 I've grown cynical enough that I now rarely look forward to big releases and I basically never pre-order. And on the rare occasion when I have pre-ordered, I am generally pretty disappointed. Destiny 2 was the first game I had pre-ordered in like 3 years and it basically made me start a YouTube channel. Still, I pre-ordered Doom Eternal because over the last 4 years I've grown to consider Doom 2016 one of the very best games ever made. Well, this month has seen a ridiculous amount of releases that I bought and planned to play and write about. Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Borderlands 3's second DLC after the Great Moxies Heist, Control's first DLC, Resident Evil, Neo 2, Half-Life Alyx, Code Vein had DLC, and while I've at least started playing all of those things, I've only finished Ori because instead I am finishing up my 4th time through Doom Eternal's campaign, this time doing the Extra Lives mode. After having beaten it on Nightmare 3 times, having found every secret, done every upgrade, read every lore entry, I'm ready to talk about why it is without a doubt the finest FPS ever designed, and comes a couple little decisions and one enemy type away from being a perfect video game. And I intend to argue it's the best implementation of difficulty I have ever seen in a game. I'm gonna go over everything I love and why, the things I didn't and why, and then I'll respond to a few critiques I saw in mainstream reviews or on Reddit and talk about why I think they're either wrong or don't actually matter all that much. After the logo. 2016 and beyond. As good as Doom 2016 is, and it is very, very, very, very good, the results of a long and troubled development are on display in several places. The early levels are significantly more intricate and complex than the latter ones. A lack of diversity in the locations, and crucially, the game kinda runs out of things to test you with by about three quarters of the way through. Doom 2016, as we all know, went through a series of difficulties in its years in development hell. Originally designed as a linear narrative shooter and a modern FPS sense, it languished along until finally being scrapped and redesigned with an emphasis put upon making a modern Doom that felt like playing the original Doom. It all seems so obvious and retrospect, but it's really not all that obvious at all. What if it had decided Doom 3 was the place to take inspiration from rather than Doom 1 and focus on making a Metro Last Light type experience? That actually might have been awesome, but anyway, when you really boil it down, what does 2016 really have in common with the original? Fast movement? Titanfall and Titanfall 2 as well as all of the Half-Life games have ridiculously fast movement too. Blood and gore? I mean, blood and gore has been in every shooter from Doom and, um, blood through Call of Duty. I think far too much has been made of Doom's reverence to the original game, and far too little has been made of the fact that Doom 2016 is simply an innovative, one-of-a-kind, meticulously designed shooter unlike anything that came before it. I've said this before, but Doom and Destiny have several things in common with a focus on movement, enemies without hitscan weapons, and a disdain for cover. But other than some similarities to Destiny, Doom really is like nothing else. No. 2016's greatness has very little to do with the original Doom and everything to do with a studio that had fuck all left to lose and decided to eschew all the modern shooter conventions to focus on game feel above all else. No holding F to open boxes. No pressing buttons to pick up ammo. No hiding behind cover. No boots on the ground, gritty realism. The full success of 2016 can best be described as a validation of gaminess, of an unapologetic commitment to gameplay over immersion and mechanics over realism. With the disappointing sales of Rage One, the departure of John Carmack, and a financial situation that necessitated the end of the studio's independence, it was in a very bad spot as they began making Doom 4. And rather than submit to modern conventional wisdom and market research about what the consumer wanted, it ended up making the game they wanted to make. And it worked. I have played 2016 through a minimum of 10 times. I consider it a modern masterpiece and I think crediting 2016's greatness to some supposed callback to a game it has almost nothing in common with doesn't give the people at it enough credit. The last Doom isn't a new chapter in the long and storied history, so much as it is a totally original piece of work that stands completely on its own. If it was called a vampire hunt and the demons were vampires and werewolves, it would be just as good because its design is unbelievably tight and coherent. It's so damn good, in fact, that I actually remained very skeptical of Doom Eternal, though it was still pretty hopeful. I had a really hard time imagining it being able to strike lightning twice and I kind of figured that much of the last game's power laid in how incredibly fresh and original it was. So it was with hope, but resigned to being disappointed, as I always am, that I booted up Doom Eternal. Let's start with what Doom Eternal does as well as any shooter ever made, probably as well as any game ever made. Kill you. Difficulty. Doom 2016 is a fairly challenging game on nightmare difficulty. Like in Eternal, constant movement and target prioritization is crucial, but where 2016 is hard, Doom Eternal is ridiculously challenging. It's so challenging that in my first playthrough, there were several spots I needed to turn it down to ultra-violence. That pissed me off and had me thinking the game was simply going too far in spots. It also meant that an immediate second playthrough was now guaranteed because I wasn't going to let the game beat me no matter how angry I got. After having to turn it down to ultra-violence in the final level and beating the final boss, I immediately, and I mean immediately, started the second save slot and resigned to beating it on nightmare all the way through. Here's the thing about Eternal that was not true about 2016. Doom Eternal adds a few wrinkles to the combat and these mechanics are not optional. Remember those fun little portals and jump pads that were occasionally in arenas in 2016? Well, they are here too, and if you don't use them, you will die. Remember how you had a choice of one grenade type in 2016, but you could kind of forget to use it every so often and it really wasn't all that big a deal. Well aside from on nightmare you used a light health siphon grenade? Well, now