DOOM: The Dark Ages Steam Charts & Stats

This is a generally positive review for DOOM: The Dark Ages (hereafter called TDA), with some negative points against it. TDA has been released in a complete and fully playable state with no major bugs, no crashes, and no microtransactions. While that is a sad indictment on the state of AAA games, it is worth mentioning. id Software have done a stellar job to design, develop, and optimise this game. I also have nothing but respect for Hugo Martin and the team at id Software for taking risks, refusing to stand still and regurgitate the same formula time after time. DOOM Eternal was radically different to DOOM 2016, and TDA is radically different to DOOM Eternal. Each game will have people who prefer it over the others. For me, however, TDA is the weakest of the trio. But first: what's good about TDA? • The weapons feel punchy and powerful. • The very light sprinkling of Souls-esque blocking, parrying, and dodging is surprisingly well integrated into the combat loop. • Level design and enemy design has never been more interesting and more creative, helped in large part by the introduction of the Lovecraftian "Cosmic Realm" to the game. • Graphics and visuals are second to none. • Putting together combos of parry, melee bash, shotgun blast, block, shield saw, shotgun blast, and so on, is fun and never gets boring. • The boss fights are some of the best they've ever been in a modern DOOM title. Fair, fun, and engaging. Never a tiresome slog, with minimal use of boss fight tropes like having to wait and being unable to attack until a moment of vulnerability appears. It's all aggression all the time. • The slider settings that impact movement speed, projectile speed, enemy aggression, projectile damage, and so on, allow for a nearly infinitely customisable experience. • The game has a good recipe of tough arena fights broken up by exploration and DOOM 1993 style secret hunting. So what's not good about TDA? • Most of the weapon upgrades feel fairly irrelevant. With the exception of the rocket launcher's extremely cool upgrades, many of the weapon upgrades essentially say "this weapon becomes stronger if you hold 'shoot' down" and didn't offer anything unique or interesting to the gameplay loop. • And while every weapon felt good to use, there was little mechanical reason to use them. DOOM Eternal forced players to alternate between weapons for a given combat situation after the developers noticed players were completing DOOM 2016 with just one or two weapons being used. This game returns to that core DOOM 2016 "problem" where you can finish the game using just one weapon. I had to force myself to use other weapons to experience a bit of variety (the weapon challenges help in this regard) because it was very easy to lean on the super shotgun to melt everything. • There are too many "points of no return" embedded into each map which is, in my opinion, a cardinal sin of level design if you're asking the player to explore and look for secrets. Either remove the "points of no return" (like in DOOM 1993) or allow the player to go back through the level before it ends to collect any remaining secrets (like in DOOM Eternal). • Maybe I'm in the minority but I really missed the platforming of DOOM Eternal. • The mech and dragon sections were fairly repetitive even on first playthrough. I am not looking forward to those sections on my second playthrough. • A lot of the cutscenes felt fairly unnecessary (the Slayer was just "aura farming" half the time) and seem to fly in the face of the "gameplay first, story last" ethos of modern DOOM games. In DOOM 2016, the Doom Slayer literally punched screens that were giving lore dumps. In DOOM Eternal, there were pages and pages of lore locked behind the pause menu. Many people would have played those games without knowing much more of the story than "demons bad, kill demons" and yet now the story is front and centre in cinematic cutscenes. It feels decidedly un-DOOM-like. • The music was a major step down from DOOM 2016 and Eternal. I barely noticed it throughout the game. Too subdued, too ambient. To be clear, being the weakest modern DOOM game still puts it head and shoulders above most AAA games. I would play TDA over any other AAA game released in the last 15 years. I just wouldn't play it over DOOM Eternal.

It would have been easy to just repeat what 2016 and Eternal did, add some modifications and slap a $70 price tag. In a way, their effort to change the dynamic of gameplay is respectable, but at some point you have to say "If it isn't broken, don't touch it" There's several new additions, but the most important is the Shield, which you'll use to parry green attacks and block red ones. This is the main problem of Dark Ages. Every enemy has a attack pattern Once you play one or two hours, you learn it all. There's little to no variation in their attacks so you'll always know how to approach an enemy. After a couple of encounters, the game just becomes repetitive. A chore. Worst of all? Each time you parry a green attack, you activate a slow-mo. Read that again: Each time you parry. You're going to be doing a lot of that and it just slows the game. There's no way to deactivate this. For a game that takes pride in how much customization you can implement into your game with many difficulty sliders and options, the fact there's no way to deactivate something so annoying as slow-mo is just shocking. The only way to achieve this is by using a cheat engine configuration but this will set your game speed to normal. If you played this game on normal (100%) speed opposed to 150%, i'm sorry but you've basically ruined your experience in Dark Ages. You need to play this in 150%. No Ifs and Buts. 150% is the definitive way. But that also means you can't use the cheat engine mod so I guess we're just out of luck. Regarding the story: I don't know. I skipped all cutscenes from chapter 10 to the end. The main protagonists of Doom are Doomguy and the demons. Everyone else is secondary. I genuinely couldn't care any less about Generic Soldier, Generic General Woman, Mister "Look At Me I Got Evil Horns and a Deep Voice I'm a Really Menacing Demon" guy. And don't lie to yourself: You don't care either. This is a franchise about gameplay over story. We don't need nor want your snoozefest epic lore about how Doomguy is this really special person in a secret order of whatever fighting a eternal war of whatever reasons against demons. Overall: 6/10 game. The bad outweighs the good. There's still a fun experience to have here but it's definitely not worth the price. I would recommend just buying Gamepass and trying it there.

