Doom Eternal: Oh, The Buttons You’ll Press

Id delivered a great FPS, but does it need to readjust its sights?

I’d pegged the Doom 2016 crowd as being parallel to the Path of Exile 1 crowd. I.e.: They want to hold one button down and clear a screen for an overcompensatory power fantasy. I have a certain disdain for the digitised cathexis of the Reddit-tier ‘mUh DoOm SlAyUh’ fanboys. While I still believe that part of the fan reaction to this game is the lack of an ego sinecure in FPS form, I now get why it’s so divisive. I can see what Id were doing with it. I respect it. I was hoping for something more in the vein of Unreal Tournament 2004. Doom Eternal is not that.

One minor technical gripe before I get going: Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don’t like wireless headphones. I don’t know why. It’s not like this was particularly advanced arcane technology. Certainly, you’d have thought this wouldn’t be an issue at the time they were released, but it is. So you’re going to be listening to the sound either through wired headphones or speakers. It’s bad enough that I’ve had my wireless headphones just stop working hours after I’ve closed the game and I’ll need to reconnect them. I don’t know what’s going on there, but, seriously, what the hell?

Doom Eternal’s aesthetic is less grounded than Doom 2016. The floating neon primary-coloured pickups are somewhat less immersive than 2016’s deliberate environmental integration. Where guns would be found in lockers or dead people’s hands before, now they’re bobbing and twirling in the middle of a beam of light. I’d have preferred 2016’s style, but Eternal is by no means unappealing.

The environments are very pretty. I’d be happy to wander around an empty version of Doom Eternal just looking at things, honestly. There are a lot of cloudy vistas with impressive scenery and eye-catching background points of interest. Id’s visual design is really impressive. I can’t shake the idea that the environmental art team for Id, should be put to work on RPGs or some kind of MMO-adjacent project. While exploration is a significant part of Doom, I’d make the anodyne, possibly misplaced, suggestion that the majority of FPS enthusiasts are not going to stop and smell the roses. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of them.

The enemies are, perhaps, a little too cartoony and the early levels are overly reliant on everything being a tiny outcrop sticking out of a void. Again, Id have clearly given the middle finger to immersion. Which is weird, considering the lengths they’ve simultaneously gone to to cram the game full of lore and explanations and so on. Which reinforces the impression that Eternal has a bit of an identity crisis. I hope Doom doesn’t become another Quake, devouring itself in a frenzy of self-reinvention with each new release.

The story is pulpy dark fantasy – very Conan-esque. It’s mostly reliant on spending most of its time making none-too-subtle hints that there’s some big twist coming, or that ThE DoOm SlAyEeEhH is interfering with some big meta plan and has some kind of dark history, blahdy blahdy blah. He keeps wandering across random characters who scowl at him and tell him he can’t make up for something or other or put something right or save everything. It’s clear that he knows all of these guys and there’s some history and so on. But MuH DeRm SlIYeUhEuGhEhEhEeEe is such a badass antihero guy who punches everything and doesn’t afraid of nothing, so…

So what, precisely? I get that this is the whole schtick of pulp fiction, and I shouldn’t take it overly seriously, because the game is a heavy metal album cover in motion. On the other hand, I can’t help getting the impression that the lady doth protest too much. It’s trying too hard to convince you that HuM DuM SlUmNeAuAuUuGh is so cool and unstoppable. The oversell is the reason I can’t buy into the hype. Pulp fiction relies entirely on style, that’s why Frank Miller can regurgitate century-old plots for Sin City and get away with some vaguely concerning implications about women – because Sin City has enough style to pull it off. Doom Eternal does not have that level of panache.

The Doom Slayer is Bella Swan for insecure nerds.

Doom, and its fanbase, often puts me in mind of self-insert fanfic. This is what I mean when I say I have a certain level of disdain for the Doom community. Encountering Doom fans is like every time you’ve ever had a 10-year-old kid claim they could beat up such and such with the pure earnestness of childhood naivete. Such and such is always at least twice their age and four times their weight, but the kid has an absolute belief in their martial prowess that only comes at that age, and so you smile and agree, “Of course you can, Little Timmy! You’re so strong!” You just hope that they never have to meet reality the hard way. And that’s fine for 10 year olds, but we’re talking about presumably grown men here, and some of the overcompensatory projection is just a little concerning. The Doom fanbase really does have chronic man-child/midlife crisis vibes.

For all its heavy metal rip and tear non-stop rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty performativity, at times, Doom Eternal feels less a shooter and more a frantic high-pressure puzzle game. A gestalt amalgamation in FPS carapace.

The monsters hit hard and that’s fine. I’ve said before how I much prefer Doom 3’s atmosphere and ‘you are not that guy’ tone over 2016’s ‘MuH d0oM sLaYuH’ pandering, even if Doom 3 is only actually good for about 3 hours before you get utterly sick of the game spawning troglodytes behind you in yet another chest-wide hallway… But here, the monsters don’t hit hard for any great purpose, it is designed so you can spam the hell out of the glory kills. Maybe that works for some people, but I’d rather shoot as a primary means of killing the enemies. I don’t want to be constantly running through hordes of goons purely so I can click on the blue flashing one so I can make sure I’ve actually killed it. It just interrupts the flow.