you have two and if you don't use them in the right way, at the right time, you will die. Remember the armor pickups in 2016? Well, now you have a flamethrower and super shotgun that drops armor from enemies and if you don't use them consistently and correctly, you will die. I love this. One of the odd things about many games is that as you turn the difficulty up, you end up using less of the mechanics. I talked about this with Titanfall 2 in one of my older videos because I think it's one of the best examples. Titanfall 2 is one of the very best shooters ever made, but when you turn it to master difficulty, you quickly realize it. You can't use the mobility tools the same way anymore. You suddenly get punished for using the game's most interesting mechanics. Instead of flying all over the map, you gotta play it like Call of Duty or you fail. A proper master difficulty in Titanfall 2 would have been to make the enemies less accurate the faster the player is moving. Instead, it just amped up their damage and aim. So rather than success coming through using the game's most lauded mechanics, you became punished for using those mechanics. Destiny 2 actually does difficulty fairly well and even there, in more difficult modes, the mechanics change. Movement and close quarters combat, the game's strengths in many ways become too risky and a slower, more methodical type of combat using cover becomes required. 2016, for all of its mechanical brilliance, had this same problem. Playing on Nightmare, the resource management the game revolved around on the other difficulties like using the glory kills and the chainsaw for ammo and health, they became at best pointless and at worst counterproductive. On Nightmare, glory kills only dropped like 5 health while still locking you in an animation and enemies kept moving while you were locked in that animation. So it rewarded basically no health and allowed enemies to swarm and surround you as well as screwing around with your ability to track them, which is the most important skill in 2016 on Nightmare difficulty. So although the highest difficulty still required constant movement and weapon switching, it made certain mechanics less important. And remember, these mechanics were the most interesting and innovative systems in the game. Id's core design imperative for 2016 was push forward combat and everything in the design was predicated on pushing the player into aggressive forward momentum. The glory kill was so successful as a system because it tied refunding health to killing enemies rather than hiding from them. Try to imagine Doom 2016 with regenerating health. The game almost falls apart with that system. Resource management and glory kills are a major component of the game's innovative feel. The glory kill was more than a fun gruesome animation. It fed directly into the entire thrust of the combat. Doom Eternal is an example of difficulty done basically perfectly. It's like a direct answer to many of my complaints about game difficulty implementation. In fact, I honestly think it is the most perfectly tuned difficulty I have ever seen in a game. In many games, as you turn the difficulty up, the most common change is you take more damage and enemies take less. And the majority of games basically leave it there. In fact, very few do anything other than that. Destiny, which changes enemy destiny and quality while moderately improving their AI, is an example of one of the better systems. Anthem at launch literally did nothing but give enemies 300% more health and damage and changed nothing else. Eternal is so impressive because it carefully and thoughtfully makes a suite of changes that indeed make the game punishingly hard by more forcefully demanding the use of all of the game's mechanics. Difficulty raises enemy health and damage. It also greatly improves their aim when you are stationary, but seems to leave it about when you're moving. And it seems to change how much damage enemies take from different weapons. On Hurt Me Plenty, a Hell Knight can be killed with basically any weapon. On Nightmare, he is very hard to kill with most weapons, but it's killed really fast with the full auto combat shotgun. And finally, AI is drastically changed across the board and not just aggressiveness, although that is the most obvious. Enemies are much more likely to evade you on Nightmare. The best example of this is the Marauder, which don't worry, we'll get to him. But on Hurt Me Plenty, he can be staggered enough to hit him like three or four times with your super shotgun. On Nightmare, he recovers from that same stagger after one shot. And the only way to hit him twice is to immediately switch to the Ballista for a follow up, which is trickier to get right than it sounds. So rather than taking mechanics away on the hardest difficulty, Eternal insists you use all of them. It straight up demands that you use every mechanic perfectly at all times. The game speeds everything up. It pushes you to more strategic use of your tools and faster reactions. Juggling the chainsaw, two grenades, the flamethrower, the blood punch, the double jump, the meat hook, the swing bars, jump pads, dash dodge, seven weapons and mods, and the several super weapons is a lot to deal with. But the game demands you use all of those tools. You have to cycle through them over and over every few seconds. When I played for a few minutes and Hurt Me Plenty, I found I could get away without even using the grenades and I could use any weapon I wanted. On Ultra Violence, you pretty much need to use everything. And on Nightmare, you need everything and you need to use the right thing at the right time while using all of the movement mechanics without panicking or you'll die. I have a little anecdote that perfectly explains the difference between the Last Doom and this one. In 2016, even on Nightmare, I simply never used the BFG. It feels like a bullshit press mouse 1 to win button. Every time I used it, I felt like I was cheating. I took that bias into Doom Eternal and was brutally punished for it. If you come into an arena, on Nightmare and Doom Eternal and you see two BFG pickups and three crucible ammo rounds on the ground, that means you will need to use two BFG and three crucible rounds in that arena. If you do not do that, you will find yourself doing what I did which is saying, Are you fucking kidding me? A Titan? Four Mancubuses? Two Barons? Two Hell Knights? Two Revenants? Two Pain Elementals? And an Archvile? What the fuck dude? It was only in my second playthrough that this actually hit me and things were less infuriating thereafter. The BFG