[Average Reading Time: 9 Minutes]

I ripped. And I tore. Until it was done.

Doom Eternal was a game I heard nothing but good things about when it first launched. More times than not I'd hear people say that it was impossible for them to go back to Doom (2016) after playing this game. Having enjoyed the 2016 game, I was excited to get my hands on Eternal. However, I didn't pick it up at launch, as my hands were full with a completely different title that just so happened to release the same day. I wouldn't pick up Doom Eternal until it got that PS5 upgrade, making it look great while not sacrificing performance. When a good sale came around, I snagged the game alongside its DLC packs, hoping to hop into those after I beat the game.

However, I did not, if only because I didn't beat the game back then. There's a reason for that. Doom Eternal's stages are huge. Like, huge huge. Huge as in "It's going to take you over an hour to beat any of these stages if you're being thorough and finding all the things and completing challenges" huge. Between the intensity of combat encounters and the time spent hunting for collectables, I found myself getting exhausted during play sessions quickly. I wouldn't be able to beat more than 2 stages without feeling fatigued, and this turned me off from the game. Because of this, I didn't return to Doom Eternal, leaving it unfinished for years.

At the time of writing this, Doom: The Dark Ages was recently announced, and the trailer did a great job of getting me excited for another dive into the world of Doom. However, the idea of going into that game before beating Eternal didn't sit well with me, so I set out to finish this game once and for all.

The plot of Doom Eternal is a lot more involved than the 2016 game, that's for sure. More people are talking, there's tons of lore hidden everywhere, and there's a sense of urgency that wasn't quite as prevalent in the first game. Story spoilers will be avoided here, but my general thoughts on the plot is that it's alright. It's nothing too revolutionary, but it won't put you to sleep, either. The lore pickups have some interesting details about the world, and the cutscenes can be entertaining, especially with Doom Slayer's insistence of not acknowledging anyone around him directly and instead focusing on what he wants to do next. The way he acts definitely got a few laughs out of me during my playthrough.

The plot isn't the only thing that got deeper in this title, as the gameplay of Doom Eternal is a much more intense beast than the 2016 entry. This game is all about moving fast, thinking fast, shooting fast, and managing resources fast. Ammo is super limited now, and you're deeply encouraged to constantly swap weapons and use supporting moves, such as your grenades, chainsaw and flamethrower to keep monsters on their back foot. Each monster also has its own weaknesses to different guns and shot types, so as you play, you begin to learn which weapons to use against which foes, rather than just mowing through enemies with one gun and not thinking about anything else.

Combat is a ballet act of that mainly consists of you shooting at foes, running out of ammo, using your chainsaw to gain more ammo, performing finishers to regain health when you run low (it will happen more often than you'd think), using your flamethrower to get enemies to drop armor, and making use of grenades and gun attachments to solve the puzzle that is each and every single combat encounter.

When you first start playing this game, keeping all of these things in mind is nothing short of overwhelming. You're going to be going up against new foes, reading the tip that pops up about their weakness (more on that below), and then committing that information to your memory as you shoot and dodge and hope nothing sneaks up on you while you try to use your newfound information to your advantage. This is what made combat exhausting for me back when I first played this game, and even now, I'd find myself breathing a sigh of relief when an encounter was over. However, the more you play Doom Eternal, the more you gain an understanding of how to approach combat encounters. You'll soon find yourself feeling more in control of yourself during fights, identifying monsters immediately and quickly switching to the right gear to take them down.

Knowledge and guns won't be the only things aiding you in combat, however. Hidden all over stages are a plethora of secrets. These can contain items that are immediately useful, such as more ammo, health, armor, and a new item for this game: extra lives. These revive you when you die, allowing you to continue a fight without having to restart an encounter. These are highly valuable and saved me multiple times during my playthrough. They're definitely worth seeking out!

The other items you find in secrets come in multiple flavors. You'll find collectables such as lore bits, music records, and action figures of the various foes you'll encounter, which are always a treat to see. Aside from those, you'll also find items that enhance your abilities, such as upgrades to your maximum health, armor, and ammo storage (guess which I maxed out first), runes to give you special abilities, and tokens that can be spent on general upgrades that do things like enhance your grenades and make you immune to red barrel explosion damage.

These enhancing items aren't required, but they do help make things easier for you in the long run, especially those ammo upgrades, since ammo is very limited in this game. I wound up hunting down every item in every stage in the game, which absolutely inflated my playtime, but I can't resist the good feeling of completely clearing out a map of secrets and goodies. The secrets overall aren't too hard to find, either (especially after you snag an upgrade that shows you the location of each item on the map).

Stages also contain a small number of challenges you can complete for upgrade tokens and batteries to unlock doors containing goodies on the base you return to after most missions. Most of these challenges are really simple to do, being things like "Find x amount of this collectable" or "Exploit an enemy weakness x number of times", which you'll wind up doing naturally in most cases. The only ones that gave me any real reason to think were the "Get x amount of different glory kills on this enemy type" ones, since I now had to think about how my positioning would affect my glory kills on enemies. However, I found a glitch where if I reloaded the checkpoint right after getting a glory kill on a mission-related foe I could re-do the same one and it would count it so it can be cheesed (at least on PS5. I'm not sure if this glitch exists in other versions of the game).

