by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
… doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does stick spikes on the wheel and bungs a chain on the end.
The Doom series has been with us since the ancient era of 1993, and has remained culturally relevant pretty much the whole time, even with low points like the 2005 movie starring The Rock.
The most recent uptick in brand recognition happened in 2016 with the fancy relaunch/reboot of the series simply titled, Doom. Boasting a back-to-basics but with better tech philosophy, the First Person Shooter was a stripped back exercise in bombastic beast blasting and fast-paced carnage. It was a hit, mining the wallets of shooter enthusiasts and victims of weaponised nostalgia alike.
A sequel followed in 2020, Doom Eternal, which added quite a lot of complexity to the formula and while successful, was perhaps a little too fiddly for its own good.
It also raised the question, what’s next for this series? Where can it possibly go, what can it possibly do, to feel fresh again?
Enter Doom: The Dark Ages, the game that takes the Doom formula and gleefully adds medieval bad arsery.
Doom: The Dark Ages puts the player, once again, in the heavy-booted feet of the Doom Slayer, a sort of demon-massacring homunculus that in this iteration exists in a techno-medieval world where knights wield laser guns, fly cybernetic dragons and have alliances with weird blobby aliens.
Unless you’ve been following the surprisingly dense lore of the series – that includes novels, board games and comics – you’ll likely find the premise of this prequel game a tad mystifying, but worry not: the entire set-up for this thing is really just finding spectacular arenas into which ol’ mate Doom Slayer is thrust, ready to rip and tear as a chunky guitar riff vibrates you right down to your bones.
The biggest difference with The Dark Ages isn’t actually the setting, but rather the gameplay. Doom Eternal was very leveraged into using the right weapon at the right time to get monsters to drop the correct ammo when you pulverise them. It also had double jumps, jump puzzles and a bunch of other oddly complex systems that sometimes felt like they got in the way of the good stuff.
The Dark Ages abandons pretty much everything from that game, replacing it with a heavier-feeling Doom Guy, way more enemies on-screen and a cool shield that can be used to close distances, fang around the battlefield decapitating demons or deflecting certain attacks back at your foes. It’s a literal game-changer in how this new adventure feels, and while those who straight-up loved everything about Eternal may balk at the changes, it gives the title a tangible point of difference. There are also sections where Doomy pilots a gigantic mech (which are simple but fun) and ones where you’ll ride a dragon (which are a bit dull, honestly), but the main game is, and will always be, mowing down hordes of demons while grinning like an idiot.
The graphics are spectacular, the music solid (although previous composer Mick Gordon is missed), the enemy variety decent (although it would have been nice to see a few more iterations in the later Lovecraftian levels) and the weapons are many and upgradable. There’s one gun that chews up enemy skulls and launches the shards like deadly projectiles and another that shoots out a wrecking ball on a chain, as well as the expected Super Shotgun and laser weapons. It’s a decent arsenal and loads of fun to use, not to mention upgrades for your shield and special abilities launched on perfect parries helping keep the gameplay fresh for the 12-15 hours that the campaign takes.
Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does stick spikes on the wheel and bungs a chain on the end. It’s a new aesthetic with an entertaining story that happily doesn’t get in the way of you rampaging into a field chockers with monsters, sporting an evil grin as they attack, knowing that before the day is over that you’ll be bathing in their blood and wearing their internal organs like a jaunty hat. If that sounds good to you, then you’re probably going to have a cheerfully violent time with Doom: The Dark Ages, bless your black little heart.