The monsters themselves all have specific weapons you’re supposed to use on them, which is cool in theory, but in reality just means you’re often using weapons you don’t really want to use. When you add the obsessive ammunition rationing going on in this game, you’re as often as not forced to switch to a gun you don’t want to you purely because you can run through your entire reserves in the first couple of minutes of an encounter. It’s to the point that when I came to upgrading one of the many upgrade pools scattered throughout the game, I didn’t care at all about any of the options, I just looked for increased ammunition capacity.

The glory kills are, at this point, invasive. Id possibly cranked them up due to the fans and the media crowing about them in 2016, but in the previous instalment, Doom used them at reasonable intervals. You weren’t forced to use them, or you used them a couple of times per fight. In Eternal, you are using them constantly to restore health or gain ammo. The game has absurd ammo restrictions to facilitate this design choice, so it teaches you to chainsaw every other monster. But I don’t really want to pause to watch yet another imp get sawn in half. I just want to blow its head off and keep moving. I was constantly pausing to watch the canned animations play out ten or more times per encounter. The resource restrictions in Eternal don’t feel tactical, or like they fit particularly smoothly with the seemingly desired pace or tone of the rest of the game; it creates a stuttering pace, that conflicts with the emphasised movement. The end result is that I didn’t feel like I was trying to bunny hop my way around an arena trying to survive the next wave of demons, I just felt like Eternal was pulling in two different directions, and found myself up tired and harried.

After you’ve chainsawed through the first ten guys, you don’t feel so compelled to do it a million more times. It’s not compelling, it’s just busywork. This can be fairly easily offset with a couple of ammo upgrades, and after you’ve got a few hours into the game, you’ll be familiar enough with the loop that chainsawing through zombies to get ammo will be normalised. However, I don’t think that the excessive presence of these system does the “core” of the game any particular favours. The glory kills and chainsaw mechanics aren’t in and of themselves bad, they’re just overdone. To the point where the shooting becomes secondary to the button pressing.

The arenas are often too small. In 2016 you had arenas, but they were spaces in which you could move about and make some evasive tactical choices. Here… you are hemmed in constantly. Every other arena is the size of a donut and you are shooting wildly at everything purely to make it start flashing so you can hit the kill animation button so you can buy yourself a little extra time. Eternal’s fights are constricted, it plays to the design choice of making everything hyper-frantic. But it runs up against Id’s seeming desire to make the game more thoughtful. If you’re going to think about things, you simply can’t do it while everything on the screen is moving at whipsaw speed.

A similar problem comes up with the platforming. There’s a lot of it in Eternal. To be fair, Eternal has managed to make the movement feel very fluid – there’s less sense of the usual FPS platforming jank, which is a relief while flinging yourself into the air from a monkey bar and shotgunning a revenant in the face as you sail past. That said, I didn’t get on with the jumping puzzles between encounters. I think primarily because of the dash ability. If you’re going to put dash into an FPS, it is Unreal Tournament style – double tap a direction. No exceptions. Doom Eternal wants it bound to a specific key. This is a bad decision.

You’ve already got everything around your WASD fingers set to every other function in the game – grenade launchers, flamethrowers, equipment swap, mod swap, toaster ovens, tent pegs, makeup bag, spare keys…. For me at least, I found I had very few options that didn’t make the dash ability awkward to get to at a split-second notice. Which you will find, because the game wants you to frequently double jump over a gap, shoot a switch mid air, dash to the dash refill floating in the sky, and then double dash again to cling to a rock face or a floating platform. This is exacerbated by the inconsistency with which you will actually ledge grab. I had so many instances in which, despite being the terror of hell, mUh DoOm SlAyUh just awkwardly scraped his faceplate along the edge of a platform he was obviously able to grab, before plummeting cartoon style into the abyss.

There are perhaps an overabundance of buttons to think about in the middle of the fights. Having all of those options is great, but when combined with Eternal’s insistence that you use all of them, the right gun or grenade or mod or piece of equipment at the right time on the right guy, while a crowd of other guys are trying to disembowel you, it’s very easy to forget which key does what. Instead of sticking a blade into some some berk’s face, you just stand in front of them and swap your shotgun attachment a couple of times like a military arms inspection performed by a particularly grouchy lemon.

Skill issue, undoubtedly, but, I guess I’m just too tired to deal with it. The game’s runtime is apparently about 14 hours. I think it’s easy to get overwhelmed in the first hour or two. I also think it’s worth playing for three or four at a minimum; the game really starts around the Cultist Base level, which is about four hours in. At that point you’re starting to get to grips with how Eternal’s conglomerated systems work and fit together, and the fights are less overwhelming as a result. If you haven’t started to really gel with the game at that point, then it’s probably a sign that you have fully bounced off of it. And that’s fine. There is definitely a reason that this one divided people so much.