DOOM Eternal - the sequel to the 2016 reboot - now with The Ancient Gods DLC

[sullynathan]

https://vocaroo.com/47XcSj7qwpS

 

[JDR13]

I wish they'd come right out and admit that the game will eventually have MTX. There's no way Bethesda is missing that chance. The pretending they don't know what is going on while the whole game seems to have been built around allowing for player and demon skins if getting annoying.

What's MTX?

 

[sullynathan]

It's always the Eastern europeans

 

[Jezal_k23]

He thinks Doom 2016 is not faithful to the mood and spirit of Doom, and I can sort of see his point, but Brutal Doom is equally as ridiculous and unfaithful to the spirit of the originals.

 

[DalekFlay]

I wish they'd come right out and admit that the game will eventually have MTX. There's no way Bethesda is missing that chance. The pretending they don't know what is going on while the whole game seems to have been built around allowing for player and demon skins if getting annoying.

I honestly don't give a shit if they sell cosmetic skins to idiots.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Honestly everything i'm seeing from Eternal is more decline. They just seem to be doubling down on all the things i disliked about Doom 2016.

 

[Belegarsson]

Gosh I love turning on my singleplayer videogame just to see ANAL BEADS EVENT IS ON, 69 DAYS LEFT. I shouldn't give a shit about this but it keeps annoying me to no end.

I was going ro D1P this because I'm sure it's just as enjoyable as 2016, but now I'm probably saving that money for Resident Evil 3 instead. There will be silly time saving and instant unlock crap, but at least I can enjoy my SP game without all the FOMO bullshit.

 

[Jenkem]

I think you can avoid that stuff by not going online

 

[vortex]

Yes, this is for battlemode and invasions. Single player is double the size 2016 was. They've said single player DLCs are to come.

 

[Morgoth]

CORONA Eternal releasing this Friday!

 

[Kruno]

I get 170-200 FPS on Ultra at 1440p on Doom 2016 with a 5700 XT. No way Doom Eternal justifies those demands given that it barely looks any different from the 2016 game. Something wrong here.

Stop being poor.

 

[Morgoth]

There's a lot of computing power required under the hood other than "looks".

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I don't have a MTX unit in my computer. I cannot play modern games.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Spoiler

 

[DJOGamer PT]

You should take a break Doom Seether. All that butthurt is not good for your blood preassure you know.

 

[janior]

It's always the Eastern europeans niggers

 

[Heroic Liberator]

 

[Morgoth]

 

[DJOGamer PT]

DECLINE ISNT GOOD FOR YOU EITHER BRO

The originals aren't going anywhere.
And there's so many wads and mods better than the orignals, that it would take a life-time to complete.

I know these reboots are never going to be as excellent as those, but that doesn't mean they can't be good or great games by themselves. The 2016 was alrigth and this one so far seems better (but that will only be truly answered in it comes out).

But more importantely their sucess is finally killing the Halo/CoD clones once and for all and is inspiring devs to make actually fun shooters. And we already got great ones like Amid Evil and specially DUSK. So at this point I really can't cry out decline from this turn of events.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-03-16-doom-eternal-review

Doom Eternal review - the same orgiastic thrills with a creeping weight of story
An even faster and bloodier but slightly wayward follow-up to a thunderous shooter reboot.

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie," the original Doom's programmer John Carmack once wrote. "It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." A connoisseur of sleaze might object that story often makes for sexier porn - after all, story tends to involve chemistry, atmosphere, suspense and all the other emotions that distinguish intimacy from the act of banging together genitals to spark a human being. Still, if we're going to liken games to pornography, and assuming it's the more kinetic kind of pornography you're after, I heartily recommend Doom Eternal: a looping video compilation of oversized guns and fists plunging into squelchy orifices, spurting along at 60 frames a second.

2016's accomplished reboot was already quite the debauch, its firefights punctuated by leering close-ups of skewered hellspawn, its heavy metal soundtrack always building to a crescendo. Eternal turns up the heat even further, allowing you to dash and flip your way around arenas that are newly fixated on the vertical axis. Dripping organs are wrenched out of, then stuffed back into, demon torsos; chargeable alt-fires scream for release; health orbs spatter the ramps and chokepoints like - well, you get the picture. The environments often look like the work of an adolescent H.R. Giger who's just got into AC/DC. Aside from silvery Protoss-ish fortresses and some seriously down-at-heel office blocks, you'll wander labyrinths of squirming flesh, using runes to unclench toothy sphincters and shearing pop-up tentacles in half with your shotgun.

