Doom: The Dark Ages (2025)

I never really “got” Doom until last year. I grew up in a Christian home and so the idea of a Hell game with demons was just never going to fly in my house. I was always more transfixed on fighting human enemies anyways, so the Wolfenstien series was more interesting to me. But after getting into streaming daily, last year I ended up finally setting right something I long left dormant. Playing through the Doom series. So I ended up playing through all of Doom 1, 2, 64 & 3 last year in Virtual Reality.

Now, back in the days of the original Xbox, I did end up playing through Doom 3 (as my PC wasn’t powerful enough and had too much slow down) and also in 2016 when they rebooted Doom, I played through that. I actually didn’t care for Doom 2016 all that much since I felt the mandatory Glory Kills were just boring after a handful of times and past the opening (which actually was rad) I just kinda didn’t find myself drawn to play more than what was asked of in the game. In 2020 when Doom Eternal dropped, on GamePass no less, I loaded it up and was so thrown off by how absolutely awful the tone and story of it was that I dropped it entirely within about an hour or two into it.

So when Doom: The Dark Ages was announced, and after I played through the series in VR, now I have a better grasp on all of Doom (except Eternal). Now that we are caught up, let’s talk about The Dark Ages!

Right off the bat, the game starts off with a semi-lengthy cutscene that just really didn’t have me engaged. Besides the “Dark, Medieval” theme the game doesn’t really stick with or do very well, it didn’t have me invested in any character. Now this totally could be due to not being familiar with Doom Eternal, and that’s my bad. I always tell people to play through series in order, if you jump into the last game in a trilogy, you’ll never know what’s going on, and have to play catch up the entire time. However, I did play part of Eternal, the second game in the trilogy and I just hated it.

The story as I understand it, is that The Slayer (Doom Guy as the internet calls him, which is dumb and way lamer than Doom Slayer), is basically a captured animal, used as a weapon of mass destruction. He gets let loose to do the bidding of a group of people and then caged back up when not in use. He ends up finding this out, and rebelling and just destroying everything in his path. There are two sides, the good and the bad, and one of the captors of The Slayer seems to be playing both sides. While this is going on, the good side has some random chick who is doing something (again, this is where it all falls apart story wise) and has some hidden power. Ultimately, recapping the story is pointless for several reasons.

One, it’s not good. The first part actually is a decent Doom game story, and if they just stuck with that, then it would have been a much tighter experience without a lot of random unnecessary cutscenes with characters I have no care or interest for. I couldn’t even tell you a single characters name or story arch or development. So many cutscenes were devoted to no names NPCs that don’t matter to the story. I’m a big “Story Guy” in games, I value them and enjoy them. I never skip cutscenes (that’s like just fast forwarding in the middle of a movie, who does that?) and I’m always trying to be invested in the story the developer is trying to tell. However, I think the extra fluff of all the side plots are boring and don’t mean anything, because they don’t take the time to make it mean anything. No real time is spent with the npcs, in game or in cutscene to make me care. They are just kinda fodder for the story to exploit when it calls for it.

So, half the story just isn’t very good, but the other half is a good solid story to get me into the mind set of the Slayer and want to destroy everything in front of me. And that’s where the real game jumps in and excels for the most part.

The mechanics are that of any normal modern shooter (we gotta come up with something more descriptive that “modern” to talk about games made after the 90’s). It keeps the health and armor pickups from the classic Doom games, and the action is frantic and frenzied. I really enjoyed the majority of the levels and really thought taking the game into castles and forests really complimented the “Dark Ages” setting the developers were going for. A stand out was late in the game, when the level was set at the bottom of the ocean. But all around the sea was parted and it takes place on dry land. The whole skybox and boundary areas are a wall of sea water and in the background, sea monsters wandered back and forth. It was kinda breathtaking (especially in VR thanks to a mod).

These small setting changes and tones really added a new layer to the game that I felt was rad and well worth playing through. You expect certain things, like going to Hell in a Doom game right? And they deliver on that, but they do subvert expectations every once in a while, and I think that’s where the game really shines. The location, and design of the set pieces are also great and really evoke the atmosphere it’s inhabiting.

The big new talking point is the Parry system, where The Slayer can use the shield to parry projectiles and attacks. I actually didn’t have an issue with the main system itself, but more how it’s implemented. For a series that revels in its difficulty, not unlike the Dark Souls genre, the implementation of the parry system seemed to be very child-like. Hand holding in a way the series isn’t known for. At the offset it didn’t feel intrusive at all, but after a few hours it felt a bit boring and lackadaisical, fairly similar to the Glory Kill system in Doom 2016.

Also, the coloring of the parry and other projectiles seemed out of place and large, again very  watered down in a way the didn’t immediately catch my eye, but over the course of the game, I became very aware of the “modernization” of bright colors to stand out as a very easy way to make the game more inclusive. I found it almost insulting in a way that these big contrasting projectiles would slowly reach me and I’d have ample time to parry, and when doing so, I’d get a slow motion moment to take stock of what is happening and react slowly. Some said when the game came out that it was slow, and this game is definitely not slow, but there are moments that make the game slow down and feel almost like cheating in a way.

However, isn’t that what Doom strives to be? A power fantasy that makes you feel like you are cheating and so unbelievably powerful that you just don’t feel like anything can stop you. And if so, then it exceeds what it is trying to do.

As I was playing through the game and thoroughly enjoying myself, but finding myself feeling a bit underwhelmed with this massively produced large budget game, I wanted something a bit simpler. And it’s something that has been on my mind for a while now. There is no need for the Doom franchise the “Godfather of shooters” to have a single game every five-ish years. There is a place for this modern new big brash AAA published game, alongside what most call a “boomer shooter”. A game that harkens back to the original 90’s semi-3d style of games, maybe sprite based enemies in a 3D world, like Warhammer 40k: Blotgun, or Dusk.

The flat pixelated nostalgia driven games are back en-vogue and everyone wants to play them. Why not create a smaller B-Team studio that is solely focused on creating a classic Throwback Shooter of Doom. We’ve seen projects like Sigil and even the new Doom 1 & 2 updates in the Kex Engine thanks to Nightdive studio make the games feel new without doing much. This B-Team could not only revitalize the genre with the original godfather of the genre, but also give something to those who feel a bit betrayed with the focus on a very dull story that ultimately goes nowhere and an over reliance on very hand holding gameplay elements. I’d love for iD Software to embrace the love of the classic style of shooter and develop side by side to make the Doom series a more regular series, with outputs in different styles to combat series fatigue. As it stands right now, waiting 5 years for The Dark Ages was just not really worth it.