I like heavy metal. I have loved it since I was a kid. The best heavy metal albums all have this structure to them, a certain style that is as predictable as it is compelling. They start with a killer opening track – Blood and Thunder by Mastodon, Battery by Metallica, Aces High by Iron Maiden – designed to set the scene, establish the mood, install presence. Then you get the second track; bigger, nastier, longer, harder. Using those same albums as an example, you have I Am Ahab, Master of Puppets and 2 Minutes to Midnight, respectively.
By now, you’re hooked – and that’s just as well, because usually what comes next is a couple of duff slices of mid-album filler that keeps edging you until the gnarly stuff at the end of the tracklist.
That is Doom The Dark Ages. I feel like the developers at Id Software have taken the series’ metal inspiration to its logical conclusion with this game, wrapping up the Doom (2016) trilogy with a tribute act that’s so akin to a classic metal album, you’d expect to see its boxart on the shelves at your local indie record store.
The intro track (sorry, ‘first level’) is the Aces High of Doom maps. It throws you in without hesitation, some nice thrumming riffs chugging along in the background as you’re given a shotgun, a shield, and an insatiable thirst for demon flesh. If you’ve played 2016 or Eternal, you know the drill; cycle through all the tools available to you, stay mobile, and improvise. Giving you a gun is that catchy riff being laid down, your movement is the bass with its thudding rhythm, and the shield… the shield is the drums, underpinning the whole thing.
The biggest gimmick in The Dark Ages is the shield; a heavy, satisfying buckler on your left wrist that can slam into enemies, close distances on remote threats, and boomerang into fodder demons to thin the herd and farm ammo for you. It’s a damn sight more interesting and malleable than the flamethrower in Doom Eternal. It’s fun to use, and as the game opens up, you can slot Satanic runes into it to make it more powerful. Just like in real life.
It also opens up another incredibly pleasing mechanic: the parry. The hordes of hell will fill the screen with green projectiles – missiles, floating shields, screaming skulls – and if you hit the parry button at the right time, you’ll send these hazards flying back to sender. This will also confer buffs; certain perks will let parries restock ammo, add projectiles of your own into the mix, coat you in armour.
Parrying, shooting, punching, running, shield-bashing, shooting again, and parrying again summons a Tetris Effect-like feeling in me. It massages my brain into a sense of flow-state that leaves me enraptured, which is quite at odds with the cartoonish super-violence that’s happening on-screen. In the shield, Doom The Dark Ages finds its heavy, stompy feet.
But the shield can only do so much to add variety into the mix. It’s like your favourite 80s hair metal band adding a new guitarist to the roster, 12 studio albums in, to spice things up a little. You can hear them, trilling along in the mix, but it’s more of the same, really, and doesn’t add a lot to the overall flavour.
Doom The Dark Ages is good. Very good. But halfway into its 22 levels, it feels like you’ve seen and heard all of its best licks. Enemy variety starts to slow down (with a focus on numbers, rather than variety, seeming to take over in the padded-out middle sections) and level design devolves from the lofty to the predictable. Doom and Doom Eternal have already stormed across such a lot of ground that The Dark Ages really needed to do something incredible to stand out in the trilogy. Sadly, the medieval world so heavily leaned upon in the marketing feels more like set dressing than a character in itself.
Luckily, the core tenet of the nu-Doom series remains as moreish and compelling as ever. In fact, I think The Dark Ages has nailed the flow and integration of combat better than either other game in the series. It’s because the weapons are so variable, and have upgrade paths and variations that actually feel different enough to make them viable. Take the ‘launcher’ archetype; you can bounce very pleasing balls of exploding death right into a demon’s face, or opt to blast a rocket square into its chest with an RPG instead.
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If you prefer the pure, dizzying aggression of getting up close and personal with enough explosives to take out a small country, good news! There’s a perk that lets you heal damage with rocket splash damage, instead of eating it in the crossfire. But only if you parry first. So you make the combat encounters fit around you, baiting out projectiles and then whipping yourself into an incendiary frenzy, laughing as you cannibalise all the poor hellbound f**ks that thought it was a good idea to get in your way.
Though the middle levels are a bit uninspired and repetitive, I was in constant awe of the scale and spectacle of the combat situations you’re thrown into. There’s the odd boss that slows things down a bit (there’s one too many baddies equipped with mandatory shields that stay erect as you play a bullet hell-like game of footsies with them), but for the most part, gunplay and traversal feels great. Figuring out how to melt armour of one big bastard whilst thinning out the fodder, avoiding an incoming hail of projectiles, and going toe-to-toe with axe-wielding brute is FPS heaven. It’s like trying to solve a Sudoku in a moshpit.
But then it all candy-wrappers together by the end. The best albums will weave in all the themes, styles, energy, and creativity on the track list and focus it into the last song- an uproarious, nearly unbelievable summary of the band’s personality in that space and time. That’s what the end of Doom The Dark Ages does. It almost – almost – makes up for the shortcomings in the middle (middling) sections with a bombast and balls-to-the-wall run of set-pieces that feels like it was three games in the making.
Doom The Dark Ages will get your blood pressure up. It will test your reflexes, your problem-solving skills, your aim, and your ability to solve problems on the fly. It’ll probably test your patience a little, too, when the chugging, uninspired, padded-out sections in the middle start to wear a bit thin. But when it does manage to get your adrenaline pumping, you’ll be champing at the bit and thumbing shells into your shotgun so fast that the princes of hell themselves shaking in their boots.
