 So we're almost done with the dog days of Winter for Games. That time of year when you're by your way through your Steam wishlist, only to realize 9 minutes after the refund limit that you were right to have never bought Immortal Unchained or Resident Evil 6. I usually post less videos this time of year because there's just so rarely anything all that good going on. And how many Destiny 2 videos can you do before you're just repeating yourself? That doesn't mean I didn't find some things I liked. My son started playing Obsidian's Honey I Shrunked a Kid simulator grounded, and while the rough edge is kind of annoyed the shit out of me, the game is far better than I expected it to be. It has a certain kind of charm to it, and with some of the more rough edges sanded down and a bit more story and quest content, I think it could be a pretty great little game. And the next video I'm going to do is about the Hollow Knight but 3D and also Zelda but a little Dark Souls game, Blue Fire, which is half the time really great and half the time totally shit. After that video I'll probably do one more about Destiny 2 and how the content vault still really pisses me off. And then we'll be in the summer and spring, which is looking pretty damn good for games this year. But before all that happens, I need to get something out of the way. It depresses me to say, but Doom Eternal is coming to an end. I made an entire hour long video about the fact that Eternal is without a doubt the very best FPS game ever. But that was before the DLC, so after 4 times playing the Ancient Gods part 2, it's time to bid farewell to Eternal and figure out whether the DLCs were really great, amazingly great, or impossibly great after the logo. Doom Eternal but harder. My review of Eternal was called Difficulty Done Right because it managed to make one of the most challenging and mechanically satisfying shooters ever by meticulously designing how the player interacts with the game. Eternal's brilliance lies in the fact that it does everything well. But the thing that most stood out to me is how every time you bump the difficulty up, you need to use more of the mechanics, not less. If you want the long version of that, you can click right here, but the TLDR version is this. Most games and almost all shooters do a very bad job at ramping up difficulty. The default model is keep jacking up enemy health and damage until the game becomes a boring slog of peeking out of cover and taking enemies out one by one. Titanfall 2 is one of the best FPS games ever, due mainly to its fast-paced and aggressive movement system. But Master difficulty ends up neutering that movement system because if you're out of cover, you get killed. Destiny 2 is basically the same. On the hardest difficulties, like in the Grandmaster Nightfalls or some of the difficult Lost Sectors, the enemies do so much damage that close quarters combat and lots of moving around ends up being impossible. Titanfall 2 and Destiny 2 are among the best shooters around, but when the game gets harder, they take away mechanics instead of adding them in. Doom Eternal does precisely the opposite. The easier difficulties let you get away with only using some of those mechanics, but the hardest difficulty requires you to use every system, tool, mechanic, and weapon as designed to succeed. The one complaint you saw about Eternal was that this produced a kind of rock, paper, scissors loop. While that's technically true, it doesn't really end up mattering because the game never feels restrictive. Its fluid movement and sheer speed allow for constant improvisation, even as the game requires using the full kit properly to succeed. Eternal's DLC managed to make the game even harder, both through making areas that border on the absurd and doubling down hard on that rock, paper, scissors aspect of the design. The first DLC made me pretty damn salty at first because it can be a massive difficulty jump at times. The DLC does not give second chances. Mistakes mean you fail. The first level of Part 1 instantly begins with a difficult arena that combines a ton of enemies with a pretty restrictive fighting area. Right from the start, it's clear that the game is picking up from the end of the base game rather than starting over. The entire level continues slowly ramping up the difficulty until the end where you suddenly find yourself fighting two marauders at the same time to start an arena. When I did my original review of Eternal, I singled out the marauder as an annoying asshole who felt finicky to fight because it was difficult to gauge what range would get him to attack. Well, either his AI got tweaked in some patch or I just got much better because I eventually really started loving the marauder fights. Doom Eternal pushes you to a level of mastery that ends up surprising you. I love fighting two marauders at once now. A room that starts with two marauders and gets harder from there is an intense way to end a level. One would think that it's not gonna get any more ridiculous, but by the time you fight a tyrant in a tiny hallway at the start of the second level, it's pretty clear that the Ancient Gods is setting out to put the player into seemingly unwinnable scenarios and challenging them