Just a very solid game. Fun gameplay loop and great enemy variety. I don't think it's better than Doom Eternal, but honestly still a banger.

I've played the original doom, doom 2, doom 64, doom 2016 and doom eternal. I'd like to say I'm a pretty big doom fan, and I've gotta say, I do not enjoy this instalment. Visually, this game is absolutely beautiful. Incredible design and just visually amazing, but that doesn't mean shit when the game play is stale. I do not enjoy the parrying in this game, i feel it slows the game down so so much and is way too repetitive and makes doom guy feel like a little bitch for needing to "hide" behind a shield. The need for "ammo" to melee is dumb. It feels out of place, for doom guy as being this super bad ass, but needs ammo to punch or use the melee weapons. Something that i feel like that shouldn't have been removed, are the glory kills. The reason they removed it was because it was a "repetitive" animation, and yet they replace it with the most boring kick... and call it an execution. That feels so very lazy and an even worse as a repetitive animation. Its the same kick for every demon and the same kick for the mech that you can use on some levels. The mech.... is so boring. Punch, Punch, dodge. that was it. Thumbs up id software. Same thing goes for the dragon. very boring. Level design, was poor. Getting rid of the double jump made the levels very flat and copy paste in a way. Maps also to me felt like there was no meaning to them. What was the story for the planet, or land area that we were running around in To me I feel doom 2016 and doom eternal had meaning to why we were going to places and a story behind them. Where as dark ages was just, go here, then go here and then there. Secrete areas are not secrete areas. With the maps being very flat, it limits what they can do with the secrete areas by also getting rid of the double jump and dash. For the story I can't say much as I have only made it a third of the way, and so far I'm disappointed it in. There are way to many characters that i feel don't need to be in it as they don't add anything to the story. Doom 2016 had an amazing story with only 3 characters. doom eternal had an ok story but in my opinion was way better than what dark ages offers. I could keep going on things that i don't like but i feel it would too long of a review. If you like this game, awesome, but for me I don't enjoy dark ages.

Really fucking BORING. So much so that I even struggle to force myself to even play or finish it. You can really tell that somebody at ID wanted to make a modern version of the original Quake and that somebody in the higher ups said "Nah, that won't sell, just put Cthulhu and castles in Doom" I for one, would have preferred a modern take on the original Quake but I have to remember that we live in bizzaro clown world where nothing logical is ever done and nothing good is ever made. I never thought I'd play a Doom game and feel so ambivalent about it. I look forward to five years from now when instead of a Hexen/Heretic reboot, we just get DOOM SLAYA with a wizard's staff. I paid $100 for this and I don't even want to PLAY IT. Jesus Christ...

This is different from D2016 or D:Eternal. Yes, it has its cons: - music is kinda generic, nothing special. It is not bad, it just exists. - Giant robot and dragon sections are excess. I hope, it will be skippable. Ok once though - it takes longer to speed up than eternal. The real fun begins only in the last third of the game. - it has more plot but it’s all feel kinda useless. Expensive cutscenes tell no story, characters lack character. I still have to go to the codex to make all this mess clear. But, it is really fun game to play. It's different fun but it is fun. It’s not slow (yes, you have to play on nightmare, turn on “sprint” in settings), it’s not simplification or something (may be a bit, compared to Eternal). Zero regrets, will play again.