What's good about these mission rewards is that the game gives you more of these items than you require to max out everything (when including collectables hidden in stages), so if you're thorough for most of the game you can afford to skip later missions as they won't do anything for you by then.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things you can stumble upon in maps are Slayer Gates. Once you find the key for these, you can enter these and take on a difficult combat room that will put your skills to the test. These were easily one of the best and most stressful parts of the game, with you being in a medium-sized arena with tons of foes spawning in to make mincemeat outta you. No matter how prepared you are going in, you'll be breathing a sigh of relief as you exit.

Speaking of combat encounters, I would like to take a moment to praise how well the enemy variety was handled. There's a healthy number of foes present here, with new terrifying monsters being added to the roster every few stages. Each time you encounter a new foe, you're given a pop-up that tells you what the monster is and how to exploit its weaknesses, whether you're shooting off a part of it to make it weaker or you're using a weapon that's more effective at interrupting their attacks. Every enemy in the game has a weakness, and part of the fun is memorizing them and taking them into account when heading into combat, turning encounters into puzzles that make you feel smart for making the right calls with your shot types.

Enemies from the original Doom and Doom II are present here, as well as some newcomers. Of the new enemies for this game, one of them stands out for many players as being one of the most arduous to face. They are known as the Marauder. They will block all of your shot types, even the most powerful ones. Get too close, and they'll shoot you with a shotgun. Be too far away and they'll throw their axe at you. They can also summon a ghost wolf to attack you. How do you deal with this threat? Well, you have to get in a sweet spot that isn't too close or too far away and then they'll do an attack where their eyes flash brightly during the windup. Once this happens, you need to shoot them with a powerful enough gun to stun them. When they're stunned, you can get in another powerful shot before they get back to normal. Rinse and repeat until they become a pile of gore.

Fighting them sounds simple on paper but during gameplay they can prove to be the most annoying enemies in the game, especially when you're also surrounded by other foes. The Marauders are very demanding of your attention, being relentless in their assault when they're present. Of course, if there's other foes around you can't just stand there and fight them the way you need to because everyone else in the room will tear you apart. What comes of this is a juggling act where you're dancing around the Marauder while trying to get rid of enough of the other enemies to make fighting them more comfortable, which is annoying. Once you deal with enough of these dudes it becomes no hassle but when the pressure's on you really feel it.

Sadly, this same issue comes up with some of the boss fights in the game. The bosses have great designs and are interesting to take down, but more often than not they're going to be constantly summoning enemies to support them, causing you to be in this same situation where you want to focus on the boss, but the infinitely spawning enemies are going to end your life if you do that, so you need to also focus on them. You also need to take these enemies into account when your health, ammo and armor are running low because they are going to be your main way of getting these resources back up. If you focus too much on the common fodder, though, the bosses can kill you with ease while you're distracted since they tend to have stronger attacks then the adds they summon. It only gets worse as you face tougher bosses with more intense attacks while they're summoning tankier enemies that also do tons of damage.

The cherry on the top is just how noisy the HUD gets when you're struggling. There's a red hue all around the screen when your health is low. There are flashing messages about you being low on health and ammo. The screen's shaking because Pinky's are charging at you and enemy shots are knocking you around. All of this is happening while you're trying to dodge around and think on your feet about what you need to do to get out of this rut and it quickly becomes a nightmare. A survivable nightmare, but a nightmare, nonetheless.

Thankfully, setting the game to an easier skill level can mitigate this a bit, and the game will offer you a powerful armor set that greatly reduces damage taken if you die too many times, so using these can make the game feel a little less intimidating if you're not used to intense shooters like this one.

One last thing I want to talk about is the music. IT ROCKS! Mick Gordon did an astounding job with the soundtrack. The tunes are intense and fit each combat encounter perfectly, and the ambience that follows you as you explore stages outside of combat is very nice. It's a shame Bethesda did him dirty because his touch on this series will be missed. If you're not gonna play the game, I will at least implore you to check out the soundtrack. You'll find some new tunes to pump iron to very quickly!

Despite all of my issues with this game, I did enjoy my time with Doom Eternal. The gunplay is great, the enemies are interesting, the story is neat, and the music is astounding. However, the intensity of the gameplay and the length of stages (if you're a collectable hunter) can easily push newcomers away. I strongly recommend setting the game to an easier skill level if you aren't used to this type of shooter. Looking back, I probably would've enjoyed the game more if I set it to easy but the idea of doing that felt wrong to me. The next time I play a game like this, though, I may swallow my pride.

I recommend checking out Doom Eternal if you haven't already. It tends to go on steep discounts sometimes, so definitely jump in when a sale is going on!