DOOM: The Dark Ages Steam Charts & Stats

This game made me realize just how much of a masterpiece Eternal is. They really tried to introduce new things and some of them work pretty well. The parry and shield mechanics are really fun to use. The soundtrack is still banging , i do not agree with the haters, i know we lost Mick but it dosent means Finishing Move didnt delivered well , it holds up in my opinion. I liked the way they tried to focus more on the lore compared to the past entries , it made the final boss fights more meaningful even tho the game felt like an episode. But the vast size of the levels make up for it , they reeally improved the exploration system. Now , talking about the bad stuff... they replaced the dash with the sprint which isnt any greater. They almost got rid of the glory kills entirely , its not that bad since glory kills are still in the game , except you have to jump in order to trigger them and theyre not many. Probably its biggest two problems for me are the arsenal and the power ups.. First off , Were they influenced by the controversial Under the Mayo ultrakill review ? because i finished the game with almost only using the super shotgun ... something i never thought would be possible in a doom game.. it feels like its too easy when the game gives you so many overpowered abilities and weapons , I do not like the fact that even after you get the BFG , you dont really feel the need to use it during combat because the enemies are just that easy to defeat with your usual weapons. Id say this entry is ten times easier than eternal when it comes to the combat loop. Combat aside , I cannot ignore the ugly crime they commited. They added the Berserk power up into the game.. but its LITERALLY the quad damage multiplier... YOU DONT EVEN USE YOUR FISTS , you just get a big damage boost for your shots , thats all , i dont understand why did they chose to use berserk for that. But yeah .. all in all .. its a DooM game and even tho its not as good as the previous entry , its still not bad at all and enjoyable as it is. Buy it whenver you feel like it , sale or not , its your wallet and your choice , No matter how good a game is on steam , nobody will ever tell you to buy it at full price.

Thought this was going to be similar/an upgrade to DOOM Eternal, was wrong. Gameplay not as fun since it feels slower and clunkier than Eternal. My favorite aspect of Eternal, glory kills, (almost) completely gone in The Dark Ages. Not worth 80 EUR, maybe <10 EUR.

Doom but for Parry addicts The best Pacific Rim game you could ever want, and you get Doom Quake edition on the same package. Extremely satisfying doom combat where you throw yourself at the enemies full force. My only gripe is once you use your favourite guns you're gonna stick to one gun only most of the time, probably due to complaints to how eternal worked as a styleswitching kinda game and how people just wanted to use what they wanna use, this game allows you to play what you wanna play. Probably my favourite Rocket Launcher Gameloop in any game ever, only way to make it even better was if there was Rocket jumping. The package is packed to the brim with game, to a point where it tires you out, like two full course meals worth. Frankly, I enjoy it, but you gotta dose it right, and going back to back on those final levels tired me out, but I was having a lot of fun and don't regret it. TL;DR Game that will get you to say HELL YEAH to it many times

The price is unacceptable it's basically pushing you into paying for Game Pass. Enjoy not owning your games in the near future. Fuck you, Microsoft.

When I first played Eternal, I was like -- whoa, this feels weird and way different than the first instalment. But, as I got used to playing Eternal, it actually became better than the first one in many ways. With Dark Ages, I got the same feeling at first, so I knew I had to give it a chance. But as the levels went on, I just couldn't have as much fun or interest... I couldn't understand why. I just think that the emphasis on the shield mechanic is what defeats the game for me. DOOM shouldn't be a tactical and defence-focus game. It's a "kill or be killed" intense and offence-focused game. But I found myself blocking and parrying way too many freaking projectiles that visually take half my screen. Everything (skills/fights) revolves around parrying and blocking. The weird "reflect-green-projectiles-and-not-the-red-ones" minigames just felt out of place. And it's part of the core mechanics of the game. - Ambience/graphics are great, but something also feels less compelling compared to previous 2 games. I think it's the washed-out colour palette that gives that vibe. - Lots of weird unexpected collision boxes with the world. Places you'd expect that you can go that you can't - I got stuck on at least 2 (if not 3) occasions because world events or fights would not trigger because of a bug. Had to restart from checkpoint to fix. - Music is alright, but as other reviews pointed out, it's a lot more generic and less intense - The dragon levels are "meh" at best... I don't want to play a Starfox game. Good idea but doesn't add value IMO. Even near the end as the dragon appeared I was like "oh no, not again" lol. - Mob placement is also questionable. You keep encountering groups of shield solders pefectly aligned and you one-shot them with 1 shield attack. Also, fodder demons are a joke. They are always placed in groups that you can one-shot with 1 AoE shield attacks. No challenge there. - I never run out of ammo or health. I think some more balancing could have been done. - You keep coming back to the same 2-3 guns. Again compared to the other 2 games, some guns seem sub-par or not satisfying to use. Even switching between guns is slow so you tend to want to keep using the same gun since it's very hard to run out of ammo - Barely any glory kills. Unsatisfying demon deaths, except a few here and there. The only glory kills that trigger are done with the shield. Because the shield is everything. - Way too many unnecessary cut-scenes. We like the DOOM lore, but it shouldn't be story focused. I don't know man. I loved the other games and completed them several times each (hell, even the older DOOM games). Of course I will finish this one because I paid the full price and it's "ok" overall.. but I just can't get myself to recommend it -- or at least, just be wary of this as a buyer.