is not a cheat button in Doom Eternal. It is a critical tool that must be used correctly or you will die over and over and over. And I mean correctly. Doom Eternal arenas on Nightmare start out very hard and get ridiculous as it goes forward. You can't use the BFG to take out 12 imps and two arachnotrons because when they are dead, the game is going to spawn an impossible group of heavies next. If an arena has a BFG round, you can be sure you'll know when it's needed. Right at the time you start thinking holy shit are you serious dude? That will be the time to use it. And the full genius of the difficulty here is reinforced even more strongly through small changes that make tremendous differences. The glory kill now freezes time and always drops health even on Nightmare. So now glory kills and chainsaws don't just remain mechanically important, they serve as tiny moments to safely catch your breath and plan ahead. The amount of enemies on screen in Eternal has been increased to almost ridiculous degrees. The sheer amount of AI on screen is like nothing I've ever seen in another game. Eternal really is combat chess. You must be thinking you head as you play. The order you defeat enemies is as important as how you defeat them. And rather than using your best weapon until you run out of ammunition, like in 2016, Eternal makes you use different weapons on different enemies because they're simply more effective against them. And refusing to learn that lesson means 8 deaths in a row until you figure out what you're doing wrong. I saw a few complaints on Reddit about the rock, paper, scissors nature of Eternal's combat and how some didn't like it. I can't refute that point. It is indeed very insistent that you use the proper tool for the job. But I want to briefly mention just how well Idd managed to reinforce these mechanics. Putting the grenade into the cacodemon's mouth and watching him choke never gets old. The ping sound that you get from knocking off a turret or a mancubus' flamethrower is immensely gratifying and immediately gives positive reinforcement through sound design alone. Staggering an enemy with a chain gun feels good. Every time you use the right tool or strategy, you are instantly rewarded with clear and entertaining feedback. For such a mechanically deep game, Eternal does a simply masterful job teaching you how to play. One of my only complaints is that I think you should be immune from self-damage with the rocket launcher unless it's like right in your face. This move ridiculously fast in this game. Including you. You thought you were fast in 2016? Look at this dude. Again, aside from 15 minutes or so just to test things out, I never got below ultra violence for a few tough arenas in my first playthrough so I can't speak to the balance in those difficulties. But on nightmare and even ultra violence, Doom Eternal is for the most part the most perfectly balanced game I have ever played. You have precisely what you need to complete each encounter. Success and failure depends upon using those things correctly. It is exquisitely unforgiving. This goes down even to that weakspots thing. You really do need to destroy those weakspots. It's not a suggestion, it is a necessity. You do need to keep away from the mancubus or you will die in like two seconds. You must destroy the arachnotron's turret. You need to light enemies on fire or you will die. I've never played a game so utterly committed to using every mechanic. I mean I hate to do this but it really is very much like a souls born game in that way. There are mechanics and you must use them correctly or you will fail. Unlike souls however, Eternal is remarkably freeform because you're given a daunting amount of tools and the most powerful tool in the game is movement. The dash is the game's most effective weapon and the jump and speed of the player character is empowering and awesome. My son was watching me play the second time through and in one encounter he said, you're so freaking good at this. Now that's less a compliment for me than it is a compliment to Id. When you've fully absorbed what this game teaches you and have become totally comfortable with the mechanics, fights look amazing. A never ending string of dashes, jumps, grenades, chainsaws, glory kills, it's non stop. Like you cannot stop moving and stringing together the correct actions is less acting out a plan than one long freeform jazz improv piece. It's the most mechanically deep and satisfying game I've played in ages because on Nightmare nothing is overpowered and nothing is underpowered. It's the rare game where the vast majority of deaths, even the really frustrating ones are truly your fault. And to be fair, I can't even imagine playing this fucking thing on a controller. So anyone who watches this who played on a console, I would love to hear what playing Nightmare is like on a controller because holy crap man, beauty at high speed. I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the game's performance and visual design. Doing maternal not only looks amazing, it runs impossibly well. No other game I own consistently runs at 144 FPS but Eternal at 1440p on ultra settings stays between 136 and 144 except in menus when it's 360. And one of the striking things about Eternal's visual design which probably ties into that performance is how restrained it is. Art design is really great with scenes and skyboxes that make you stop and look. That's frequent. Players are amazing with gorgeous details on all sorts of items including the weapons and enemies. I mean, look at the guns. Just look at these. And as I played, I noticed something else. Each area feels like a real place, but the game is never showing off or pushing graphics far enough to slow down the performance. I'm sure it could have found all sorts of places to go nuts with lighting and volumetric god rays and high resolution shadows or to go overboard on textures. And all of those things are here and they look great. But it feels like there was a deliberate effort made to figure out exactly how many visual bells and whistles were needed for the job and it seems like they resisted going even further at the risk of slowing down performance. I appreciate that. I don't care what people say about the human eye man, I can tell the difference between 144 FPS and 60. I can. I prefer beautiful and fast to ridiculously beautiful but slower. As far as art direction, Doom Eternal's visual presentation goes in a different, less grounded direction than the last game. There is an absolute difference in focus between Eternal and 2016. Colors are brighter. Creatures and effects are way over the top metal. And areas are far less dark. And issues the Doom 3 Reminiscent Industrial Horror vibe of the last game for something much closer to a fantasy setting. And this, like almost everything else in the game, is a neat bit of design cohesion because 2016 was a game about industrial horror and Eternal is a game about fantasy. 