This review contains spoilers

Tag Two is the weakest entry in the otherwise excellent compendium that is Doom Eternal.

Aesthetically, the levels here look fantastic; mechanically, there are some really fun additions – I enjoy that id attempts to make use of every weapon mod, including the auto-shotgun mod which gets some mileage in taking down stone imps (essentially just imp reskins with a spindash), but for every step forward, it seems like Tag Two takes another step back.

Tag Two has some interesting challenges. The part where you fight several mancubuses (mancubi?) around a fountain in the Purple Goo That Makes You Not Jump Or Dash Good was a neat idea. The Cursed Prowler is not such a neat idea. In fact, I lost three lives to the same Cursed Prowler because I missed my only Blood Punch and could not get another for the life of me. I don’t think the idea of a Cursed Prowler is bad, but why a Blood Punch? Why can’t I just kill the dude to get my jump and dash back? I guess it’s not so bad since there’s only three in the entire DLC, but holy crap was this guy awful.

The final level feels… nowhere near as intense or demanding as the levels prior, and obviously nowhere near as hectic as anything in Tag One. The part with the possessed Marauder was scary for five seconds, and then I killed him. The new soldier enemies are also just unfinished.

This DLC was made under a significant time crunch, so I feel bad for bagging on it so hard, but also… it would’ve never been enough anyways. There’s plenty of other reviews that dig into the weirdly lax difficulty as well as the time constraints that id software produced Tag Two under, and I don’t really want to retread old ground here, but all I’ll say is that it’s pretty obvious towards the end, and it sucks, and I feel bad for them. What they did manage to accomplish is impressive, and I’m actually glad they managed to create something that is mostly high-quality and cohesive in spite of these limitations.

Yet the final boss, the Dark Lord, leaves much to be desired. It is once again the Marauder, except with more health, more summons, and not nearly as aggressive. Not only are the Dark Lord’s openings less frequent, but each successful hit he lands actually refills his health, ballooning an already long multi-phase bossfight into a ridiculous timesink.

This wouldn’t bother me so much if there were any sort of reliable way to pressure him into attacking more, maybe being able to deal chip damage or something? As it stands, the boss utilizes one of my least favorite video game tropes – that is, the enemy/boss remains invincible, unless you attack them at a certain point, and then you can deal damage for X amount of seconds before rinsing and repeating. In some cases, I understand. I don’t even hate the Marauder that much anymore because he attacks so quickly and his openings are so frequent. But the Dark Lord? This guy takes FOREVER to kill, and it doesn’t feel climactic or earned, just tedious and annoying.

The final phase where all his adds turn into heavy demons is also turbo-turd city. Majorly crap way to artificially inflate difficulty, especially at the last leg of an already long endurance test. I didn’t die to this boss, it was just a major pain in the ass to finish.

Which is a shame, too, because the final cutscene where Doomguy says his first word is actually really cool… or, it would be, if the base game didn’t do this already in a flashback (a flashback which is, by the way, one of the worst story elements in the base game by a long shot). This moment would be 10x cooler if that flashback didn’t happen, but it DID happen, and so the one, solitary word Tag Two leaves us with, “No,” rings hollow.

It would’ve been PEAK. It would’ve been CINEMA. Instead, all I can think is, man, if this was the only thing he said, that would’ve been awesome. But I KNOW what Doomguy sounds like, Hugo. YOU made it canon. YOU DID THIS.

And really, what a shame. Because playing through Doom Eternal again let me see it through brand new eyes, and I finally saw the game I wanted to see. Now I’m left with its final hurrah, and it isn’t quite as triumphant as I’d imagined.

The hammer is very fun though!

Reviewed on Feb 13, 2023


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