Doom Eternal Review
The original DOOM was a cult game, largely responsible for what shooters look like now, if not the industry as a whole, so the demands for sequels have always been at least exaggerated. Of course, no one in their right mind expects the remakes and reboots to strictly follow the same formula as the original, but fans are certainly not going to forgive radical concept changes – we all remember a good, in principle, DOOM 3, which players disliked only because “it wasn’t like that before. But DOOM 2016 showed that it is enough to leave the core of the gameplay untouched to satisfy both the audience of hardcore fans, and fresh blood, unfamiliar with the classics.
Yes, that game was a bit of a hodgepodge of different popular mechanics, but who’s to say that’s a bad thing? We ended up with a super fast spinoff shooter, with confusing levels, tons of secrets, and hordes of bloodthirsty demons. As a longtime fan of the series, I wasn’t thrilled with certain innovations, but on the whole I had to agree that id Software then showed what a perfect reboot of a classic game should look like. The sequel appeared to be done under the slogan Citius, Altius, Fortius! At least this is how DOOM Eternal looks like on the background of its elder brother – it is much more dynamic, bloody, complex and pathos-laden than its predecessor. And to it, unfortunately, about twice as many questions.
Was DOOM Eternal able to surpass the previous part? Yes and no. It is definitely faster, bloodier and more diverse than the game of 2016, there is more story, more monsters, more interesting levels, but, on the other hand, the novelty is gone, we have already seen it all last time, even if in a slightly different dynamic, there is no noticeable qualitative leap forward. And I, even if I absolutely do not share id Software passion for certain game mechanics, for the second time I have to admit that the game was simply powerful. Yes, the old-school admirers could, like me, berate the “tinsel stuff that’s unnecessary for a good shooter, like three types of chops simultaneously” and complain that it’s not DOOM at all, and they’d be right, because Eternal is as far from the good old DOOM as it could be, just run the DOOM 64 re-release that came out with it for comparison. But does that make it a bad game? No, it’s just different, get used to it, now DOOM looks like this.
