Doom Eternal Critique

This critique will discuss the campaign of the base game first and foremost. The DLC is discussed after the main game in its own sections as it is built upon the foundation of the base campaign. I have not succeded in finding a multiplayer match, and no multiplayer aspects are discussed.

Doom Eternal wants to do two things, which is the criteria used in this critique:

The first thing the game wants to do is to smash demons in a glorious and gory manner. You want to feel the power of the unstoppable and merciless doomslayer in your own hands. A power fantasy in other words.
The second thing the game wants to do is to be a challenging game.

Technical
The game ran phenomenally well for me considering the graphical fidelity. It never dipped below 144 Hz at very high settings including ray-tracing. The game occasionally clipped into objects for me; leaving the head and camera inside iron bars of a cage above a lava lake. The game will freeze if you are tabbed out while loading. The sound is only playing if you look directly at a character, but luckily this is barley noticeable as there are few characters that talk in-game. I would have liked to know when the previous check-point was to know how much I was losing if I quit. Your character also has a tendency to get stuck on certain objects, which is a pretty big issue.

The presentation
The game does the “demon and hell” theme better than most other games I can think of in terms of its presentation. Everything about the game looks fantastic, and sounds fantastic. Brutality and gore is a big part of how the game presents itself; especially glory kills adds a lot of flavour to the game. The way that the enemies blow up, or their heads pop with a head-shot is super satisfying to watch. Demons will become more and more fleshy, with more bones showing as they get damaged. I really love this detail as a way to show the enemy health.
Then there is the environments that the game offers, it is surprisingly varied with different takes on hell; hell on earth, icy hell, burning hell and so forth. All of them offers something new and unique, and the details that the game offers like horrible fates for humans stuck inside walls are immaculate.
The high energy metal soundtrack elevates the visuals to even higher levels. You are pushed forward by the high energy soundtrack and the excellent weapon and demon sounds.
The presentation is what I think the game does best, and is what sells the power fantasy of the game.

Progression & Exploration
Exploration of the levels is a very important aspect of Doom Eternal as it ties directly into the progression and your character’s strength. You can find weapon attachments, weapon upgrade points, runes, praetor armour upgrades, and stat upgrades through sentinel crystals. In addition you also have items like slayer keys, cheat codes and a plethora of collectables. The amount of stuff you can find in the levels is immense, and exploring them is super important for your character’s progression and strength.
I would say the focus on exploring the levels is to much, and not enough effort has been put into making it easy and convenient to find the important stuff. I have ended levels so many times because I was in the moment and did not break my own immersion to check if I collected everything on the level. If I forgot anything I would have to replay the levels, which sort of sucks when you want to progress through the game. Is it so much to ask for to have a pop-up that warns you when the level ends if you have not collected every upgrade that is meaningful for gameplay. The map is frustratingly small and forces you to tab frequently to make sure you are not missing anything; which again pulls you out of the immersion and gameplay. I think the game forces exploration on you, but at the same time does not give you the tools to do it in your own way. You explore when the game tells you to explore, or you get punished for not exploring at the correct time. The high focus on exploration soured my experience of smashing and destroying demons significantly.
The rate of progression is high. New mechanics, weapons, attachments, runes, demons and upgrades are frequently introduced to constantly keep the gameplay fresh. The progression plays really well with the overall power fantasy of the game. You continuously get new demons to brutalise or new tools to brutalise the previous demons you have fought in a different manner.

Combat mechanics
Doom Eternal’s combat mechanics builds upon the legacy of previous doom games. The core doom mechanics works, but they need to be very well implemented in order to work. My overall experience with the combat in this game ranges from fantastic to infuriating. Unfortunately I think that the game lives in the decent to infuriating range most of the time. I found the game to frequently be more punishing than it is challenging.

The game is over when you lose all health and armour. You can get armour and health back by using pick-ups, glory kills or the flame belch. You can avoid getting hit by positioning properly and using the double jump, dash and map tools to get into the correct position. Losing health and armour is the primary way the game punishes you. The second way that the game punishes you is to take away your ammunition. You lose health, armour or ammunition when you fail to do what the game challenges you to do.

The game offers two primary challenges to overcome:

The primary challenge the game offers the players is positioning and movement. This includes both the knowledge of where you are supposed to be, and have the mechanical skill required to get there. This is continuously checked as the game is very fast paced.
The second challenge the game offers is exploiting the demons’ weaknesses and avoiding their strengths. This includes both the knowledge of the different mechanics and demons, but also the mechanical ability to execute on that knowledge. This includes things like hitting your shots, hitting the weak-spots with an accuracy while moving. You need to use the correct tools for the correct situation.