2016's visual design and art direction had a remarkable internal consistency. But that consistency, and no doubt developmental problems, also resulted in a distinct lack of variety and that is simply not the case here. Every level feels unique. Every level feels like it's needed, and a consistent artistic look doesn't prevent the game from having a great variety of locations and art assets. And level design is just simply great. But as gorgeous as Eternal is, and it really, really is a beautiful game, the fact is graphical beauty isn't really what you're there for, and it feels like the developers know exactly how far they needed to push it to do what they wanted to do. It was a smart decision to make the game look as good as they could while still running at ridiculous frame rates. I have a nice, but not beastly PC. I've got an i7-8700K, an RTX 2070 Super, and 32GB of RAM. And I experienced very few bugs, and like no frame rate drops, none. The only bugs you'll encounter is that same thing that happens in 2016 where a glory kill will warp you into the geometry. Now in the last game, that kills you, or drops you through the map. Here it just looks weird for a second. The final delay was obviously used to polish this game to a mirror shine, and it shows. One of 2016's other notable achievements was its excellent pacing. The combat was more intense than other shooters, and it was seemingly too high octane to be constant. The game needed to slow it down on occasion, and games generally accomplished this in one of three ways. Story, puzzles, or exploration. Now I just wanted a mini rant about how 2016 was less like the originals and people imply, but one place the game does mimic the original Doom is in its general pacing. The original Doom, like all shooters until Half-Life, was incredibly light on story. Those early games featured some very light puzzles and complex levels that needed to be thoroughly explored, and 2016, at least for the first 2 thirds of the game, stuck to that formula by pacing it with exploration and secret hunting. As such, the game has a great ebb and flow, with combat arenas followed by long stretches of quiet, often actually kind of spooky level exploration, and it really works because many of 2016's levels are like textbook examples of classic old school shooter level design. Doom Eternal is no less well paced, but its methods are a drastic departure from the last game. It's paced well, not because it has tons of quiet time, but rather because it intersperses platforming challenges and side combat challenges in between its almost unrelenting action. It is an immense credit to the quality and depth of the mechanics here that 14 hours of combat work so well, and that the game can be so well paced even with far less time devoted to slowing down and smelling the roses. The secrets and exploration here are more tightly constrained, and its levels are less sprawling and more linear, but just as satisfying as the last games. The Foundry in 2016 was probably the most interesting level with lots of backtracking and exploration puzzles. Eternal's secrets are less about exploring the map, and more about solving platforming puzzles or puzzle puzzles, or keenly observing dead ends in broken walls. It was far less quiet time, and the secret hunting exploration are more firmly rooted in the mechanics of the gameplay. Even the game's most impressive and foundry-like level, the Super Gordest, is far more linear in the way you move through it. There has been a significant change to pace and level structure. It's different in design and just as good, if not better, an execution. I'll touch on this later a bit more, but the platforming has been somewhat controversial? I don't get it. The platforming is a major component of level exploration and secret hunting, and more importantly, unlike in 2016, it's literally also a combat mechanic now. Doom Eternal is almost manically committed to mechanics, and it uses those mechanics in every way possible. It uses all of the buffalo man. So it's not that surprising to see skill and mechanics brought over into the level exploration as well. Game is still a break from combat, but it's not quite precisely because the platforming and movement system are a big part of that pacing now. You know why I don't like Uncharted? Because moving through the levels isn't interesting gameplay. Climbing a wall isn't interesting gameplay to me, because you can't fail. You can fail at Doom's platforming. You will. You will fail. Which means that you can fail at the level exploration, which keeps things interesting. But the penalty is smartly only lost armor and health and not instant death, so it's not all that frustrating. Going to find a secret is simply more compelling when it requires skill-based usage of the mechanics, rather than making sure you've crawled every inch of the map. And this isn't a critique of 2016's pacing and exploration, I love that game. It's more of an appreciation that it didn't just remake the last game with different levels. This is a different game, with different mechanics and entirely different pacing. It works and it's a new standard that feels entirely fresh. There's literally nothing else like it in gaming now, or in the past. Now I'm of the opinion that this is as close to a perfect game as anyone can get. But it is not, of course, perfect. Nothing is perfect. Bloodborne's NPC fights are fucking bullshit, man. Blood of War's enemy and boss variety is bad. Titanfall 2 falls apart on Master Difficulty. The last of us's combat is mediocre. The Binding of Isaac… well, actually. Anyway, let's address a couple of my critiques about Eternal. Boss fights, insane arenas, and an asshole. I happen to have loved the boss fights in the last game. In fact, I'm a big fan of boss fights in general. But I look for pretty specific things and boss fights that I enjoy. And let's get this out of the way right now, and I will repeat this point over and over as I move forward. But what follows isn't an objective assertion about design, it is a personal preference based in taste. As an example of boss fights that I find a bit lackluster, let's take Vermintide 2, which I've been playing with my son in the last few weeks. Dead bosses aren't terrible or anything, they're