Doom is back after Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal. I didn’t have a chance to play Doom Eternal, so I jumped right into Doom: The Dark Ages for this review. Maybe you got the wrong impression that Doom was a mindless shooter? Well, this time it’s got lore, and more lore than you want, probably.

The Lore behind The Dark Ages

Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, set long before those events during a legendary war known as The Unholy Crusade. This war, only alluded to in the earlier games, now takes center stage in this one. The forces of Hell launch a full-scale invasion against the alien realm of Argent D’Nur, a world with a unique culture blending medieval themes, Viking traditions, fantasy mysticism, and advanced science-fiction technology.

Argent D’Nur is protected by its elite soldiers, the Night Sentinels, wearing armor and wielding both high-tech and melee weapons. But they are no match to the legions of Hell. Out of the blue, the Doomguy is transported to Argent D’Nur (by accident while fighting on other fronts). He soon proves himself a formidable warrior on which the Sentinels can count on.

Some of the spiritual leaders of Argent D’Nur took this opportunity to experiment with Doomguy to infuse him with superhuman powers, transforming him into the Doom Slayer. As you can guess, you will be playing that character.

It’s all About the SHIELD

You evolve in environments that mix a lot of different styles. You start in a place that really looks like a medieval environment, with huge beasts and dragons fighting each others, and humans wearing plated armor fighting back as much as they can (carrying guns!). It’s a weird mix of genres, like going to Universal Studios and seeing Spiderman just next to Harry Potter during the same stroll.

This Doom is quite different from your typical Doom experience. It’s not just about guns. You have a shield, and you get to use it heavily not only to protect yourself, but as a way to attack and kill enemies too. You can kind of teleport in front of enemies to hit them with your shield, because… reasons.

Later on your shield will get an upgrade: it will grow razor blades on its sides, and will be used to cut enemies in half or simply make them suffer for a few seconds as you throw your shield at them like a rotating saw.

The shield is a major gameplay element in here.

Before, everything used to be about guns, but the shield changes everything: it becomes a defensive and an offensive weapon.

It just depends on how you use it. This means you don’t shoot as much as in previous Doom episodes. You will prioritize melee over guns for many, many situations. The game also forces you to use the shield as an offensive weapon, as there are enemies that have their own shields protecting them, and your guns are ineffective against them. So you have to throw your shield at their shields (?!) to get rid of them. Don’t ask me if it makes sense, I’m just telling you what it is. It’s fantasy, alright?

You can also use your shield to jump higher. You might wonder why, right? In practice you can stick your shield into some kind of green glue that you find on certain walls. Your shield gets stuck for a while, such as when you try to call your shield back it instead pulls you to it, making you jump higher than you would by yourself. You know what? I think the id guys watched a little too much of Captain America. But they didn’t stop a the Marvel franchise. They watched Pacific Rim too! Turns out that your Sentinels friends have prepared a large mech version of your character for you to jump in and control, to fight the huge demons from Hell (we are talking about 100 meters high monsters).

In such phases you are able to punch and kick these huge foes, and destroy at the same time the city you are supposed to protect. Collateral damage, right, oops!? It even gets better when you get a delivery of a big ass gun from the skies. Think something the size of SpaceX’s Starship, but it’s not a rocket, it’s just a big ass gun for your 100 meters tall mech. There’s no way any of the physics make sense at this scale, but it’s good fun. The mech sequences have a much simpler gameplay though, so I see more as some kind of recreation from the intense fights than anything else.

While there is a lot of focus on the shield, some more shield, and yet more shield, you still get to handle a lot of guns, and some of them look fairly new in their design. I can’t say that they are very effective since enemies are more or less bullet sponges until you use your shield on them.

Fun fact, getting ammo is totally weird, too. There is some ammo that you can find on the field as you move around, but that’s nowhere enough to refill your guns all the time. Instead, the proposed mechanism in this game is to hit your enemies with your shield to make them drop ammo. And you know, they just happen to have the right ammo for your weapon, of course!