I personally do not recommend Doom the Dark Ages, because I think it is a downgrade from eternal and Doom 2016. Is Doom the Dark Ages a good game? Yes, but the game just feels low effort. An analogy would be that Doom Eternal was a lavish dinner, Doom The Dark Ages is a good steak, and that's about it, it's got no seasoning and no other courses to the meal, just a big juicy steak. To start off with the good, yes the combat is still Doom, in that you can still feel like a badass mowing down hordes of demons. However, they dumbed down glory kills significantly. Since it's been a few years, you should remind yourself how good we had it in Eternal, before you see what this game has to offer. The new "executions" are just no where near as cool. That leads into my next point, this game lacks seasoning, it lacks flair, it sort of feels like "We know you like Doom, so let's skip all the fluff and keep it to the basics" that being combat. The progression system feels a lot less interesting, you just pick up gold bars and gemstones to spend in stores. That is far less interesting than what we had before, and the upgrades for the weapons feel a lot less impactful, especially since you can end up saving a ton of gold and get all the upgrades for the new gun you got immediately, since you have to wait tell you reach a store, whereas before the upgrade happened right then and there. The game just lacks so much flair throughout the experience. Except for, ironically, in the story department. Doom the Dark Ages places where more emphasis on showing you cutscenes, which feel very out of place in a doom game. I much preferred the story being told in-world, in-game, like Doom 2016 and Eternal do. The cutscenes just cheapen the story. And yet, it seems like either there were bugs or cut content, because the transitions between levels can be abrupt and immersion breaking, like more than a few times I thought "Wait, why am I here now?" wheras in the last two doom games, the objectives really added to the experience. Doom the Dark Ages, you don't really even know what you are accomplishing in half of the missions. That gets to my last aspect. The music is just not the same without Mick Gordon. Id software did Mick Gordon dirty. The music in the Dark Ages is generic forgettable metal music, nothing like the music in eternal, the music in eternal was iconic and amazing. I had to listen to some Mick Gordon music to get Doom the Dark Ages lame music out of my system. So in summary, don't play Doom the Dark Ages, just play 2016 or Eternal. But if you really want to give it a try, wait for a sale, or just play it on gamepass, you'll thank yourself later.

Okay DOOM game, not as good as eternal, can't justify the 80€ pricepoint. Too much cinematics, dragon and robot maps are boring and combat is WAY too shield focused, they even made weapon switching slower to emphasize the shield play. Combat is fun but every enemy has crazy tracking to further emphasize the shieldplay so you get hit in the back a LOT, also encounters feel too short and a bit too far between to really get to enjoy the flow. Upgrading weapons in the begininning is frustrating because you basically get a better weapon for each slot later, also keybinding 2 different weapons in each bind sucks ass, especially with the slower weapon swapping. TLDR; just go play eternal if this isn't on sale for 30€ or lower

Cannonball simulator. You're the cannonball. Mayhem on a grand scale, fun guns, satisfying shield application. Fixes the worst flaws of Eternal and generally does its own thing.

Doom is one of my favorite franchises. Doom and Doom II were a formative part of my childhood, and a huge part of my introduction into the world of gaming. To say that I was extremely excited for this new entry is an understatement. I feel incredibly lucky to be a Doom fan. While other franchises rise and fall, Doom has remained a constant throughout my life. It still stands strong and proud, and for one simple reason; ID Software has never been afraid of taking risks. Each new entry brings something new to the table, and dramatically changes up the gameplay and atmosphere while still retaining the DNA of it's origins. This is incredibly rare, especially in this modern gaming landscape. My expectations were sky high, and as expected, ID Software delivers the goods yet again. This time the gameplay revolves around parrying and countering while avoiding bullet-hell projectiles, and it's an absolute blast! The new combat sandbox is incredibly fun and satisfying to master. The team has truly gone all-out and delivered some of the coolest looking weapon and enemy designs in the entire series. The Super Shotgun is a beast (even though I kinda miss the meathook), the Cycler is everything I've wanted out of a plasma rifle, the Ravager is the coolest concept for a weapon I've seen in the last decade, and the Chainshot is a work of art. The mecha, turret and dragon sections are fine. I enjoyed them as fun (if somewhat mindless) power fantasy segments, but found myself wishing they had a little more complexity. And now for the least impressive aspect of the game, which is kind of a big deal for a Doom game, the soundtrack. ID Soft's perplexing and unfair treatment of Mick Gordon has left a stain on the franchise that's proving difficult to wash away. Mick's work for Doom 2016 and Eternal, a fusion of electronic/metal that's practically oozing with creativity and originality, is a core part of modern Doom's identity, and his absence is very noticable. Filling Mick's shoes is a gargantuan task, and I sadly have to conclude that ID picked the wrong band for this task. I stuggle to recall a single memorable piece of music, no particular melodies or moments stand out as having elevated the gameplay experience, but rather just sitting there in the backgroud with it's generic compositions and flat mixing. For a series known and beloved for it's music, this just doesn't cut it. I'm not even going to mention the story, because despite ID doubling down on these elements, I never have and never will play a Doom game for the story elements, it just doesn't interest me. Overall, Doom: The Dark ages is another fantastic entry into a legendary series that's bogged down by a few questionable choices like the $80 pricetag, mandatory raytracing and inclusion of Denuvo. If you can get past these issues, the game is easily the best FPS to come out this year, and definitely my personal GOTY. 9/10