just kind of low effort. They're basically regular monsters but with a big health bar. Attack patterns and aggro often seem really random, so it doesn't feel like their fights you can learn, instead you kind of just mash at them until they die. Dark Souls' boss fights are so good because even though many of them are quite hard, they're based upon pattern recognition. Lady Maria or Ornstein and Smog or the Dancer are hard until you fully learn their movesets. Once you've got that, it's just a matter of executing, and when it goes well, it feels like a dance. The more frustrating bosses for me are the ones that feel chaotic, like Demon Princes or Bloodstarbeast or Darkbeastpaul by fucking hate. Fights where it's just too hard to identify what the boss is doing because of their visual design or because the attacks come out so fast it's more about twitch skills than it is pattern recognition. My favorite boss fights in games are ones that use the mechanics you've learned to test slightly different things. Doom 2016's boss fights are really well done, all of them. Their fights with phases, attacks are clearly telegraphed and they can be learned so well you don't take damage. I got so good at them that I eventually almost never even get hit. That doesn't mean they're easy, they're not. It just means that they're designed in such a way that they can be mastered by basically anybody regardless of their twitch skills. Doom Eternal has a clear design philosophy behind its boss fights. They aren't lazy or haphazard or not well thought out from a design perspective. In fact, like everything else in the game, they show a clear commitment to coherent and consistent design. To clear, an obvious philosophy behind Eternal's bosses is making them play out and test the same skills the rest of the game does. So rather than feel like a separate type of gameplay, the idea was seemingly to take the regular combat loop and just amp it the fuck up. All of the fights feature multiple ads and almost all of them are designed to feel like a normal arena that's less about recognizing the pattern of one or two strong enemies and more about continuing to play the game as you have been, but adding to it. It doesn't refine the combat system down to one target. It adds a massively dangerous boss into a regular arena. I'm not saying they're bad design or that they're terrible, I'm just saying I don't like them as much as the last game's bosses. There are five of them in the game if you count the first Marauder fight and I think you should even though he doesn't have a health bar. Let's briefly look at them in order. The Marauder fight made me so furious on my first playthrough man. By my third time through I could handle him even when he's showing up as a regular fucking dude in the middle of an arena, but just because I can handle him doesn't mean he's fun to fight in a group of other dangerous enemies. He breaks the game's rules in many ways. He has a hit scan weapon that a nightmare can take half of your health. He turtles behind a shield and can only be fought with two weapons. He requires you to not move around because getting too far can kill you and getting too close can kill you. And his whole mid-range requirement is finicky as hell and seems random which means the fight rarely feels like you're in control of it. I do not like him as a regular enemy and I doubt I ever will. But by the third playthrough I actually came to enjoy the boss fight so I kind of enjoy him as a boss now. But if a boss fight requires three playthroughs to fully appreciate and not be frustrating, I'd argue it might not be all that good. And again, I actually consider him one of the better bosses in the game now. Next up is the Doom Hunter, sorry, Doom Hunters. It's a two-phase fight with first one of them and then two of them. This isn't a particularly frustrating fight, but it's a really good example of the change in design philosophy. You fight these guys in arenas filled with other enemies and rather than being a dance it's kind of a chase. You circle the arena and never stop moving and only focus on the boss when you've cleared the adds. I enjoy this fight a lot actually, but it's another example of a boss that's just actually kind of a beat up regular enemy in a regular arena. As evidenced by the fact that these dudes show up all through the rest of the campaign in regular arenas. Which means that it's less of a boss and more of like a combat gauntlet. Again, here it works. It's fine, it's satisfying. But just keep that in mind as we move forward and look at the bosses. Next we've got the Gladiator. This is probably the very closest you'll get to what I would consider an actual boss fight, but it's got some issues that made me angry. First off, this douchebag is even more committed to turtling behind a shield. 2016 bosses had immunity phases, but this dude like turtles behind his shield. Second, enemies spawn in consistently and they can easily do some damage before you clear them out. These adds are obviously there to provide armor and ammo during the fight, but couldn't that have been accomplished by just not having this asshole turtle behind a shield? The biggest issue with the fight is it's too hard to read and dodge his attacks. Even on my third playthrough, I never felt like I had a real handle on his second phase and I don't think I ever really will. His attacks come out very fast. They're very hard to dodge and it feels much more like a DPS race. Each time I beat him, I ended up face-tanking damage and just burning him down before he could kill me. And again, none of these fights are bad, but none of them are as good or memorable as the last game. Let's move on. Next, we have the Connaker. Another example of a fight that's not about pattern recognition and fighting the boss and more about constant movement and add control. The Connaker's fight is so chaotic, I honestly don't even know what attack she has. She lights the entire floor on fire and occasionally blasts you with a laser. But the thing is, in order to learn a boss's attacks, you have to, you know, be able to watch the boss. The Connaker constantly spawns those maker drones, which drop health and ammo when you headshot them, but also put out a ridiculous amount of damage and take a ridiculous amount of damage if you shoot them anywhere but their tiny little heads. Between a floor on fire, two hit-kill boss attacks and three to five high damage enemies constantly spawning in, you never have a chance to even really focus on the boss. It's just chaos of, like, running in circles and swinging on bars and damaging the boss as