It should be clear by now to anyone with a functioning frontal cortex that a lot of "criticism" issued by gamers is, to put it politely, myopic. A fairly common sentence you'll see in conversation about any given franchise will be "It's a good game, but not a good [x] game". DmC: Devil May Cry got it, Dark Souls 2 got it, and Doom: The Dark Ages will get it. Normally I'd roll my eyes at such a platitudinous piece of hack-work, but id and Bethesda's latest instalment in the long-running first-person shooter series, following the excellent Doom (2016) and the even excellenter Doom Eternal has made me sit back, take a long look at one of the stupidest pieces of analysis I've ever repeatedly seen, and go... hmm. Yeah. Kind of.
When it comes to Doom, it has to be understood that I am not talking about a traditional video game franchise, here. I do not class Doom or its follow-ups as first-person shooters in the generally understood sense. Focusing solely on their campaigns, they are - with the arguable exception of Doom 3 - essentially electroshock therapy you can buy on the Steam Store. With the difficulty tuned sufficiently high, you are not just playing a game. You are reacting. You get better when you go beyond panic. When you just know what to do in every single imperceptible fraction of time that your sense of vision witnesses whatever godawful appalling situation you've managed to get your Doom Slayer into. Your brain is completely plugged into the game. You achieve Gorevana.
The divisive Doom Eternal managed to marry the instant stimulus feel of the classic DOS Doom titles with a fresh and still unique method of approaching combat. It wasn't the same as the 1993 PC title, not even remotely. But it managed to make you feel the same way! That same passage from the panicked arrrgh of fear, frustration and hesitation into the bloodthirsty ARRRGH of a blood punching, chainsawing, double jumping, evil smashing, flame belching, glory killing engine of total carnage. Your skills improved. Your play evolved. But you had to earn it.
Doom: The Dark Ages fails because it hands it to you. "No, Stu", you may be thinking. "Please, no." And I understand why. I'm not about to difficulty discourse your asses. I'll get it out of the way. I don't care what difficulty you play games on. I don't care if you use cheats to unlock all the hats or whatever. It means nothing to me. Do as you will. Live your best life. Flourish. But understand that as a long-term Doom fan I'm going to want a Doom experience from my Doom game. That is not what I got here. Which is where I would cleverly circle back to my apparent about-face on "It's a good game, but not a good Doom game." Or I would, if I was actually convinced that this is a good game at all.
It didn't start well. The first three or four levels of the 22 on offer were, frankly, far too easy. The Slayer now has a borderline teleport move, activated by pressing LT then RT, that sends him flying towards a targeted enemy. Since the respawning fodder monsters now show up in large clusters and drop health when killed, this means you're essentially one command away from a heal at any given time. With the difficulty set - as ever - to Ultra-Violence, I found myself essentially being spoon-fed victory. Yeah, you're so cool, player! Look at the cool thing you did! And you didn't have to do anything! Is that rewarding to people?
The new parry mechanic sees you tap LT again to reflect certain projectiles and physical attacks back at your enemies, leaving them open to retaliation. Not a bad idea in theory but it essentially amounts to seeking out the green fireballs in a slow-moving formation and pressing the button when you're within a kilometre or so. This is not particularly challenging and stops being satisfying quickly. It's reactive, yes, but the enemy patterns are always the same and the battlegrounds this time around are so wide and flat that encounters just blend into one another. There is exploration - some of it rather good - but there's none of the platforming from Eternal, a fact that will no doubt please its detractors but disappoint those such as myself who enjoyed the way that game's verticality added speed and diversity to the combat.
Weapon hot-swapping has also been greatly discouraged, with much of the game completeable using one or two of the game's many different guns. I personally used the Super Shotgun about 80% of the time, switching to Plasma in order to fry certain enemy shields and the odd sojourn into the Impaler - essentially the Stake Gun from Painkiller, and upgradeable to the point of seeming genuinely broken while also somehow remaining quite boring. See, the upgrade system here is just so flat compared to its predecessor - you've got options, sure, but none of them actually make any meaningful difference to the way you approach the game. I fought in basically the same way from the early levels right the way through to the end. And yes, it did get more difficult once I hit about the eighth level, by which point I was already rapidly losing interest and hurriedly reinstalling Doom Eternal.
New gameplay types have been thrown in to break up the general monotony. There are now giant mech battles that are so simplistic I could barely believe what I was playing. Essentially a one-button QTE dragged on for all too many minutes, with some Punch-Out! esque dodging that you'd have to be physically unconscious to possibly fail. The dragon riding segments are more successful, though their genuinely impressive scope does belie the similarly simplistic gameplay. You'll hover around battleships which launch laser patterns at you, patterns with conspicuous gaps either vertically or horizontally. Why would the demons design their weapons this way? I know it seems like a daft thing to ask in something as utterly unreal as Doom, but it is quite literally avoided by moving either up/down or left/right. You could play it over the phone on Live & Kicking. There's suspension of disbelief, there's acceptance that you're playing a game, and then there's stuff like this which is so hollow that it just makes you wonder why you're bothering.
Yes, I have been harsh on Doom: The Dark Ages. Maybe a little more than it deserves, but I just don't like it. The game is certainly not without its moments and the graphics are often impressive. The secrets are barely hidden (they're marked on the map, for god's sake) but it's still fun to roam the absolutely enormous stages and seek out every last drop of gold. The gunplay is good and the melee is nice and crunchy, but making me press R3 multiple times in a row is criminal. I don't want to press those horrible clicky analog sticks ever, let alone repeatedly to perform combos. I think people who really, really hated Doom Eternal will enjoy this one a lot more, but unfortunately I think Eternal is a modern masterpiece and this is a massively dumbed-down version of it. You won't need to adapt, you won't need to think on your feet. It's just another undemanding AAA experience that values empty spectacle over satisfying gameplay. It's not Doom. It's the opposite of Doom. That's a gigantic bummer! I fell asleep playing this game! I fell asleep playing a Doom game on Ultra-Violence!
One last thing I want to address, though, is the prevalence of difficulty sliders. Almost everything can be adjusted to make things as easy and difficult as you want, from enemy health to parry timing, all to a frankly remarkable level of precision. This would absolutely fix my main issue with the game, but for one crucial variable - it's not my job to balance the damn thing. I don't want to fiddle with a bunch of parameters until I find the exact level I enjoy. I didn't want to do it in Sonic Frontiers and I certainly don't want to do it in a series that I have always played on the same difficulty level and, until Dark Ages, never had an issue with it. Am I being petulant? It's fine by me if you think that, you'd have a reasonably solid argument. But I'm not interested in making compromises for a game that has never previously compromised its audience. If a Doom game strips itself of everything that I feel makes for a Doom, from mechanics to visuals to structure, then surely it's at last reasonable to say that it isn't a Doom game? Or at least not one of any real consequence?
Doom: The Dark Ages has its moments. It is a hyper-polished AAA game like basically every other hyper-polished AAA game. If that's what you're into, shit, it's your money. But I'm into Doom.