The movement & positioning
Doom Eternal is a fast moving arena shooter, which means that the movement needs to be fluid and natural. The movement and positioning is an incredible important mechanic in which so much of the game hinges on. Doom Eternal’s movement feels choppy and unpolished, and is one of the game’s greatest weaknesses.

Character friction causes your character to get stuck on everything from demons to small boxes and walls in the environment. If you move to close to a wall for example, you will not be able to jump up because the friction of the wall will be greater than the force of the jump. You will also suddenly slow down when moving about the environment because your character came to close to a tiny box. Your character will also be slowed heavily down if the shield spawning demons spawns a shield to close to you. I don’t like that demons also cause the character to slow down due to friction. Let them block the character, but I don’t understand the constant slows that are applied to the player-character in this game. It absolutely sucks.
Your character has a tendency to get stuck on the environment. You can for example get stuck on small boxes or in doorways that will stop movement in a direction, and only reset back to normal when you jump.
The jumping to platforms and monkey bars suck. You don’t have a lot of control of the character and it feels a bit random if he is going to catch on the edge or not.
The movement has a tendency to snap or teleport you from start position to end position without a proper animation between the start and stop points. This is understandable when it comes to glory kills to some extent, but even then it is jarring for the flow of the game.

These issues are a constant throughout the game, but the level-design can alleviate a significant portion of the issues. Some of the encounters are really good and fun because you don’t need to interact with a lot of the things that causes these issues around movement. Then there are equally badly designed encounters that really highlight these issues with the movement.

Demon & Gameplay Design
The initial sections of the game are great examples of how the rest of the game should work in terms of demon & gameplay design. You want to hit head-shots on the fodder enemies and finish them with a glory kills. You want to use a grenade to activate the glory kill on the Cacodemon (The floating demon) and you want to target the stinger on the Arachnotron (The scorpion). The great thing about these elements is that they are optional, you can choose not to do them and take a health or ammunition penalty. You overcome the challenge by using the weaknesses and intended counters for the different demons, which feels fantastic.
Most of the heavy demons and fodder enemies are actually surprisingly good at this aspect. Most of them have distinct weaknesses that you can use to do a lot of damage or reduce their damage.
The Baron of Hell, Tyrant, Archvile, Hell Knight and Dread Knight have no real weakness apart from being staggered by the chaingun. This leads to a game-loop where you have to dump ammunition into them to kill them. They offer no tangible weakness for you to exploit. All you do is dump rounds into them while you move and position to not die. There is nothing wrong with having demons without specific weaknesses, but the number of them cannot be large. I love how the Hell Knight works when you first are introduced to him, he takes a fair bit of damage to kill and is a high threat. However there is not anything else that uses this tank damage mechanic early. This leads to the Hell Knight feeling like healthy game design as everything else still has notable weaknesses.
The game does not utilise the full arsenal of weapons you have available in a good manner. What is for example the purpose of micro-missiles? I don’t feel like I ever wanted to use this attachment, it feels that it lacks a purpose. Why are there no demons that have an explosion weakness for example? There are a lot of tools that could have been used to a much better extent. If the game allowed you to get ammunition easier then you would have use for the heavy ammo consumption attachments, but you are limited in how much ammunition you have. It then becomes a choice of using the higher DPS or having the availability of something that can target weak-points. This was not even a consideration during my play-through.
The rocket launcher for example is only used to do damage to tanky enemies or AOE damage. I think it lacks a proper niche use. I think that more specific weaknesses would have done wonders for the combat and raised it to a new level. There are so many effects you could add to demons as a response to a player using their weakness. You could add a slow effect because the legs got damaged, you could reduce the demons damage, you could make it stagger after every attack. The opportunities to add more complex dynamics are significant, and feels like wasted potential.