you fly through the air. Again, this is really more like a harder arena than a proper boss fight. And I hate to repeat myself, but I do really admire the commitment to the game's core mechanics. I think it's really clever and interesting to try something new and different by making the boss fights more closely resemble the base combat. I just don't like it as much. Finally, there's the last fight, which I just do not like at all. The Icon of Sin is the boss from Doom II and also this Doom II. And like in Doom II, it's kind of like fighting a stationary target more than an actual enemy. In Eternal, it feels like you're fighting a skybox. That's fine. That's not the problem. The Icon is properly epic in scope and it is an impressive spectacle. The problem is more in how the fight can feel quite random. This fight doesn't spawn a few enemies to refill your health. The Icon of Sin fights spawns pain elementals and hell knights, arachnotrons, mancubus, cyber mancubus, carcasses, basically anything other than titans and archfiles. And so it honestly doesn't feel like you're fighting the boss. It's just an insanely chaotic mess of tough enemies and heavies with the very rare chance to stop for four seconds to shoot at the sky. The madness is mitigated by blood punch and crucible ammo being all over the map, so it isn't impossibly hard, although it is obviously quite challenging and I've yet to beat it without dying at least once. It's just insanely chaotic. So chaotic that again, it's almost impossible to see what the boss is doing. He spends most of the fight lighting the floor on fire, blasting off a death laser and mashing his fists down as well as destroying the arena around you. I honestly have no hope of ever beating this boss without taking damage. I mean, someone will probably do it someday, but it would be a ridiculous achievement that relied as much on RNG spawns and attacks as it did on skill. There's just so much going on. You can't even see the boss' attacks much less learn them. In many ways, it is extremely similar to the con maker fight, just multiplied by several factors. It is just a constant state of running and jumping and ad clearing. Maybe things feel different on hurt me funny, but I kinda doubt it. It's not the difficulty, it's the design. I'll wrap up this boss section by again saying, I understand what the idea was here. I get the goal was to make the boss fights more closely conformed to the regular combat. An effort was made to make boss encounters just extreme versions of the tougher arenas that only end when you've done enough damage to the boss. In fact, the truth is the only thing that separates them from the harder arenas is that ads will never stop spawning. I get it. I just don't like it as much. 2016's bosses played into the game's pacing. They were a great change of pace that slowed the combat down without being too easy or boring. Eternal is, without a doubt, far more intense and challenging than the last game. And as such, bosses that changed things up and slowed it down a bit would have worked just as well, if not better, in this game. Battle mode. How about the PvP battle mode? I'm conflicted. On one hand, again, I'm impressed by the desire to innovate and the commitment to a coherent design across all of the modes and difficulties. Battle mode has more in common with Doom Eternal than 2016's PvP had in common with that campaign. I haven't plated a huge amount, but one mode isn't all that much. And even though it's reasonably fun, it's still less fun than just playing the campaign again. Here's what I think should happen next time. Someone send this to Id so they know. If the idea is to have a PvP mode that fully captures what the game does best, how about a death match where players are just as fast and mobile as the campaign, and best of all, a competitive PvE match? Have teams of slayers let loose in a map with demons, ramping up to a boss, and score the game based upon points players get by killing enemies. This should be a one-on-one mode and a two-on-two mode. In one mode, it will be totally PvE. You can't damage other players and it's strictly erased to see who can get the most points by killing enemies and bosses. In the other mode, it's the same, but you can also kill other players, which would award more points than killing an imp, but less than killing a hell knight. Basically, points per target are awarded on how much health they have. Players have more health than an imp, but they have less than a mancubi. I think that would do a better job of capturing the magic of the game. And more importantly, it would be a unique mode that people who love shooters end competition, but don't really like PvP would be much more likely to play. At the risk of complimenting myself, I honestly believe a mode like that would be a tremendous hit. Still, battle mode deserves praise for trying to innovate. It's just kind of strangely balanced and it's just less fun to play as a demon because movement is so important in mechanics. I'm not sure it'll have a very long shelf life, but honestly, I should play it more before I dismiss it. Let's get my other nitpicks out of the way before I respond to some reviews I've seen and we wrap it up. And they are nitpicks, I promise, okay? So there are four or five arenas in the game that might be pushing things into the realm of frustration. There's an encounter on a tiny strip of ground against a marauder and a bunch of dangerous enemies at once. There's a couple of arenas in the final level and there are a couple of slayer gates that are kind of crazy, including one that features a marauder and a doom hunter. I don't know if the arenas are really a problem because as I got better, I handled them with a lot less frustration. I just think they are right on the edge occasionally. That being said, by the end of the game, you are so fucking good at it that I don't see how they could ramp the difficulty up enough without getting stupid. So, you know, if you find yourself getting pissed off like I did, I will say this. After another playthrough, you'll probably have much less trouble in these spots while still feeling challenged. It's just a nitpick. The secret combat encounters don't refund your ammo when you fail. I think that's stupid and pointless. I am admittedly easily frustrated, but holy shit, it is so frustrating to fail an encounter and be put in a shitty position to try again because you're out of ammo. I beat them all in like one to four tries, but it seems needlessly frustrating for someone like me who gets so very angry so easily. I'm not sure why it's even a thing. Like, is