9/10 – 13 hours?
Review as written on 8/28/2022
The essence of a sequel. Bigger and better than Doom 2016, improving on so many things that finally create a memorable shooter experience. Fast paced shooting but with style and brains, creating a fun standalone experience but really showing its muscles to veterans of the series. (don’t think i really qualify as one, i only played this and 2016)
My biggest applause to Eternal goes towards the numerous improvements this game adds to the last title, mostly with the gameplay loop. Doom 2016 was a fun game but i found it very unmemorable. You’d speed through one area, shoot a bunch of demons, rinse and repeat until the game ended. There was hardly any time to explore and savor the world, and all enemies were either bullet sponges or extremely frail. You were given no time to use your brain and enjoy the game, you just zoomed right through for 10 ish hours. Eternal adds a plethora of changes that fix this:
- Enemies have weak points, adding more strategy to combat. It encourages you to swap through your weapons to efficiently target each enemy and take them down quickly, keeping your mind active and giving you opportunities to use your whole arsenal. The final boss does this especially as you need to fight off demons as quickly as possible to give yourself an opening to damage the boss.
- The chainsaw, which felt like a luxury in the last game, is now rechargeable, allowing you to get a giant load of ammo basically whenever you want. Another incentive to use whatever weapons you want instead of the most ammo efficient ones.
- Platforming in the original game felt very limited and imprecise. Hell, you didn’t have a double jump until the game’s halfway point. This game has that unlocked immediately, as well as giving you two mid-air dashes and a wall cling. These, along with the monkey bars and grooved walls, encourage awareness of your surroundings; you actually get to look around and enjoy the beautiful looking scapes. This makes the secrets more natural to find as well, not to mention there are more kinds of secrets now (slayer gates are awesome 🙂 )
- There are more varied environments as well, more than just brown hellscapes and red Mars. you get to visit different places on Earth affected by demons, and visit the core of Hell deep within Mars, which looks gorgeous.
The only faults of this game are the remaining unsolved issues from 2016. My least favorite of which is the fact that enemies are borderline inaudible for no reason. You can hardly tell what’s near you until they’re right in your face or until you’re already at death’s door. None of them make any loud noises with their cries or attacks, and the lack of significant screen shakes or damage indicators don’t help either. I also hate how the clingable walls blend in way too well with the environment, making them hard to find more often than not.
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