It does not make much sense, but it works, and it continuously encourages you to do melee attacks instead of playing it safe, far away from the enemies. Enemies will attack you in different ways, too, and if you parry with your shield at the right time, you can deflect some of their attacks or even counter them. The shield solves everything, again.

I think you get the picture. The game forces you to use your shield for everything, so there is no way you will play this Doom episode like a regular Doom game.

As usual, in most games you get to unlock new weapons, with upgrades for your character, your shield and your guns. To upgrade them you need to collect Gold as you go around (what kind of idiot leaves stacks of Gold lying around? Ok, am I asking too many questions?), and you can exchange the Gold you obtained for upgrades on some kind of death altar (again, why Gold?). There are trees of skills to unlock and so on, basically everything to give you some freedom and expand the possibilities of your combat style.

Come for the bullets, stay for the story?

This is the first Doom game with an actual cinematic storyline. There are cutscenes, secondary characters (that nobody cares about), archvillains that speak in menacing voices, and humans who keep on relying on the Doomguy because they get their asses kicked by the legions from Hell.

Is the story good? No.

Is it necessary? Probably not.

Did they hire a writer for this?

I hope not, because there is nothing even remotely original that a 5 years old count not come up with.

Frankly, we did not need this at all.

When watching this, I get the feeling Why are they trying so hard to put a story in there?. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants to see this, and if you were trying to convince me that there is a point to it, you are doing a piss poor job at it. You can’t build cinematic tension out of nowhere, and having a character that barely speaks does not help. Doom is probably the worst game to insert a story in there, because it’s just 100% action, there is no thinking, no strategy, no place for emotions apart from rage and anger.

But I exagerate a little. Sometimes you will be in awe. Not because of the story, but because of the quality of the engine.

A New Engine

The id tech 8 engine looks quite good, especially when it comes to reflections. It uses some kind of ray-tracing like technology to make things look a more realistic without consuming as much compute power as regular ray-tracing. It’s not a visual revolution but the artists did an excellent job to make the setting work, and you can see that there are a lot of unusual shapes. It’s not just corridors and crates. Since there is some kind of medieval backdrop you get to see a lot of different structures, and that reminds me more of Quake than Doom, from time to time.

While I usually play a lot on the Steam Deck, for this title that was hardly an option (see next paragraph) so I ended up on my RTX3060-equipped desktop. With DLSS it works well and you get a very comfortable framerate with medium settings on 3440x1440p screen (Ultra Wide). So it looks like it should run well on a large range of configurations out there. When you launch the game it will complain about your PC not having the latest Nvidia drivers (are you kidding? I am on Arch btw), but you can safely ignore such warnings and jump right in. Also, the FSR mode did not work at launch on Linux (I did not try it again since) so I went for DLSS by default.

Steam Deck Performance

This is the kind of game that is really hard to recommend on the Steam Deck. It’s rated as unsupported right now, and while it’s not technically true (since the game runs), I can understand why you’d want to rate it as such.

It runs if you turn everything to the lowest of the low, but even then, at max 15W TDP, the framerate remains unstable between 20 and 30 FPS. What redeems the experience a little is that it still looks great even at low settings - but it will be a lot less enjoyable because of the framerate issues. Still, it’s in the playable territory. I have played a bit on the Steam Deck and survived large scale fights a few times. One the things that makes it work on the Steam Deck is that you don’t need to aim as much when you are using the shield, which does act like an auto-aim. That’s a redeeming quality of the game design.

A Different Doom

I must admit, this feels like a very different Doom from any of the previous ones I have played. In many ways, the fights feel more disorganized, the difficulty is a bit lower (at the default settings), and since there is more melee action than shooting it’s a lot more forgiving. The amount of enemies you get on screen at the same time reminds me more of Serious Sam than anything else sometimes, but in a good way. I have not reached the end, but I heard you can complete the game in about 20 hours of so for the campaign itself. Not too long, just right for me. id software did a good job again, and the shield feature brings some freshness to the series that we had not seen for a long time.

Well done. Just don’t expect to play it on the Steam Deck, you might be disappointed. In any case, it goes right into our recommended games list.

Note: we were provided a key from the publisher.