Some, of course, will soberly insist that all of this is just good, honest, videogame violence - clean, upstanding fun with absolutely no over- or undertones whatsoever. And to these people I say: when I am walking down the shaft of an enormous spear, straight into the pierced belly of a reeling, gaping titan, it is difficult to argue that there isn't some kind of metaphor in play. "Rip and tear"? More like rip and splooge.

Carmack's porn quote (which he has since qualified a little) epitomises the view that narrative in games is always an imposition, a foreign body carried over from film and literature. It's a view that has been roundly debunked. The thing is, though, Eternal does have a story, somewhere in amongst the parade of demon O-faces, and while that story is lightweight by Zenimax game standards, it feels hopelessly grafted on. Having thwarted Hell's invasion of Mars, the legendary Doom Slayer must purge Earth itself of diabolical interlopers, setting out from a gothic orbital station turned customisation hub to a series of ravaged cities, factories and temples that feel on loan from Gears of War. In the process, he must also tunnel back into a startlingly eventful past, sitting through flashbacks and wrangling with old allies.

The 2016 game was a thrilling reimagining of the speed and ferocity of 90s Doom combat, but it also magnified Doom's narrative trappings, adding in cutscenes, audio diaries, codex entries and mid-mission dialogue - a curious reversal of one of id's key decisions with the original game, which was once planned to include a sizeable narrative component written by co-founder Tom Hall. Eternal adds yet more to the load, expanding the cast and redoubling the emphasis on lore.

The cutscenes are now a mix of first and third-person, which means the Slayer is a fully tangible human being - one you can, moreover, trick out with unlockable outfits and weapon skins - rather than a pair of enormous fists twitching beneath your aiming reticle. He feels enclosed by the fiction, rather than, as Christian Donlan put it back in the day, like a man who is also playing Doom and who shares your resentment for anything that gets in the way. There's some effort to explain the character's superhuman prowess, with one scientist suggesting that you represent humanity's rage to survive, as opposed to humanity's love of making Cacodemons pop in slow motion. The Slayer even has a voice these days, though I think he strings together maybe five words in total.

True, our man in green never looks happy with all the attention, stomping impatiently through cinematics while other parties monologue at his retreating head (if they're lucky, that is - the fate of most speaking roles in Eternal is to be ground up like tuna). Nor are you required to listen to the audio diaries, or dip into the codex. But these elements drag on you nonetheless, like the lakes of purple goop that stop you running or jumping in certain levels. They're a deflating reminder that you are no longer here just to indulge your baser instincts. Conversely, the developer's guilty awareness that people don't play Doom for the narrative means that when you do dig into the world-building, you'll find it to be scanty and by-the-numbers: a set of tired references to ancient races, legendary battles and fallen cities.

Still, if visceral gratification is the goal, Eternal amply delivers. The combat is once again about ceaseless pivoting between attack and retreat, care of a raucous battlefield ecology which sees you ripping ammo, health and armour refills from your prey rather than just searching for medikits or finding somewhere to cool off. Stun a foe and you can execute them for a smidgeon of health. These executions double as windows of rest, with other demons easing off till you're done rearranging your victim's anatomy. They can also be triggered from metres away, warping you to the target without even the courtesy of a transitional animation, which means you can use them to escape or get behind a mob. Bisect demons with your trusty chainsaw, meanwhile, and you'll be rewarded with a geyser of ammo, restocking all your weapons in one dollop. You'll need plenty of chainsaw fuel to carve up the bigger demons, but you'll always have enough to carve up the smaller "fodder" demons, who spawn endlessly throughout each battle till the larger demons are slain.

Spoiler

This hyper-aggressive resourcing style forces you to close the gap with foes who are, in any case, very good at running you down. Some, like the minion-summoning Archville, are closer to terrain hazards, but the underworld's legions are light on snipers or artillery; pretty much everybody, from the podgy Mancubus to the serpentine Whiplash, is hell-bent on getting in your face. It sounds like chaos, and often is, but there's a lot of science to Eternal's combat, and solid artistry to how the key variables are conveyed from second to second. Ammo, health and armour drops are colour-coded; staggered enemies flash blue, then orange when they're about to recover. The game's audio is similarly readable, once you acclimatise to the roaring heavy metal soundtrack. You'll learn to follow the progress of the battle by ear - be it the tink of a cooldown gauge, the belch of a Cacodemon that has just swallowed something explosive, teeing it up for an execution, or the nasal howl of a charging Pinky.