to figure it out. If, like me, you play on Nightmare the first time through, the DLC can be pretty brutal because the arenas in Ancient Gods all feel like the Slayer Gates in the base game. They purposefully constrain the player and require total mastery of the movement system. If you manage to play Eternal and ignore portals and jump pads and swing bars, the Ancient Gods kills you for failing to use them. The change in arenas is the most consistent and noticeable way the difficulty is ramped up in the first part, but right as you're finally comfortable with the harder layouts, the game has some other tricks up its sleeve. About halfway through the third level, this enemy starts showing up to totally scramble combat encounters. Now, I was not the only one to complain about the Marauder in Eternal. It was one of the only enemies that was seriously criticized, and to Id's credit, they were definitely right. He works so well precisely because he changes the entire approach the player needs to take to an arena. In the DLCs, Id has doubled down and introduced the spirit-possessed enemy which makes the Marauder look like an imp. This enemy type made me fully appreciate an almost invisible mechanic that's constantly going on in the background of the base game. Staggering enemies is the most crucial system in the game. The chain gun, rocket launcher, and grenades make most enemies lose their footing, giving you time to either react to them or take them down or escape. When an enemy is possessed by a spirit in the DLC, however, they have extra health, do more damage, move way faster and cannot be staggered at all. This adds a different layer to the combat because if one of the fast, aggressive demons is possessed, it turns into a chase where you're constantly running around, chipping away at their health while topping up an armor and ammo from the fodder demons. It also makes certain demons far tougher to deal with than others. If a Hell Knight, Baron, or Arachnotron is possessed, it can be quite difficult. If it's a Mancubus, it's not much of a difference. Much like the Marauder and my first couple of playthroughs, I did not really like these enemies. Once you kill the possessed demon, you have to ghostbuster the spirit away with the microwave beam, which locks your movement down. And as part one goes on, the game starts throwing these guys into increasingly insane situations, like in a foggy canyon or in small little arenas or eventually in a crowded final boss room. After the first playthrough, I went back and played part one on Ultra Violence and I got far more comfortable with them. And by part two, I have changed my mind. They're an excellent addition to the combat. My one serious complaint with them is that it is random which enemy they'll possess in a combat arena. You can plane arena and die to a possessed Baron only to reload and have a revenant be possessed this time. When I went back to get footage, here is the enemy that the game's first spirit possessed. Just my freaking luck, man. It seems like an odd choice to make this random, but I guess from Id's point of view, it adds a certain amount of interesting variety to encounters. Still, the difference between this guy and this guy is ridiculous. The other new addition was the blood maker and while I don't hate them, I'm less positive on these guys. Not because they are particularly difficult, but more because the mechanic used to defeat them once again feels kind of random. Blood makers are pretty much maker drones, but unlike the drones, these guys have an invulnerable shield that only drops when they charge up a specific attack. They can get frustrating when you've got an already ridiculous arena and are running around waiting for these guys to finally give you the chance to shoot them. Still, they're used pretty sparingly and they do add another layer to the combat system, but there are certain arenas where they respond too much for my liking and they can be very annoying to deal with while being chased by possessed demons. When it comes to the way the new levels look, Ancient Gods 1 is for the most part just as great as the base game with an even wider variety of arenas. The Ancient Gods truly feels like it's exploring a bunch of different ideas to make the game more challenging and interesting. The difficulty is ramped up to extreme levels, but when you step back for a bit and calm your tits, that's actually a good thing. I want games like Eternal to push the envelope and challenge me. That is exactly what I'm looking for in games. There are two places Part 1 misses, however. It's in the music and the boss design. In my review of the base game, my one major complaint was I did not love all the bosses. I thought the Doom Hunter was great and the Gladiator and Conmaker are okay, but I really ended up disappointed with the icon of sin. I didn't think any of these were poorly designed. I just didn't like to change a focus from the boss design in the first game. Doom 2016's bosses were fights based on pattern recognition. Each of them was really good and tested something different in the player than the regular levels did. In Eternal, it is quite clear that I'd wanted to make the boss fights exactly the same as the regular