A painfully mediocre sequel to a Masterpiece that was Eternal. I went on a social media hiatus when it dropped to evade spoilers, but it turns out that there are no spoilers to be had since 99% of stuff that happens here was in the Eternal codex entries. One interesting thing happens throughout the entire story and that thing jumps the shark and is run into the ground within 4 levels. The gameplay seems like a sad casualized parody of Eternal+2016 with gamepad being the controller in mind for a franchise that created PC gaming. The game has TURRET SECTIONS. I thought we figured out how painfully boring that is by 2009, but I was unfortunately wrong. Same goes for unnecessary vehicle sections. Controlling Doomguy feels like controlling a large vehicle already, but then he gets into an even larger vehicle and things slow down even more. Not worth the full price and upgrading to an RTX GPU.

The game play is way different from 2016/Eternal in a way that is not fun for me. The mech battles does nothing for your progression and feels clunky. For me I just didn't find any enjoyment. Eternal is by far the best game play I've experienced in a Doom game. Game enjoyment is subjective to individuals and for me it's just not fun.

We are in fact in the dark ages, if modern gaming price points begin at $70. Kidding aside, DOOM: The Dark Ages is a phenomenal, but a different entry in the DOOM franchise. I was leaning towards not recommending this game due to how expensive it is for a 25 hour campaign with no additional content, but I genuinely enjoyed this game, and the game play alone is still DOOM in its core but this time, with a different flavor that I didn't realized I needed after playing 2016 and Eternal. The Dark Ages features the origin of the DOOM Slayer - still the same killing machine, but this time you'll feel like an M1 Abrams tank ready to cause havoc. Newly added weapons to the Slayer's arsenal include a shield, a flail, and a mace which enhances the ways you can kill hordes of demons. There's also a lot of parrying which I grew to love, and newly added sections that feature a giant robot mech and a dragon made the game more interesting. The combat loop is refreshing, and just like the previous entries, fluid and satisfying. The game theme and level design which features a medieval and at times, a Lovecraftian theme are amazingly integrated. Overall, the Dark Ages will feel different from its predecessors - id Software did not stick with what works and instead provided a new experience to the beloved DOOM franchise with the Dark Ages. While I had a blast playing this game, I'd say wait for a sale.

