 💡✨, leaving fans expectant and wanting more 🔥🤩.