Re: DOOM: The Dark Ages

On Wed, 21 May 2025 09:10:18 +0200, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm struggling to be interested in this game. There's always a trendy
mechanic that gets shoved in every game from a specific time period:
Crafting, Open world... This time it seems to be the parries, and it's
enough to put me away. Thanks to the soulslikes, it has become another
overused mechanic. I just want to move fast, circlestrafe, shoot a lot
and and have reasonable amounts of  ammo and health (Basically, classic
Doom, Quake 1 and Serious Sam).

I suspect that you will not like this DOOM very much. Personally I
enjoy some it, but there is just too much that frustrates me.

There are some sequences (too many for me) where guns become
essentially superfluous. You do collect some nice beefy and
interesting looking guns for sure. You can dispense with the lowest
demons with your shotgun, your nail gun, your spiker that fires bone
shards. All guns are upgradeable via gold and rubies that you collect
which can be exchanged at shrines for upgrades, assuming that you have
enough of the right currency.

The first upgrade shrine that I came across had (of course) handily
places bars of gold to collect close by. I collected the gold and
upgraded the shotgun.  I was hugely frustrated by the very next area
that required the use of the shield and melee to dispense with
numerous tougher demons. I should have upgraded the shield, but my
instinct as an FPS fan was to improve my gun.

Some tougher demons absolutely require combo's of shield and melee to
dispense with them. Some require you to stun them with the shield
throw, and then finish them off with the power glove. Guns in this
Doom are not even 50% of the game.

There is even a section that forces you to play as a giant Titan to
tackle the equally giant demons. That was entirely about melee and
foot stomping until the very end when a project weapon appears. Even
then, you still have to 'finish' the demons with a specific type of
melee attack.

That portion of the game *really* sucks and is nothing like what I
expect from a DOOM game.

I get frustrated by the need to remember which combo is needed to kill
which greater demon caste. Sometimes I don't even use any of my
weapons.

Then there's the secrets to find. Gold bars, rubies, life sigil's,
collectable toys, armour, codex cards. None of them are vital to the
game, but they are pointless filler with little to no interest to the
pure FPS fan.

At the end of the first chapter I had killed 100% of demons but only
had a map completion rate of 37% because of the secrets that I had
missed.

DOOM: The Dark Ages tries to be too many things and completely fails
at being a first person shooter because of it. This DOOM is *not* a
DOOM game.

--
Rob