Doom: The Dark Ages review: thrilling prequel goes too big too fast

Just a few missions into Doom: The Dark Ages, I felt like I’d reached the apex of action games. There I was behind the controls of an enormous Atlan mech, eclipsing the kind of battleground that felt enormous to me moments before. The sky above me was scorched. Buildings turned to ruins under my feet. One by one, an army of demonic kaiju ate my metallic fists. How can it get any bigger and badder than this?

It doesn’t — and that’s both the gift and curse of the Doom Slayer’s latest saga.

In an attempt to one up the already hellacious shooter series, one that reached new adrenaline highs in 2020’s Doom: Eternal, developer Id Software turns every dial up to 11 from right Chapter 1. The battles are faster and more ferocious. Hidden lore becomes glitzy cutscenes. Our hero rides a mechadragon, for God’s sake. Every single piece of it is an exercise in maximalist escalation, trying to find a ceiling to a timeless shooter hyper violent glory. It reaches that height, but comes up against a hard truth: There’s nothing left to climb once you’ve reached the top.

Doom: The Dark Ages delivers another dose of reliable thrills by building on the foundation established by its excellent predecessors. The power fantasy of it all is more potent than ever, but Id Software’s experiment in excess proves that there is such a thing as “too much” when it comes to video game spectacle.

Year One

Rather than picking up where Eternal left off, The Dark Ages is a prequel to Id Software’s rebooted Doom series. It acts as a Doom Slayer origin story that draws inspiration from Batman: Year One, Frank Miller’s gritty tale about The Dark Knight’s first year on the job. That approach lays the groundwork for the most narrative-focused Doom game to date, complete with big cutscenes. It’s analogous to the jump from Metroid Prime to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. The latter built on Retro Studio’s famously atmospheric adventure by ratcheting up the lore and introducing a large cast of characters to deliver it all in dialogue. The Dark Ages does the same for Doom with mixed results.

The idea is that it all takes place in Doom’s own medieval era, where humans fight a war against demons with crossbows, flails, and — you guessed it — shotguns. It’s a fun enough gimmick that allows Id Software to imagine more primitive versions of classic weapons, but the tale under that schtick is Doom’s most incomprehensible chapter to date. New characters who are never properly introduced spend cinematics rattling off proper nouns that never really mean anything to me. A lot of money went into creating a story that more or less just boils down to “There’s a war happening between humans and demons.”

More successful is its characterization of the Doom Slayer. While previous installments paint him as an all-powerful killer who’s always in control, he’s initially a tool here. The origin story involves him being reduced to a living weapon whose personality is electrified out of his body in order to give him a one-track mind that’s hyper focused on demon killing. It’s a clever meta twist that turns the character’s usually thin persona and turns it into a source of pain that drives him down a more layered path of revenge and destruction. A few key sequences that show his humanity cut through an otherwise convoluted word soup.

I can understand the instinct here. Doom has always been one of those deceptively deep series. To the average player, it might seem like there’s not much more to it than guns and guts. Deep fans will tell you that there’s much more beneath the surface, and The Dark Ages feels like it’s built to finally reward that audience. In delivering that, Id loses something special about the series. There’s a certain mystique to old games that were light on in-game story. They were often sparse and atmospheric, leaving players’ imaginations to fill the negative space. Only the most dedicated fans would crawl down the rabbit hole, finding secret lore hidden away in books or cassette tapes. Those scattered tidbits gave games like Doom a sense of hidden history, turning fans into archivists who could trade their findings with one another.

The bigger Doom gets, the smaller its world actually feels. Wet concrete seeps into every gap, creating a solidified record of history that’s the same for every player. Even the little details are enshrined in in-game Codex entries. 2016’s Doom reboot found a happy medium, retaining a sparse and sleek story while still expanding the lore. The Dark Ages goes full Hollywood and feels a little less special for it.

Primal violence

The expanded scope is detrimental to areas of The Dark Ages, but it does wonders for its core action. If Eternal was all about showcasing the Doom Slayer’s agility, this installment is all about power. The basics of shooting remain the same from the 2016 reboot. I rip and tear through enemies with an arsenal of oversized weapons, no reloading required. Battles are fast-paced and heavy, requiring me to constantly stay on the move while also remaining in the heat of battle in order to refill my health through gory finishers. Anytime my finger isn’t pressing down the trigger, I’m wasting my time.

The Dark Ages still does all that while layering in a wealth of new systems that make for the series’ most involved combat system yet. First, there’s my trusty Shield Saw. I can toss it like Captain America’s shield to cut through weak enemies or hold it steady to parry incoming attacks. The latter is especially impactful as it gives me even more confidence to stand tall in the center of the action instead of running for cover. Performing a perfect parry will also trigger my selected Shield Rune, which punishes any enemy who dares to lash out at me. My rune of choice was a shoulder turret that would activate on each block, letting me spray more lead out as an act of vengeance.

Similarly, there’s a greater emphasis on melee attacks this time too. By the end of the campaign, I’m able to equip one of three melee weapons: gauntlets, a flail, or a spiked mace. Each one has its own speed and power, but each easily allows me to chip armor off of enemies and get some of my own for the trouble. It’s another incentive to get up close and personal, doling out three-hit combos to buff up defenses while leaving my enemies defenseless. Systems like that successfully build on Eternal’s puzzle-like combat, which was built around using the right move to top off the right resource. The only difference is that I’m even more of a menace.

Those new ideas pair nicely with The Dark Ages new guns, which ratchet the chaos up even more. Some of them are your average Doom weapons, from Super Shotguns to plasma rifles. Each weapon has two modes that can be swapped between on the fly and each has its own small upgrade tree. The best guns in the batch are the Slayer’s new medieval-flavored tools, which really pay off the absurdity of the setting. One primitive tool throws a skull into a grinder and shoots the shards out in a wide spread. My personal favorite is a ball and chain that can be charged up, fired, and retracted. It feels incredibly powerful and just a little slapstick as it bonks demons. That’s exactly the kind of energy I look for in modern Doom games.