arenas. Doom Hunter and Icon are basically just really tough arena fights with another dangerous enemy that happens to have a health bar. Part 1 ends up splitting the difference. The game still relies on ad control to push difficulty, so the fights are still about balancing ads and a boss, but both of them feature attacks that slow the player down, which is literally the last thing I want in a Doom game. Even after five and six playthroughs, I find them to be a bit of a slog. The first one has you fighting two Hellraiser cubes that are immune to damage most of the time and slow the player while being chased by a Hell Knight in a pinky. It just feels pretty frustrating and even after getting good at it, it doesn't feel like a really great fight. In fact, the only way to really beat it cleanly is to use the Ballista. If you don't use that, it's just a nightmare, but still, it's just, I don't know, it just isn't a great feeling fight. It's not very memorable and ultimately you're fighting two boxes. The final fight against Hayden is just a total miss for me. It has blood makers, pairs of respawning spirit-possessed demons and eyeballs and a boss that shoot the same slowing attacks at you. It feels too punishing and too easy to end up dead from even the tiniest mistake when you play on Nightmare. I didn't like it the first time and I liked it less and less each subsequent time, again, even after I got better at it. Overall, though, part one is a DLC that pushes an already spectacular game forward in a bunch of ways. It takes everything great about the game and does it even better. Part two. Ancient Gods Part Two is a bit different from the first DLC. It's not as laser focused on extreme difficulty and it only has one boss. Instead, its focus is basically on spectacular level design. While 2016 featured rock solid levels with the foundry standing out as the truly exceptional one, Eternal exceeded the original in pretty much every way. The Super Gornest is the clear standout but almost every level is both clever and beautiful. While part one continued this quality, part two is a significant leap in level complexity and design. Each of the levels on offer loops back on itself in almost like Dark Souls one style layout and the addition of using the Super Shotgun meat hook as a grapple to swing yourself to higher areas feels great. Part two's levels are beautiful, arresting, detailed and feature some of the most interesting and unique areas the franchise has to offer. It thoroughly explores how space and geometry interacts with the movement and combat systems and it's just a revelation. There's an incredible amount of diversity in offer here. Almost every arena feels like something new and different from what's come before. There's a section of fighting a few Hell Knights in a tiny room with radiation. There's a section of fighting waves of imps and pinkies in a narrow hallway with exploding barrels. And then there were several huge open arenas with no cover that forced the player to make use of jump pads and grappling hooks. And then there's the most intense arena in the game that features a new enemy that buffs demons of damage and two marauders while floating on a small island. Part two keeps using the previous new enemies in interesting ways while also throwing multiple tyrants or a spirit buffed Doom Hunter or multiple marauders at you. Even if there were no new enemies, simply ramping up how the base game and part one's enemies are used would have been enough. But the game does have several new enemy types as well. There's an armored baron that requires you to pour plasma damage to break his armor or shoot his arm at just the moment when he attacks. This is probably the coolest new enemy because it is just incredibly satisfying to kill him without letting his armor recharge. And because the sound design of your shots planking off only to have it suddenly break with the clank is just great. The new stone skinned imps roll around and knocked a player back, which is annoying to be honest, but it makes them a constant nuisance that needs to be quickly addressed. These guys use the full auto combat shotgun, which I didn't discover for like three playthroughs because I have the tooltips turned off. And while again, this does lean into the rock, paper, scissors thing, it's good. It requires you to get really in the habit of like constantly switching the mods, which is something you don't really have to do in the base game ever, to be honest. Finally, there are those zombies that temporarily buff other enemies if you damage them. They're pretty much like buff totems, but only if they take damage. These guys were highly annoying at first, but as with almost every other thing that feels like bullshit and eternal, over time it becomes clear that this is just, yes, another really interesting way to push the player and it adds a deeper level of situational awareness to arenas. Now again, that doesn't mean they aren't frustrating, they certainly are, but it's the kind of frustration that drives mastery. Part two adds one new wrinkle to the player's toolkit, a giant plasma hammer. The first time through the game, I wasn't able to really work this into my rotation consistently and it felt kind of like