New variables include an ice grenade, mapped to the trigger, which lets you flash-freeze whole groups to interrupt otherwise lethal offensives. You can also light foes up with your shoulder flamethrower attachment, causing them to spit out armour parts and further motivating you to fight at close quarters when you're hurting. The most important change-up, however, is your newfound agility. Besides availing himself of launchpads, the Slayer can now perform aerial dashes, scuttle up laddered surfaces, swing from monkey bars and use a Super Shotgun-mounted grapple line to yank himself towards or past enemies.

This encourages showboating reminiscent of anti-gravity duels in the sadly-forgotten Lawbreakers. You might grapple somebody, fling yourself past them while firing your shotgun pointblank, then double-jump to a monkey bar, hurling yourself at a stunned Pain Elemental, then drop neatly onto a launchpad while switching to your Heavy Assault Rifle so that you can carpet the arena in micro-missiles. The weapons are by and large entertaining rejigs of DOOM 2016's offerings, with two upgradeable alternate-fires per gun that lend themselves to different tactics and different opponents. Your shotgun, for instance, can serve as either a sticky grenade launcher - useful when trying to shoot the turret off a Cyberdemon - or a buckshot-firing Gatling gun for crowd control.

Inevitably, the charm of Eternal diminishes the further you travel from these firefights. Its grander story component aside, the game is slightly over-burdened with customisation systems. Besides tracking down weapon mods in levels themselves, you'll equip runes for perks such as slow-mo when you aim in mid-air, together with Praetor Suit upgrades such as the ability to suck in health drops from further away. There's a knack to combining Rune perks, especially when tackling "Master" versions of levels that have more punishing enemy spawn patterns, but the role-playing systems aren't novel, and the associated menu-diving bogs down a shooter that's at its best in the thick of the bloodshed.

What really saps Eternal, however, is the predictable way the campaign once again breaks down into combat bowls and platforming stretches that feel like they've been stripped at random from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. There are collectibles to unearth, some tucked in high alcoves or behind smashable walls, together with optional hidden battle chambers, but the alternation of shoot-out then jumpy bit then shoot-out is the same throughout. Boss battles are the biggest change of tune - the final clash is a doozie, a gruelling two-phase affair in which your nemesis looms over the layout like the world's angriest D&D player. But some of them are just annoying, a question of repeating a tactic to whittle down a health-bar. It's revealing that the game offers you a layer of all-but-indestructible Sentinel armour after a certain number of deaths, though Eternal's accessibility is otherwise refreshing: dropping the difficulty doesn't cost you anything in terms of progress, and you revert to the previous difficulty once the bossfight is over.

It's worth remembering that old school Doom wasn't just a series of one-man massacres. It could be ominous and anxiety-inducing. It had monsters you could hear through walls, shambling about in the guts of the level, and concealed partitions that slid open without warning. It had a narrative, just about, but it didn't try to root the weirdness of its concept or spaces in lore, and its secrets were as much about enjoying the possibilities of virtual architecture as securing a power-up. It was a world of alarming corners and optical tricks that deformed and shifted simply because it could. For all its abundance of things to find, you don't get quite the same feeling in DOOM Eternal. At times, it feels like the levels have been designed backwards from the completion screen, with its grocery lists of optional treasures and encounters. You might argue that 3D worlds are simply less surprising on the whole in 2020 than in 1993, but that's to ignore the work of countless DOOM modders whose creations, made using id's original engine and tools, continue to startle and intrigue today.

The missing link in this review is multiplayer, which is offline for the moment, but which already looks like a step up from Doom 2016's ramshackle online. It's a strictly asymmetrical affair, with one player starring as the Slayer while the others control one of five demon breeds from the campaign. As a demon, you can summon AI-controlled hellspawn with the D-pad, so victory is presumably as much about mob strategy as dealing damage yourself. Which sounds like a pleasant way to cool off once you've tired of the sweaty embrace of a campaign that, for all its breaking of Carmack's ancient maxim, has a shot at being one of the best you'll play this year. Still, Doom Eternal leaves me undecided. The game is fundamentally the 2016 reboot again with new props, and its dogged commitment to Doom's narrative universe is as baffling as the firefights are exhilarating. Is this really all Doom can be, nowadays - a cascade of collectables, unwanted cutscenes and the spectacle of a gurning demon face, forever?

 

[Wunderbar]

lol, he's butthurt about being called out for his blood fresh supply review.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-eternal-review/

DOOM ETERNAL REVIEW
id Software returns with one of the most intense shooters ever.