The Marauder
The marauder is among the worst designed and implemented enemies I have ever encountered in a video game. Doom Eternal is at its core a fast paced shooter that revolves around constant movement and changing weaponry. The marauder has a lot of mechanics it uses, and by themselves none of them are a problem; however when you add them together you create an abomination of an enemy that should not exist.
He moves very quickly, especially when he rotates around the player. You cannot consistently outrun him once you are close to him. He will always be in range to do damage. You will stand and fight where he catches you until one of you dies.
He has four attacks: Shotgun if you are to close, wolf attack, ranged projectiles when you are far away and finally smashing you with his axe when you are at the “proper and correct” distance. All of these attacks do a large amount of damage with a high attack speed.
He is quite tanky and immune to BFG and blade attacks. He is also immune to all types of damage due to his shield. The only way to get him to drop his shield is to attack him while he is trying to smash you in the face with his axe.
All of these mechanics means that if you try to run from him he will catch you or his long range attacks will devastate you. You are almost required to stand and fight close to your original position at the time of his spawn. You need to position yourself at just the right distance such that he will use his axe allow you to do damage to him; you need to repeat this several times for him to die.
This mechanic forces you to stand in one spot which means that you are an easy target for the other demons. You almost need to prepare your area such that there is a minimum amount of interruptions while you fight him. Being forced to stand still in a game that is all about moving to keep the armour and health flowing is a death sentence. The game now punishes you for not moving, but also for moving. It is an anti-design that should never exist in a game in the way it does here.
To add injury to the already pretty terrible game-design the range at which he attacks you is quite narrow. He frequently shotguns you to the face because you are to close, before the knock-back of his shotgun propels you into a range he deems to be to far and launches a ranged attack. As he spins around you he might shotgun you because he moves to close to you, and then he might move again while you are in motion, into another shotgun attack because he moves to close again. His attack pattern is chaotic due to the inconsistency of the level design and his distance from walls. There are a great deal of bad locations where you can fight him where the fight feels completely bullshit as he will never attack you to make himself vulnerable
Then you have the good location where he stands still like a good boy and just attacks you 4 times in a row with his axe without moving and you kill him incredible easy, because all of his mechanics are centred around a gimmick. It is not difficult to kill him when the AI is behaving reasonably well and you don’t get swarmed by other demons.
It is difficult to kill him when he refuses to attack you and you do get swarmed by other demons because he is taking his time, bleeding you out. You bleed out because the game decides you should die now, and not so much because you as a player played bad. This is terrible terrible game design, and whoever designed the marauder should feel ashamed.
You are not fighting a demon, you are managing a game AI. That is what it feels like to fight this enemy, and that is a terrible terrible immersion breaker. I had very little enjoyment in the combat encounters after I fought the marauader.
The interesting thing here is that you could have split these mechanics into several enemies and they would probably have worked great. Remove the shield mechanic and suddenly the Marauder is a challenging but interesting enemy.
You could add the shield and counter-attack mechanic to another type of enemy. If it was added to a larger and slower melee demon it would have been great. It could have closed down sections of the level, forcing you to make the decision of waiting for a counter attack or avoiding the region until you are ready for it. The PLAYER needs to be in control, and NOT the game.

How the game punishes you instead of challenges you
One of my huge issues with doom eternally out of ammunition is that the game focuses on being punishing rather than challenging. The difference being that in challenging games you lose because you made mistakes that were avoidable, and in punishing games you lose because they are close to unavoidable.

How do you lose in doom eternally out of ammo?

You run out of ammo at higher difficulties, especially in the later stages of the game, causing you to lose.
Movement issues as discussed previously.
Marauder bullshit.
You are killed by a demon that spawns at a surprising location or an annoying location. Pinky’s are frequently spawned at locations such that they will ambush you and kill you based on surprise or your unpreparedness. The game will spawn demons behind you frequently.
You can’t find the high priority enemy like the totem or Archvile fast enough and their effects makes you essentially lose the encounter. This is simply level knowledge and knowledge of where and when they spawn.
Demons and types of demons spawn in locations that make your current position really bad. This is similar to Pinky spawns, but here they are not surprising as much as forcing you into a bad positions due to how the enemies and types of enemies spawn. You might suddenly be in a crossfire, when you a couple of seconds ago were safe.
You move poorly and die.
You shoot poorly and die.
You are located in a tight space where movement is very difficult and you die from not being able to avoid attacks.

