Opinie o grach

The core gameplay is solid. The introduction of shield and melee mechanics to replace Doom Eternal's flamethrower and glory kills is a welcome change, and thanks to the excellent sound and physics design, you really feel the weight of the Slayer with every movement and every shot. Each weapon packs a punch, and the feedback is satisfying.

The combat on its own is good, but it's not Doom Eternal good. The weapons are mostly viable on their own, but a couple of standouts make many others feel unnecessary, if not outright useless. That's a pretty big contrast from Eternal's loop, which forced you to use your entire arsenal frequently. In Dark Ages, I never really felt incentivised to mix things up the same way. Where Eternal made weapon wapping second nature, Dark Ages makes it feel almost like a chore, you save heaps of time just hurling your shield instead of swapping to the plasma rifle to take out shieldbearers, for example. It's clear that the combat design revolved around the new shield mechanics more than anything else. That's not inherently bad, but it does narrow the experience.

Beyond combat, though, the game nearly becomes a slog, mostly due to how the secrets and maps are structured. The maps are enormous, partly because of the mech and dragon set pieces demanding extra scale, and partly because of a more open world approach than previous games. The downside? You'll spend a lot of time backtracking. The last main level alone forces you to progress about 70% of the way just to find the secrets key, at which point you have to go back through the entire previous portion of the map to collect everything you left behind. This happens often, and it's kept me from jumping back in on Nightmare or Ultra Nightmare after finishing my Ultra Violence playthrough.

I could honestly do without the mech and dragon sections entirely. They break the pace pretty hard, and the combat in both is lacklustre and unexciting. If these portions had been cut, the game would have been significantly improved. In the case of Dark Ages, I think more could have been taken away to good effect.

And on that note, the soundtrack is sorely missing Mick Gordon. I can still remember those catchy, driving synth metal tracks from Eternal stuck in my head for hours after playing. But after hours of Dark Ages? I couldn't recite a single riff if I tried. It's an unfortunate blemish, and it's a shame that Id and Gordon's relationship ended the way it did.