it purposely designed to make someone like me explode? Several levels lock you out of previous areas so you can't go back to find secrets and the early areas don't allow fast travel back, which is annoying. Why isn't the fast travel at the end of the level thing available right from the start of the game? I don't get it. There are a few secrets that require you to reload checkpoints if you miss them. Like this one here that requires you to fall down a huge hole and dash through a wall on your way down. If you miss it, you just have to miss it or reload the last checkpoint a few times until you get it. I think I've made it clear over the years that I'm not the kind of dude who will just miss it, so that means reloading the checkpoint over and over. That annoyed me. Don't force me into loading screens, dude. Finally, anytime the Marauder shows up mixed in with a bunch of other dangerous enemies, he grinds the game to a halt as you have to play footsie with him and can't really use the movement system. His axe throw is way too fast to consistently dodge. The shotgun is hitscan. He teleports around like an idiot and he forces you into one very specific response. He is immune to your super weapons, so the only, and I mean the only way to fight him is to hit him with the super shotgun and immediately switch to the bowster to get a second hidden on him. On easier difficulties, you can hit him like three or four times, and I know that because I saw people defending him on Reddit and saying it's not a problem, so I went and tried it and hurt me plenty, and sure enough, he is much easier to handle there. Now, Eternal is one of the best shooters ever, probably the best shooter ever, because it requires you to use all of the mechanics while offering a shocking amount of improvisation in how you use them, being suddenly forced into an annoyingly narrow set of options is frustrating. As I said, I can handle him now, but it's still easy to get killed because the enemy's response is seemingly so random. He at least needs a patch, man. He'll attack from right in your face or he'll throw the axe when he's in midrange. He'll spam the wolf sometimes. He'll get stuck in an infuriating loop of teleporting behind and around you. Even after you've got a grips on him, he's always annoying as fuck. I honestly think he should have been used in the boss fight and never again. As a boss, he is challenging. As a regular enemy, he's toxic. Wrapping up. All right, this is longer than I'd hoped it would be, but I ended up having a lot to say about this game, and it's so rare that I'm compelled to make a video by a game I really love, so I figured I'd get this one out of my system. Now, I don't read reviews before playing a game I'm interested in, because I'm afraid I'll end up writing about the game and that it will like, you know, seep in and infect my writing, so I just don't, I never do that. But I did read reviews for Eternal about halfway through my second playthrough. And while Eternal reviewed well, I think it actually did not review well enough. This is not an eight. I don't see how anyone could possibly rate this game lower than a nine. If I had to give it a numeric rating, it would be a 97.5. It's honestly nearly perfect. Many of the reviews dinged the game because of the platforming. I don't get this. It is amongst the best first-person platforming you will ever play, because movement and controls are absolutely tight as hell. Not only did I not mind the platforming, I'm willing to state that the game would be much diminished by its removal. It doesn't take up a huge amount of time, and it serves to pace the game and the exploration by grounding it in the game's top-notch movement systems. This is a weird criticism to me. Jumping, moving, and dashing all feel great here. Using those mechanics as much as possible seems like a natural fit. The platforming here never gets as involved as Destiny 2's Dungeons or Raid platforming. And falling doesn't mean death or failing to finish a dungeon under a time limit. More than that, it's incredibly rare that you have frustrating moments with it, because it smartly didn't have your character stumble or drift when they land. When you dash to a wall, you stick hard to the wall. When you land from a jump, you stop solidly and immediately. It is unbelievably tight. The game never takes control away from you, and it leaves you feeling like you're always able to make your character move how you want him to. I don't think FPS platforming has been done better. And it's yet another example of a developer at the top of their industry in almost every way. Aside from the swimming, which can get a little wonky, but those are a nice little change of pace, even if they're the least solid of all the movement puzzles and there's not that many of them. I saw complaints in reviews about how hard it was to find secrets. Listen, man, if you don't want to find the secrets, you don't have to. I found everything in every level. And at the end of the game, I had 10 extra suit tokens and like 10 or 15 extra weapon upgrade points. There is more than enough to completely fulfill progression without obsessing over it. If you don't like hunting secrets, don't hunt them. When I play Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, I realize that the secrets are pointless garbage that will annoy the shit out of me so I don't go for them at all. I enjoy those games more ignoring those things. I enjoyed Eternal more by finding them because everything is tricky enough to give you satisfaction, but easy enough that nothing takes more than two or three minutes to figure out. They're fantastically balanced. There's been some talks and reviews that the combat is too busy. I disagree wholeheartedly. Doing Eternal, I'm sure, is something anyone can enjoy, but it's also a shooter for people who love shooters. Let me give you an example. The most recent Call of Duty was a pretty good game that I considered doing a video about, but ultimately when I got to writing, the combat is so bland that I decided it was just kind of a waste of time. What was it gonna say? Like, you know, the combat's the same as it's ever been. You get behind a box. Great shooters are exceedingly rare and the vast majority of modern FPS games take no chances at all. Complex shooters that are mechanically deep are vanishingly rare. It's basically doom, destiny, rage tube, and Titanfall 2 as far as like, big budget shooters. I'd ask the reviewers what they'd have thought if Eternal was just 2016 with different environments. It had every right to play it safe here, to take the last game they made