The third game in the Doom renaissance, much like the third game of the original trilogy, is technically quite impressive, but overall disappointing in its highest moments, and downright frustrating in the lowest. I'll get this out of the way immediately: The game is far too easy, and though that's a problem I find myself having with a lot of games, it's the reasons [i]why[/i] Dark Ages is so easy that really drag it down when compared to prior entries in the series, and make it kind of dull even if it was its own entirely new IP. From the start of the game you have access to a shield bash attack - It has about a second's worth of cooldown between uses, and it launches you full speed into whatever enemy you have targeted while rendering you seemingly invincible for the duration. Upon impact, you explode with enough force to kill 20 of the random fodder demons around you, and they all drop health. You can also toss the shield as a boomerang that pierces through fodder demons and kills them instantly, and you don't even need to wait for it to return to use it as a regular shield again, it just teleports back if you press the button. Sometimes the fodder demons have shields, but if you shoot them a couple of times (or once with the Super Shotgun, even at range - Or hell, sometimes you don't even have to shoot them) they get "Superheated" and a single toss of your own shield will not only destroy the superheated shield, but will explode and kill all the fodder demons nearby, making them all drop armor. You can turn the game up to a higher speed, you can increase enemy health and damage, you can play on Nightmare with all the sliders turned up and it doesn't make a bit of difference - The fodder demons pose no threat, they die immediately and drop so many resources that it's difficult to actually die in any encounter that includes them (which is most of them.) Heavier demons aren't quite so weak, but the number of them that get instantly killed (or put into an execution state) from a single shield bash into their face (which stuns them) with a follow-up blast from the super shotgun is frankly ridiculous. Hell knights, Revenants, Mancubi and Arachnotrons spawn in just to get bonked on the head and shot once constantly. Sometimes the heavier demons are armored, which means you might need to bonkshoot a second time with a shield toss thrown in the middle, but every now and then I find myself shooting off the demons' armor plating anyway. The shield also allows you to tank damage while it's up (as expected) but there's rarely a reason to do this outside of the few enemies that have a hitscan-ish attack that don't die in one hit. It also has a parry that completely obliterates everything in the game- -To clarify, the parry is unbelievably easy to pull off (even with the parry window turned down to its shortest) and as soon as you get a shield rune that gives you an attack on parry, doing it to an oncoming projectile is almost guaranteed to kill everything around you, and stun/maim even heavy demons. Parrying melee attacks will stagger bigger demons too, which would be sensible if they didn't all die in two seconds immediately after. It introduces different melee weapons but each one renders the previous one completely pointless. The third weapon is a big hammer that refills ALL of your ammo for ALL of your guns when it hits anything, and does absolutely absurd damage to the target and even hurts things around it. The downside is that it has a longer cooldown but since you can recharge melee cooldowns by parrying things and melee pickups are everywhere, you're never really hurting for it. There's waaaay more guns than in previous entries, but you swap so slowly between them that you're almost disincentivised to use them. Each gun seems to have a different purpose but the majority of them are outclassed by the shield: [i]The enemy has an energy shield that will explode if you shoot it with a plasma weapon?[/i] Too bad, the shield toss (after a couple of cheap upgrades) will bounce between targets if it hits an enemy shield, killing them all much faster. [i]There are lots of enemies and you need crowd control?[/i] The shield explode whenever you use one of its infinite dashes. [i]Single big targets?[/i] The shield toss can stun bigger demons in place for a while. [i]HUGE enemies?[/i] Just parry their attacks - Some of them you never even have to shoot. I started out trying to use a lot of weapons on my Nightmare run, and it eventually devolved into a Super Shotgun-fest, since I was never running out of ammo and it does absurd damage to anything it hits. It's almost the only weapon worth using since you can close the distance to enemies in an instant at any time. The rocket launcher was also pretty useful for two reasons: Parrying an attack makes it so splash damage from the rocket launch heals you for a short while, which makes most encounters trivial on its own - But much [i]worse[/i] than this is all down to the enemies' [b]awful, awful, awful[/b] AI. Doom 2016 and Eternal used the roster of demons so well that I genuinely can not find any fun within the senselessness of Dark Ages: Demons will spawn into the arena 50 metres away from you, far enough that they can't actually shoot you, and then just STAND STILL. You can lob rockets at them all day until they die and they won't move, and I cannot understand how this enemy behaviour made it into the game. I cannot defend Dark Ages on novelty alone. Yes, it is very [i]different[/i] from all previous entries in the series, but its differences are not what makes it bad. The terrible design choices and compromises made to the level, enemy and player design are what make it bad. You are too strong at all times but only need to use 10% of the tools you are given. Maps and enemy counts are bigger than ever, but they're mostly just open wastelands with hordes of fodder demons that provide no meaningful challenge nor cathartic satisfaction when defeated. The game has no idea which of its enemies are actually threatening and which aren't, so it will repeatedly throw you into cramped arenas with lots of Hell Knights and expect you to have trouble these trash mobs that die immediately, or put Arachnotrons and Mancubi in places where they are very easy to shield bash. The dev team seems to have no confidence in their ability to balance all this crap so they didn't even bother to try, hence the addition of fine-tuning difficulty sliders - You can call it player choice, but I'm calling it a cop-out. The only way you can make the game slightly challenging is by playing it at 150% speed. This is to say nothing of the writing, which is about as stock as you can get. The game's universe has interesting ideas to explore, but there's no overarching themes, none of the characters actually develop in any meaningful way, the [b]one[/b] entire female character they have is the most Mary Sue thing in Doom history and she spends most of the game either doing nothing, getting kidnapped and needing to be rescued, or being so overly powerful that she could probably fight Doomguy, all whilst having no emotive reaction or growth to anything that happens in the plot - Nobody does. Doomguy himself is a moron throughout most of the game. The mech sections were fun - Once. The dragon sections were fun - Once. The less said about them the better because they show you everything they have to offer within the first 5 minutes of either. All the secrets are displayed clearly on the map and aren't at all secret. There are wide open underwater areas with invisible walls. There's a weird amount of backtracking that was fixed by Eternal's fast travel but isn't included here. Keys are marked clearly on the map, but locked doors aren't?? It has around 5 bosses, by which I mean it has 2 bosses but the second one is reused a bunch of times for the last two missions. I could keep going, but I've ran out of space. Don't buy this garbage.

Dark ages is awesome but I'd still wait for a sale, given that it's around 20 hours of playtime the price is too much. That doesn't mean I don't like it or I think it's bad at all, but the price is not justifiable. You'll need a high end PC to get the most out of it because it has mandatory ray traced lighting which will kill your performance on low tier RTX cards. The recommended specs are very optimistic I'd say. I happened to upgrade my GPU mid playthrough, the first card (4070ti non-super) struggled to maintain a smooth framerate at medium settings, didn't try low settings. My 9070 XT was able to get 200fps consistently at max settings, using FSR at native & frame gen. Without frame gen it was pretty choppy. I would definitely look at benchmarks for your GPU before choosing to play this to see if it's a framerate you'd be okay with. I loved all the mechanics with the shield, both in and out of combat. Blocking attacks from massive enemies is peak satisfaction. The newest Doom trilogy's peak is always during the chaotic fights with dozens of enemies and the defensive mechanics with the shield lend themselves well to them, the feeling of intensity is the strongest I personally get from any game during the most challenging hordes. The sections where you pilot a mech or dragon are fun but very simple, which is fine as they don't overstay their welcome. The music is good, but unremarkable. Dark ages doesn't have any standout or memorable tracks really, you can tell they were trying to replicate what Mick Gordon did in the previous games but it's just not the same. Overall it's a great game that fits in well with 2016 and Eternal. I'd honestly struggle to pick a favourite between this and Eternal.