almost a gimmick, but once I got proficient with it, it became clear that this thing needs to stay in any future Doom game. The hammer replaces the crucible, which was basically a free erase button for heavies. Instead of a sword that you can use on a Tyrant or a Doom Hunter, the hammer is more like an ice grenade. It's not a melee BFG, it's a tool that needs to be worked into regular rotation. Every two glory kills charges the hammer, at which point you jump up into the air as high as possible and smash the hammer down. This shakes health and ammo loose from the enemy and also stuns them outright for several seconds. After upgrading it, the hammer also increases armor drops from burning enemies. Very few things in the game are as satisfying as kiting a bunch of things around before lighting six demons on fire and smashing them with the hammer to fully recharge your armor. The hammer is simply a better and more interesting mechanic than the crucible was. It's an idea refined and perfected rather than something totally new. Before we wrap up here, there's two other interesting things that need to be said about the ancient gods part two. First is the final level, which features sky boxes that put almost everything else in AAA gaming to shame. How many times have you played a shooter and gone into a mission that's supposed to be a huge final battle only to realize the game can't deliver on the grandeur of its premise? The final mission of part two is storming the Dark Lord's Castle. As you fight through some of the most ridiculously hard arenas in the game, every sky box and background is full of sentinels, fighting demons, giant mechs, fighting huge building size demons or dragons burning the ground. It's beautiful and interesting and makes that final level memorable like nothing that's come before. And of course, there's the final boss. Now, as I've said, I have found eternal and part one's bosses to range from good to mediocre to annoying. So I wasn't expecting to love the final boss. I was just hoping it wouldn't be shit. And then in my first playthrough, I hit a wall in the third phase where it just kind of started pissing me off. He couldn't kill me and I couldn't kill him because he heals himself every time you're damaged and the hitbox on his sword attack is larger than the model would imply. Unlike the other bosses though, I have come around totally on this fight and I now consider it the best in the franchise. By my third playthrough, the Dark Lord ends up being a satisfying dance that perfectly balances Doom's core resource and cooldown management with its slick movement system. It's the boss that best exemplifies what this game does so well. It has ads, but not so many that you end up losing track of actually fighting the boss. And it's more like the first game in an important way. This boss is less about manic multitasking and more about careful pattern recognition. After a few times getting the rhythm, you can defeat the Dark Lord without taking damage. I like hard games, but the ones I love most are games you can master to the point you're in total control. There's no mastering the icon of sin so well that you're never hit. I mean, sure, I bet you there is someone who's done that, but not for me. And even the good bosses like Doom Hunter still focus more on running around managing resources than it does in a simple dance. Dark Lord is just a slick ballet that relies on careful positioning, perfect cooldown management, quick swapping weapons, and being very deliberate about managing your dash. It is both challenging, but also allows for total mastery. It's a nearly perfect send-off to a nearly perfect game. Wrapping up. The Ancient Gods part one and two makes me sad. I don't think it's even debatable that Doom Eternal is the best single-player FPS game ever made and a game that does difficulty better than perhaps any other game ever made, period. And now the DLCs are over and we'll have to wait four years for whatever comes next. The Ancient Gods part one pushes Doom Eternal forward and expands the game in ways that makes it more difficult but also just feel different to play. The first time I played it, I was convinced that the difficulty increase was too much and I tweeted as much. But after playing part one on Nightmare and getting pretty frustrated, I went back immediately and played on Ultra Violence and totally fell in love with it. So much so that on my third playthrough, playing the Extra Life mode on Nightmare, it had me thinking it is equally good to the base game. The Ancient Gods part two is better than part one pretty much in every way. The music is spectacular. The difficulty is just right and the actual levels and art design push Eternal forward quite a bit. Part two is the best level design in the game. It has the best arena design in the game and it has the best enemy mix in the game. It swaps the crucible sword for the more interesting hammer. It mixes the new enemies and the old enemies in ways that pushes the combat to its absolute limit and its game feel is perfect. Doom Eternal has ended its run as it started as one of the most intelligently designed games ever made. All right, Blue Fire is up next. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.