and just make it longer without changing much. They didn't do that. They set out to take the last game and ask, okay, how can we make this unique? How can we push the player out of their comfort zone? How can we take even people who've played 2016 10 times and challenge and delight them? Doom Eternal might in fact be too busy if you're not someone who loves shooters. But I have a feeling that playing on easy probably makes many of these mechanics less crucial. If you're finding it too mechanically complex, I'd recommend just playing it on easy until you're comfortable. It's not a pissing contest, man. Play on the difficulty that feels most fun, not the one that proves you have a penis. If you're not interested in having a shooter push you mechanically, then this probably isn't the game for you, I guess. There hasn't been nearly enough praise for just how innovative and unique the combat system is here. If you find a combat too intricate, I mean, all I can say is there are people like me who've been dying for more mechanically complex shooters and there are dozens of conventional shooters out there for you. A common complaint I saw was about tutorials and tool tips. I don't get this. First off, you can turn off the tutorials in the menu and after your first playthrough, I recommend you do just that. But Eternal is not only very challenging, it is easily the most complex shooter around. It has multiple guns that work best on only certain enemies. It has multiple movement systems that need to be mastered. It has multiple tools that aren't just extra damage dealers but crucial mechanics that must be used properly to succeed. It took a bold step making this game so unforgiving. Throwing players into a game where you move 60 miles an hour and can be killed instantly for failing to use the ice grenade right was risky. Doing that without some tutorial risk alienating players who weren't aware that they were about to play a game far harder than the last one. I think Eternal does a nearly masterful job, balancing difficulty and hand-holding. It's hard but every crucial piece of information is boldly and explicitly put on screen. By all means, turn the tutorials off from the beginning if you wanna figure it out yourself. But frankly the game's more than hard enough just to execute without having to die 35 times before you figure out you should stick a grenade on a spider turrets gun. I commend the clear player education the game does. Finally, I saw a lot of talk about the story and lore being totally inconsistent or silly or disjointed and anyone who's watched my videos knows I am generally very harsh on video game stories. I don't agree. I'm not gonna argue that this is some masterpiece of storytelling but listen man, Doom Eternal isn't about its story but surprisingly I found the lore and narrative to be pretty damn entertaining and anyone who watches my videos knows I think stories in games are usually putrid. I was actually pulled in by the lore. I found the world building really interesting and the overarching themes quite good. Civil War views said they felt like the story was thrown out with little explanation but unless you're giving me a narrative based game, if the choice is drowning me in exposition or giving me a clear tale that is then expanded in the codex, I will take the latter every time. The quality of the storytelling is pretty good. Interesting locations, interesting characters, interesting motivations and an interesting world. The story and narrative here were far more ambitious and confident than I expected. I thought Eternal had enough twists and turns that it works if you don't pay attention and it has enough good lore that it also works if you wanna think on it and dig into it. I'm about to get into a few lore spoilers for like 10 seconds, I don't know man. Here we go, ready? Three, two, one. I like that it seems Samuel Hayden is actually one of the makers and that he's the one who gives you your powers. I like that it seems like he's playing a longer game. I like that none of this is explicitly explained but is heavily implied merely by his actions and dialogue and the weird fact that he like seems to know an awful lot about what's going on. I like that Vega appears to have been the father. I love the story of the betrayer and his son. I love the codexes about the Night Sentinels and their king and the slow corruption of the Khan makers. I enjoyed reading about this warlike conquering Argent society. I love the mixing of Judeo-Christian cosmology with sci-fi interdimensional travel which isn't new or anything in sci-fi stories but it's always entertaining because I like sci-fi and I like Judeo-Christian cosmology and myth. I even like that the game is a direct sequel to Doom 64. I think that's cool. I'm not gonna argue that this is a narrative masterpiece like The Last of Us or something but I will argue the story is benign enough to not get in your way if you don't want it and you can skip all the cutscenes but it's still substantial and interesting enough that I actually read all of the codexes which I didn't in the last game and really honestly never do that actually. I generally skip codexes. And most importantly, it makes me want more of the story in future games which is all you can really ask of a shooter's story. Let's wrap it up with this, ready? There is no other game like this. There has never been another shooter like this. Shooters, even the more involved ones like Destiny tend to keep it pretty simple. I'm one of the rare people who loved Rage 2 because I so greatly appreciated a shooter that reveled in mechanical complexity and required more of me than just mouse one and scroll wheel. Doom Eternal isn't a simple game. Its difficulty isn't balanced by enemy health or shields or having numbers go up on your guns. Doom Eternal is the most finely balanced and mechanically complex and satisfying shooter ever made. It takes one of the best games of the last decade and instead of making it again, it pushes it forward while still staying true to the feel and flow that 2016 established. It is bold and risky and damn near perfect and it's the best implementation of difficulty in a shooter ever and probably in any game ever. It is so damn good. I'm having a lot of trouble playing the Borderlands 3 DLC because it is so much less engaging and satisfying mechanically. Doom Eternal is so good. It makes other shooters feel like crap in comparison. That's pretty damn good. I guess I'll finish up Neo2 next because I don't think I can enjoy another shooter for a good long while. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.