I just finished Doom Eternal and I'm feeling anxious and exhausted. I've kneed the underside of my desk too many times to count from tensing up. My hands are soft from sweating and my knuckles crack when I try to make a fist. Doom Eternal is a celebration of excess. Excess in sin, in violence, scale, speed, and volume. I've never played a shooter this intense and demanding.

Doom Eternal also runs beautifully on a wide range of hardware and feels designed for a mouse and keyboard first. It's a modern classic, with a few caveats. Cheap deaths from getting stuck on geometry happen too often. There are six or seven layers of unnecessary progression. Doom's dark humor has mostly been traded in for deep lore and a high-fantasy cosmology. And the strain from a heavy focus on resource management is felt at every difficulty level. I worry that for some, it could be Doom: But Too Much.

But "too much" works for me as Eternal's guiding light. The moment to moment combat is distilled panic rather than empowerment. I live for the fleeting moments my head gets above water within the hurricane of light and noise and extravagant violence, and I pull off a feat of accuracy and reflex I never thought I was capable of before.

Paimon pleasure
Doom Eternal is a tough teacher. A few hours in I'm getting by just fine, juggling half a dozen weapons, belching fire on the hordes to spawn armor to stay afloat, tossing grenades at every opportunity to stun and soften up the crowd. I'm dashing in and out of the action for the occasional Glory Kill to keep my health topped off, dodging projectiles and managing the arena, deciding, between breaths if I remember to breathe, which demons to attack based on who's currently kicking my ass the most.

Late into the fight a marauder appears. This guy has an axe, a shield, and only opens up to damage if you counter a specific attack with a precisely timed gunshot. Blasting it with a rocket barrage does absolutely nothing. With this enemy design, Doom is asking me to stop shooting and moving so much. It's playing with the comfort zone I've built over decades of playing arena shooters. Now I have to let up on the trigger, to circle-strafe and assume the calm restraint of a Dark Souls duel. I hate this enemy at first, but then I get the hang of it after a dozen or so attempts.

I've been playing these shooters since I was a teen. But Eternal isn't just asking me to get intimate with my keyboard's number row, it's challenging me to change playstyles in the middle of a classic Doom arena fight, to stop doing boxing and start doing judo. Managing resources, switching weapons, staying on the move, prioritizing demons based on the arena shape and current threat is plenty to juggle for most people, but Doom Eternal makes you change age-old habits too.

Doom's guns aren't as subject to this complexity. The old gang is back again. Hello, combat shotgun. Hello, plasma rifle. Hello, BFG. With more opportunities to refill ammunition and heaps more arenas with ways to get airborne, the previously underutilized ballista gets heavy use as a railgun stand-in and stylish airborne demon deletion tool.

Updated viewmodels reinforce each weapon's heft and sheen, and the gun skins rewarded for completing certain milestones are weird, but not unwelcome in a singleplayer game. Refined reload and firing animations imbue each with a sense of mechanical realism, especially the alternate firing modes, which have way more utility this time. But the guns haven't lost the fundamental character they had in Doom 2016. The big changes in Doom Eternal are in how it handles resource management.

Glory Kills still reward health for staggering a demon and finishing them with a special melee kill animation, but chainsaw kills, which drop ammo, are far more important for keeping your guns fed. Burning through every bullet takes very little time. Throw in the flame belch, a tool that lights demons on fire to make them puke up armor for a bit, and suddenly half of each fight becomes about juggling resources. I regularly had to dip out of Marauder fights to chase down a stray demon for ammo or health.

Making your enemies your life-saving resources contributes to the overbearing tension of Doom Eternal. Chasing demons into a dangerously tight space normally isn't a great idea, except when it's the setup for a quick flame belch followed by a grenade or rocket. Every stray imp is a potential ammo cache, so keeping a few around just in case is a good plan, so long as you're willing to pay the annoying fireball tax. You have to confront these guys to stay alive, and it's rarely on your own terms.

It was all overwhelming at first, frustrating second, and then suddenly novel and exciting. Yes, it makes zero sense that you light monsters on fire in order to get them to drop armor shards. But oddities like this feed into an exhausting, anxiety-inducing, thrilling-once-you-get-it vibe, and farming armor from the same guy I'm dueling creates a give-and-take with enemies that isn't present in other shooters.