The entire game is designed around the premise of punishing the player. There are so many ways the game has scheduled a player death. The developers have attempted to script difficulty by adding things that will cause you to die the first times you encounter them, but that becomes easy once you understand what is going on. This is a false way to create the sense of overcoming a challenge. Essentially they have tried to create an illusion of challenging gameplay through punishing game mechanics. I think that doom eternal manages to create a mirage of difficulty by throwing many different demons, weapons and mechanics at the player. It makes it seem like the game is complex with a lot of intricate parts. In reality I think it is mostly an illusion of difficulty in combination with punishing mechanics and design choices. I rarely felt like I lost when I died. It felt like I did not know where the enemies spawned and lost because of it, it felt like the AI made me loss, it feels like the enemies hid in an unknown map which made me lose. Comparatively few deaths are due to me playing “poorly” according to most other first person shooters.
I am in a lot of ways playing a management puzzle game that requires me to die a couple of times to get access to the pieces of the puzzle. I am certainly not playing a skill based shooter. The puzzles are not very hard or clever, they are just hard to fit together. The mechanical skill to put the pieces together might exist, but that is in a lot of ways what doom eternal is. It is a mechanically demanding puzzle game, and not a shooter.

Overall base campaign thoughts
While I dislike the challenging gameplay loop of the game, the game shines at easy and medium difficulties as the punishing aspects are reduced and you can enjoy the power fantasy in relative peace. The thing that makes me smile when I think about doom eternal is its environments, the details of its demons and the feeling of power and death inflicted upon them.
I think that the game could have been significantly better if you did not have to manage your ammo so significantly. I think the way you should lose is by getting overwhelmed by demons and not because you ran out of ammo. The game could easily have removed a lot of the bullshit spawning spots for demons as well, and the game would be significantly less frustrating. It seems to me that the developers focused so hard on making the game punishing that they forgot that making it challenging is what is appealing.

The Ancient Gods DLC

The ancient gods DLC really embodies the design philosophy of punishing gameplay above all else. Every aspect of the game is made to make the game more punishing. I did not want to play through a more punishing game, so I played it on easy to see how it worked. I am very glad I did not choose a “harder” difficulty as most of the challenge is just artificial bullshit. I don’t have an interest in writing a long section about the DLC. This is going to be a list format on what I think the DLC did poorly and what it did great. Let us start with what it did poorly.

The DLC just throws more demons at you with less ammunition. This means that your creative flexibility to solve the combat puzzle is reduced. You follow a stricter route intended by the developers or you fail. I hate this kind of rigid gameplay design.
The DLC adds several enemies that can only be dealt with in a single way. The spirit can only be killed by the plasma rifle. The stone imp can only be killed by the rotating shotgun attachment. The cursed demon can only be killed by blood punches. The blood Maykr which forces a head-shot when it decides to be vulnerable. This again forces the player to adhere to a rigid pattern set-up by the developer, which I detest.
The boss fights feel really poorly designed, even more so than the base game. The game shines as an arena horde shooter, and not with boss fights. The platforming and invisible walls of the last boss in part one was dreadful. The summoning and healing of the dark lord in the second part was obnoxious and not interesting.
The DLC uses fog to make it harder to see, it uses more visual effects to clutter your screen. This is another great example of artificial difficulty where they take something away from you to force you into a rigid game-play loop.
The marauders are even more annoying with several being added together or them being buffed up by totems or other effects. Just a cheap way to add difficulty to the game. It just makes the design of the marauders even more apparent in how terrible it is. I hate the marauders even more in the DLC.
The DLC just adds more armour or ways to buff the base demons. There are very few new creative things added to the game. It is low effort and void of creativity from a game-design perspective. Armoured baron of hell is not interesting. A minion that buffs enemies when it dies is not interesting. It is just ways to make the player fail.
Generally speaking the DLC is buggier and less polished than the base game. The giant tentacles can hit you through walls, and there are invisible walls that hinder gameplay in some sections (last boss fight of part 1). The movement issues are generally speaking more pronounced in this DLC, I got stuck much more frequently than I did in the base game.
More usage of restricted spaces and surprise enemy spawns.

That is a lot of negatives, so lets go over some of the things I did like.

The yellow shielded enemies that can’t be damaged from the front is great design, you can run behind them, throw grenades behind them or explode a rocket next to them. You have several ways to deal with them, and none are forced on you. I really liked how they were implemented.
The Sentintel hammer was also a good addition in how it added a bit more depth to the mechanics. It was also a necessary addition to give you more ammunition now that the game forces you to dump more ammo into your enemies.

Overall the DLC is just a punishment fest for that niche of players that enjoy that. However as an overall quality I think it is far worse than the base game. I would say it is a mediocre DLC. I would give the DLC a score 4/10, but this is not included in the main game score.