What’s impressive is just how natural the juggling act of all these systems comes to me, another one of Eternal’s strengths that’s retained here. Every button has a clear use on the control scheme and I’m never left confused about what to press and when — the only exception to that is the radial weapon wheel, which remains a clumsy way to swap between guns on the fly. When I’m locked into an arena battle, combat becomes balletic. I toss my shield to one side to cut down some dregs and turn to fire a rocket. My shield returns to me just in time to parry an incoming attack, telegraphed with a green cue. I follow it up with a few flail hits and then a bloody finisher. All of this happens in one smooth motion, like I’m executing movements in a dance (a suite of great accessibility features helps make sure more players can find that same flow for themselves, too).

I don’t really appreciate how second nature it all is to me until I find myself dropped into a trap. After getting a collectible, I fall into a dark, narrow hallway that’s full of melee recharge items. Soon, a wave of enemies comes flooding towards me and I have to think fast to block their attacks and counter with quick shots. The action on screen almost becomes abstracted, full of flashing colors like a Norman McLaren animation. I don’t miss a beat, hitting all of my moves working off green and purple streaks alone. Moments like that are where The Dark Ages clicks most, putting the Doom Slayer’s instincts in my own head. You really start to understand why this guy likes killing demons so much. It’s a primal kind of violence.

Bigger doesn’t mean better

With action that strong, The Dark Ages should be the best entry in the trilogy. After all, it checks all of the right boxes. It’s a technical powerhouse, filled with spectacular visuals that create an enormous sense of scale, all while maintaining a smooth 60 frames per second. Id’s level design is at its best here, too. Chapters take me from hellish corridors to an open battlefield where I carry out a siege against waves of demons. Each space is meticulously detailed and filled with well-hidden secrets that find ways to use my shield as an environmental puzzle tool. The audio design is as loud and proud as ever, with gunshots and metal music combining into one ruthless symphony of destruction. The story is longer, has a bit of extra variety, and threads in plenty of epic set pieces.

So why wasn’t I nearly as thrilled with it as I was by 2016’s Doom?

The Dark Ages is emblematic of a recurring issue in big-budget franchise video game design. The instinct is to always go bigger each time. How do you top Monster Hunter World? More weapons, creepier monsters, larger environments. It’s all about escalation, whether through gameplay iteration or technical prowess. That’s the top priority here, but it’s a self-defeating approach that turns The Dark Ages into the most inelegant and meandering game of the trilogy.

The scope increase isn’t without some creativity, mind you. In addition to standard first-person shooting levels, The Dark Ages also features chapters that have the Doom Slayer piloting mechs and dragons. Both are fun ideas that feel like a teenage boy’s coolest dreams come to life, but neither are exactly as exciting as they sound. The first mech chapter is awe-inspiring, but the actual combat systems aren’t terribly deep. I’m mostly just hitting my right trigger to slowly punch out kaiju enough to fill a special meter. It gets old fast. The thrill of dragon flying is similarly short-lived, as I’m largely taking down ship after ship by completing a dodging minigame. Both gimmicks look very different and make for welcome formula diversions, but they boil down to the same one-note duck and counter gameplay hook.

What’s especially strange is where those chapters fit into the story. The Dark Ages doesn’t save either of them for some big, climactic moment. Both first occur back to back early in the run of 22 missions. That decision means that the scale climbs to unimaginable heights by Chapter 6 and then has nowhere else to go. With no sense of mounting progression, The Dark Ages is dynamically flat for most of its run time. An epic siege in a critical early chapters feels no different than a random arena battle in a lower-stakes transitional level later. The excitement turns to monotony once the same explore-and-shoot formula is repeated over and over across 45-minute chapters that shuffle the same enemies into different arenas. It’s no coincidence that 2016’s Doom is both the best and shortest of the trilogy. The Dark Ages is twice its length without actually adding much.

But hey, that’s just Doom, right? Of course every dial is going to be cranked up as far as it can go. The goal is to create a non-stop adrenaline ride that doesn’t take its foot off the gas, isn’t it? Excess is the appeal.

Is that actually true though? My instinct is to say that The Dark Ages is the logical progression for the series, fully realizing its maximalist potential. It sounds right in my head, but I don’t think that it actually is. I wouldn’t describe 1993’s Doom as excessive. Perhaps it was for the time, but its timeless appeal comes from its elegant minimalism. Walk through hallways, find colored keycards, shoot demons. It’s the shooter’s version of Pong, boiling the complexity of the genre down to its essence. 2016’s reboot worked because it carried the same energy, rejecting open-world trends of the time to create a focused, linear adventure fueled by atmospheric storytelling and heavy metal. Id Software has described The Dark Ages as a return to the series roots, but it couldn’t feel further from them. If anything, it feels like more of a cousin to the bloated God of War Ragnarok.

I don’t think any of this will stop players from having the time of their life blasting through demons. As critical as I am of The Dark Ages’ design philosophy, I still spent hour after hour poking around its intricate levels and mastering its stellar combat. I may have tuned out the story more than I expected, but my jaw wasn’t immune to dropping when I had to blast an approaching giant with an explosive turret. Even with its faults, this is still a bonafide blockbuster by a studio that knows how to dish them out better than anyone. It just feels like the pedal is as far against the metal as it can go. Doom: The Dark Ages starts cruising at 100 miles per hour and never pumps the brakes. That’s perfectly fine for a joyride, but you need acceleration to really appreciate speed.

Doom: The Dark Ages was tested on PlayStation 5 Pro.