These more unfamiliar ideas could do with a bit more onboarding, and Eternal's current solution of spelling out how to beat every new demon (even bosses!) with on-screen explainers isn't exactly elegant. Trial and error is essential to Eternal's learning curve, which wasn't the greatest way to acclimate myself to the new ideas and systems introduced throughout its 15-hour runtime.

But the ideas settle easier if you're packing any Extra Lives, literal old-timey 1UPs hidden around each level that keep the momentum going with an instant respawn. I only wish they weren't automatically spent with death, since I lost plenty from stupid mistakes. A prompt would be nice, because Doom Eternal's fights get larger, more complex, and more challenging than ever. I died so, so much. Turns out there are still plenty of novel ways to push my pointing and clicking skills.

Spoiler

Zig Zagan
Also on the pile of new stuff to digest: a lot of progression systems. Weapon points, runes, secrets, sentinel batteries, suit upgrades, challenges, weapon mods, skins, weapon mod upgrades, weapon mastery upgrades—it's a lot. Too much, really, because Eternal places the bulk of these upgrades along the critical path. By the end I had almost every upgrade and without trying too hard to find them all, as if it's all an elaborate cardboard front built to make players feel good while ensuring they stay at pace with the steep difficulty curve.

Secrets give a little incentive to stop and dig out extra upgrades and collectibles, but they're clearly marked on the map, and Doom Eternal's level design is extremely straightforward. I miss the mazes of old FPS games (or recent homages like Ion Maiden), where finding that last keycard or a hidden door was a big victory. Eternal's goal is momentum with little room for downtime. The ability to climb certain walls, dash in midair, and swing from monkey bars makes for some challenging navigation sequences, but I wanted to spend more time soaking in Eternal's incredible settings rather than just shooting and dashing my way through them.

The new forms of mobility do shine in the arena, though, especially with how these fights scale up so quickly. It's Doom 2016 endgame stuff from pretty early on, and then surpasses that benchmark, adding tougher demons and even more waves and wild configurations of them, and then surpasses that mark again and again. The dash is essential for dodging projectiles, but even more so for map awareness.

Dashing out of the fray and to a decent vantage point wins a split second to see what you're up against, and any chance to scan the crowd and prioritize a target makes a big difference. Those brief moments of respite allow me to land a nice scoped shot with the chaingun on an arachnotron's scorpion-tail gun turret to make them less of a threat, or freeze a slithering whiplash demon with an ice bomb so it holds still for a gun hug.

Combat arenas vary from tiny, crowded shotgun gauntlets to huge multilayered jungle gyms. A favorite spans a bubbling river of fire, jump pads on every terrace of the elaborate blistery structures consuming a ruined city. Monkeybars jut out from walls all over that I can swing off of, making it possible to stay in the air for the majority of the fight. I don't have to touch the ground between gibbing a revenant with the railgun and grappling right up to the dumb grin of a cacodemon with the super shotgun's new meat hook attachment. My super shotgun's meat hook sets any demons it lodges into on fire, a cute touch.

The arenas jive with the expanded mobility for a more expressive combat experience than 2016. If I want to do it, I probably can, as if there's an uninterrupted circuit between my brain, the mouse and keyboard, and the Doomguy. It's why getting stuck on Doom's occasionally jagged hell-geometry is such a momentum killer.

It happened right at the end of my eighth or so attempt on an early boss. A strenuous arena fight with two Doom Hunters was almost over—I just needed to finish one off—but a smaller demon spawned in front of me and body-blocked me into a corner. Three seconds of standing still and I was dead. I think Doom Eternal knew something was up, because before I respawned a prompt popped up and asked if I wanted to put on some Sentinel Armor.

It's a difficulty-bracing system that kicks in after a couple deaths and gives you a buff that decreases damage for specific fights. I took the offer and feel better for it because I probably would have stopped playing for a while otherwise. Between the variable difficulties—I pushed through on Ultra-Violence—and salves like Sentinel Armor and extra lives that help remove friction, Doom Eternal did an excellent job pushing me just beyond my limit without burning me out, despite the occasional unfair death.

Doom Eternal is a challenging game, but it won't stop you if you'd prefer to take a breezy tour through metal album landscapes and demon guts. Cheats don't affect progression at all. You can clean up any collectibles (except Slayer Gates, an endgame challenge) and finish the whole thing as an unkillable machine. Just drop Eternal to its easiest difficulty and go cheat hunting. They're clearly marked on the map along with every other collectible.

