Doom Eternal Review – I Suck at FPS Games, so Take My Review With a Grain of Salt

Normally, there is a point at which I would stop playing a game for review for a variety of reasons, but there is a new one in the case of Doom Eternal. I titled my review as such because I have tried multiple times, but keep dying as I try to advance past the current chapter, so I keep stepping back and trying it again a bit later, but progress has slowed to the point of utter frustration for me. This is, mind you, not the games fault. I just don't play FPS games, and just don't seem to have any talent for them. So, in order to be able to focus on other content, I cut the play-through of this game short (Eventually I will get back to it and beat it), with only a couple chapters left to complete. Despite utterly sucking at this game, I do think I have a bit to add to discussing it, so I figured I'd still do the review. Just know this so you can appropriately judge my terrible opinion on this game.

And that opinion is, despite me sucking, the game was a lot of fun. I never got into Doom back in the day, though I did play the second one a little, and just never got into First Person Shooters. With the reboot of Doom in 2016, however, the visual joy of seeing the game be played has increased and made me take another look at the series, though I ended up not picking it up. Doom Eternal seemed to add a lot more mobility options to the gameplay, and so I figured it would be worth a go this time around.

Dashing around, having the hook on your Super Shotgun, the double jumps, and all kinds of environmental objects that move you around the field added a lot of fun I never remembered being there in the original games. Throw in all kinds of weapons and bloody kills, the game does a great job at making you feel like 'The Doom Slayer', just this ever forward-moving force of destruction and death.

And then the game grinds to a halt whenever there is a platforming section. Cause when I think The Doom Slayer, I think grabbing on to walls, looking for other walls to grab onto, and platforming based on precision timing to avoid spinning lines of fire like I was playing Mario. It's not even that the platforming segments weren't well made, they were and I was able to handle them all easily (Unlike the later parts of the game). I just went from feeling like the bringer of death to.... not.

As far as the story goes part of me kind of loved it for a while. See, I felt like I was missing a lot of necessary information about what characters would talk about since I didn't play the first game, so it was hard to care about what they were all saying. That said, the Slayer himself just... doesn't react to anything they say. He's there to do something, and more then once he just keeps doing his thing regardless of what the villains are saying, it's kind of like he cares as little about what's going on as I do, and I loved it. Still though, eventually you start getting flashbacks to where the Slayer came from and I just didn't care about that either. When you are killing demons, this game is fantastic, anytime you are doing anything else I just started to clock out.

There are times you get some fantastic bits of dialogue though, like the logs of one scientist you come across. At first, she says clearly you are not a god, the second log says she now believes you are a god, and the third she is basically talking about you like she's your evangelical herald. I got a big kick out of that. Also, there is this gem.

I do want to say that I was having issues with the audio. Every so often, the audio would just cut out and start up again a moment later. It doesn't ruin the game at all, but it happened often enough to get annoying. There are also times you'll see what looks like a ledge you can step on, but can't. Even if you see things just like it elsewhere you can step on. Here is one pictured below I fell right through, but this does happen very infrequently.

Overall there isn't much more to say than that. The actual demon-slaying is great, plenty of weapons and options to customize your abilities and gear, and a good mix and variety of demons with a pretty solid challenge (Unless you are me and just keep getting your ass kicked). If you like the idea of an FPS where you just cut your way through demon hordes with little regard for anything else, not really much reason not to get this one.