At a recent event held at Los Angeles’ City Market Social House, the good people from iD Software and Bethesda Softworks gave game journalists (myself included) an opportunity to play the upcoming sci-fi / fantasy first-person shooter Doom: The Dark Ages, which is slated to be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on May 15, 2025.
What follows are my impressions of the game.
(Note: All screenshots were provided by iD Software and Bethesda Softworks.)
A prequel of sorts…
to 2016’s DOOM and 2020’s DOOM Eternal, DOOM: The Dark Ages takes place in the past, but on other planets that are both medieval and futuristic. While one has a city that looks like Arrakeen from the Dune movies, the game actually starts on a world where there’s futuristic energy weapons and space stations, but the people are wearing armor and running around castles like they just escaped from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
It’s kind of like how Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands mixed elements of Borderlands-esque science fiction with fantasy. Only bloodier and more serious.
Now, for the most part, the gameplay and combat in DOOM: The Dark Ages is similar to that of DOOM and DOOM Eternal. There’s no reloading or iron sights; finishing off enemies with special moves causes them to drop ammo, armor, and health packs; and you move like you’ve got a brand new pair of roller-skates and that zombie-looking guy over there has a brand new key.
But it also has a lot of new, and engaging, combat mechanics that make this feel somewhat different from those earlier games.
This became readily apparent…
in the first section we got to play, which encompassed the game’s opening and the beginning of the second level. With enemies attacking the castle in hopes of drawing you out, you oblige them by beaming down from a space station, your shotgun at the ready.
Well, mostly. Right away, I learned that while you still shoot by pulling the right trigger, pulling the left does not engage your gun’s special attack. Instead, it pulls up your shield. And I mean a physical shield like the ones in Avowed, not like the energy one you have in Halo Infinite.
Though it’s a lot handier than the ones in Avowed. While it can withstand many shots before failing, it can also — if you time it right, and use it against attacks that are green — parry incoming attacks, returning them to their rightful owners. This is especially helpful when fighting enemies who fling green energy at you, and need to be hit multiple times before dying.
Or, as I learned later, sometimes these green attacks aren’t energy but people coming at you fists first.
Your shield in DOOM: The Dark Ages…
can also be used in a melee attack called a Shield Charge. If you’re facing an enemy who is susceptible to these kinds of attacks, and hold the left trigger to lock onto them, you can then hit the right trigger and send yourself flying into them, reducing them (and any enemies standing next to them) to chunks.
This is especially fun when you find yourself above a bunch of enemies and can use the Shield Charge to come down on them like a missile strike.
The Shield Charge can also be used to destroy certain barriers, including some (hint, hint) that hide the entrances to secret places.
Now, not every enemy is easily dispatched by this move. But most are, at the very least, injured by it, and sometimes left stunned and waiting for you to finish them off.
It was while I was clearing out the castle…
and its courtyard that I got another melee weapon, a spiked metal glove called The Gauntlet. Except that, unlike many first-person shooters, in which you can smack people all you want, The Gauntlet uses ammo, and you can only carry three uses at a time (at least at first). Still, it’s very effective, especially if you smack people three times in rapid succession.
All of which came in handy when I got to the next area, a rather open one where there were four portals that could only be closed by killing every nearby enemy. Though unlike earlier DOOM games, these portals could be closed in any order. Seems DOOM: The Dark Ages is a bit more open minded.
After destroying all four, I was given a quick chance to test out a turret against a Godzilla-sized titan before being called back to the space station. It was a nice change of pace that didn’t overstay its welcome.
I next found myself on the aforementioned Dune-looking planet, and with a new attachment for my shield: a spike strip that allows you to throw you shield, and have it come back to you, like if Captain America’s shield was forged by the dwarf that made Thor’s hammer.
Or, to use a video game reference,
it’s like the throwable shield you have if you play Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a warrior, only you don’t have to wait a moment between throws.
Tossing your shield in DOOM: The Dark Ages not only cuts down multiple weak enemies at a time, but if they’re too big to be sliced, the shield becomes embedded in them, rendering them immobile — and thus open to attack — for a few seconds.
It even works against enemies who are also holding metal shields, since you can shoot their shields multiple times, causing the metal to become super-heated, and then use your shield to shattered them into little pieces that will embed themselves in their owner.
With the first part of the demo finished, I went back to the menu and loaded the second…and found myself piloting a mecha titan called an Atlan. Where before I had guns and my shield, I now found myself taking out enemies (i.e., titans) with a combination of punches, foot stomping, and some good old bobbin’ and weavin’.
You can even…
do a flying punch similar to your shield charge, just not as often.
Being big and scary didn’t last, though, as my Atlan then got a gatling gun, which was more effective, but less fun than punching people. You can even supercharge your gun by dodging an incoming attack at just the right time (one of those things that only makes sense in a video game), but even this wasn’t as fun as smacking titans upside the head.
DOOM: The Dark Ages was also not as much fun (relatively speaking) in the next part, during which I piloted a dragon. Assuming a big salamander with giant electric wings and mounted machine guns counts as a dragon.
After being taught the controls by flying through some caves and taking out some stationary turrets, I got to the main part of this mission, in which I had to attack a ship called a Hell Carrier, take out its guns, and then land on it and destroy it from the inside. And while the part after the dragon dropped me off was as much fun as the similar moments in the demo’s first section, the flying parts never really grabbed me. Certainly not as much as when you did something similar in Halo 5.
That said,
in context, these flying parts, and the gun-totin’ mech part, may work well to break up all the runnin’ and gunnin’ like the turret sequence did. We’ll have to see.
This brings me to the last section of DOOM: The Dark Ages we got to play: another large open area with plenty of targets…and secrets. Once again, I had to kill tons of enemies to destroy some portals, and in this regard, this part was just like the first, only on a larger scale (both in terms of the battlefield size and the number of enemies attacking at any given time).
That is, until I got to something called a Morale Encounter. In these, there’s a boss who can attack, but cannot be hurt until you eliminate all of their minions. And they have a lot of minions. The payoff being that you not only destroy the nearby portal, you also earn a nice reward for your trouble; which, in this case, increased the ammo capacity of the Rail Spike Shredder, a fully-auto assault rifle that shoots barbed spikes, which I had gotten earlier in the demo.
This section of DOOM: The Dark Ages…
was also where I got a new melee weapon: the Flail. Which, for people who’ve never played Dungeons And Dragons, is a metal spiked ball on a chain you swing into people’s faces.
And while the Flail, like the Gauntlet, is limited by how much ammo you have for it, it’s just as much fun to use, especially against tougher enemies.
Though I did find it a little odd that, unlike your guns, which you can swap on the fly, changing your melee weapon requires you to pause the game and pull up a menu. Though, on the plus side, pausing the game actually pauses the game. DOOM: The Dark Ages is thankfully not a live service game.
This was not the only curious design choice I noticed about DOOM: The Dark Ages. The game is single-player only, even though the mechanics make it seem like it’d make for some exciting multiplayer modes, especially if one is shields-only (and no, not a “human frisbee golf”-type mode, you sickos).
The thing is,
even with no multiplayer, or ability to switch melee weapons on the fly, and even with the dragon part and the shooting sections of the mech encounter not being as good as the rest, DOOM: The Dark Ages is still shaping up to be as much fun as the previous games, and in the same way that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands did something different but also the same as Borderlands, and ended up being just as engaging.
We’ll just have to wait until May 15, 2025 to see if DOOM: The Dark Ages can pull it off.
For more video game reviews, interviews, and previews, please check out the video game section of paulsemel.com, or Paul’s page on Open Critic.