My favs: Party Mode and QuakeCon Mode. The former makes demons pop like confetti pinatas and the latter frames the action with a 'live' audience that cheers or boos based on how well you're doing. There's even a 'woo' guy. Paired with the classic center-screen gun perspective and a new option that gives Doomguy and his weapons their classic sounds, I'm having a blast whipping through the levels on a second playthrough, cleaning up collectibles as an immortal demigod in a well earned victory lap after my vanilla Ultra-Violence run. I cheated the game and didn't cheat myself. Doom Eternal is happy for me. Feels great.

More story Foras
Eternal revisits plenty of old scenery, Hell and Mars included, but also goes to some unexpected locations with distinct architecture and color palettes. Doom 2016 was red and blue. Doom Eternal throws in purple and green and gold and grey. If there was any downtime in Doom Eternal, it was because I stopped between fights to soak in the scale and majesty of its vistas.

Demons as tall as skyscrapers carrying hell barges around on their backs, swarms of dozens of cacodemons like gnats in the distance, ancient sentinel castles climbing mossy mountains into the clouds—Doom is a full on high fantasy world now, pages and pages of optional lore included.

Some of the natural humor is dulled as a result, but I still laugh every time I hear the cartoonish pop of a cacodemon's eye getting ripped from the socket. Besides, Doom taking itself this seriously feels like a joke of its own. I didn't really care much for the story anyway, even after reading every codex entry. Nothing was lost or gained. It's thematic dressing, an excuse for wack, outrageous settings and action sequences, BFGs, even B'er FGs, and so on.

Musically, it's an evolution, not a reinvention. Mick Gordon builds on the Doom 2016 sound with chanting heavy metal choruses and a darker, black metal-adjacent vibe overall. This is still a very familiar energetic Meshuggah-inspired sound that I love, it just didn't cover as much new ground as I'd hoped. But without Gordon's signature sound, Doom Eternal would feel empty. The music is integral to the action, an undercurrent of energy to aspire to.

In the new Battlemode it's possible to duke it out with other players, either as the slayer or a few demons. It's a multiplayer mode much more aligned with the spirit of Doom, but it wasn't available to try out during the pre-release period. PCG's Emma Matthews had a chance to try it in February and thought it matched the heart-rending pace of the singleplayer mode, it just isn't the main attraction here. We'll be sure to spend more time with it once the servers go live, but whether Battlemode is great or not doesn't change how worthwhile Doom Eternal already is. This is a pretty slick computer game, folks.

Doom Eternal feels like it was made for the PC first, too. I had zero hiccups during my 15-hour playthrough. No crashes, no hitching, and I didn't have to bump a single setting down to get my framerate above 120 fps at 1440p. Granted, I have a juicy rig (RTX 2080, i9-9900K), but I'm still used to playing with post-processing junk to inch my fps higher. Our performance review shows Doom Eternal maxed out and maintaining 60 fps at 1080p on a GTX 1650, a $150 GPU. Doom is seriously an industry standout in this regard.

Arenas are filled with dozens of demons at once, each one like their own bespoke muppet, each detailed and present in how they're put together and how they fall apart. The gore system breaks them up piece by piece, exposing gristle and bruised muscle and bones underneath. And Doom never skips a beat rendering all the demon bits and weapon effects and wild environments, my mouse whipping around so fast as if to dare it to all gum up. Nah.

Anything less than perfect performance wouldn't do, because Doom Eternal is one of the most demanding arena shooters I've ever played, a game that teases out and hones every muscle memory committed to my right forearm and left hand fingertips since they graced a mouse and keyboard. It's bright and loud, hyper violent yet tastefully refined, and absolutely draining. I can't recall playing a shooter where sensory overload was one of the most common reasons for death.

THE VERDICT
94

DOOM ETERNAL
Doom Eternal is a ceaseless, panicked nightmare that pushes you to point and click with more skill and style than ever before.

 

[Biscotti]

On one side you have the Codex with a raging hateboner for anything NuDoom, and on the other side you have basically the rest of the internet gushing over it like it's the second coming of FPS Christ.
In actuality, it's probably going to be a pretty fun game: Nothing groundbreaking like all the reviewers and (((influencers))) are claiming, but not some horrible affront to the very identity of the genre either. This is the internet however, and it only deals in extremities.

 

[jebsmoker]

i'm still very wary of doom eternal. i'm probably just gonna get the official pc port of doom 64 for like 5 dollars and buy eternal after all the excitement dies down for it. i'm not convinced its the 2nd coming of FPS christ either

 

[Junmarko]

Soundtrack is giving me Sepultura vibes