090
brainless shooter. Don’t be fooled by the power
chords churning in the background, or all the
bloody insides cheerfully thrown around. This is
a game that demands you keep thinking if you
want to survive.
As ever, staying still for more than a few
seconds in a fight almost certainly means death.
You need to keep moving non-stop, as the
huge number of demons in each encounter will
constantly fire and/or move to your position.
It’s precisely how you attack that will determine
whether or not you make it out alive. For
example, glory kills return. When a demon
is almost dead, they’ll stop moving and flash
orange, which is your cue to quickly get in close
for a satisfyingly gory finishing move, which
results in a bumper crop of health pickups. If
you’re low on health, therefore, it’s better to
avoid using your most powerful weapons on
weaker enemies in order to avoid blowing them
into bits and robbing yourself of glory kills.
Then there are your flamethrower and
chainsaw. Operating on cooldowns, the formermakes enemies drop armour
shards, while ripping apart
fodder with the latter drops a
load of ammo. You therefore
need one eye on the horde and
another on your various gauges
in order to avoid running
dangerously low on anything.
Above all, it works to support
the classic Doom feature of
making you feel so damn
powerful. We’ve lost count of
the number of times we were
surrounded by hellspawn,
health almost gone and several
weapons out of ammo, only
to pull it back through tactical
play and come out the other
side alive and well-equipped.WISHING HELL
It takes a few hours for the
well-publicised Super Shotgun
to make an appearance, but
once it does, it’s a welcome
addition. Using the meathook
attachment to pull ourselves
into a demon from distance,
and then give them both
barrels to the face, is enormousfun every single time. We don’t
end up using it as much as we
expected to, as it seems to be
one of the first guns to run low
on ammo, but it gets us out of
many a tight space.
While most of our other
weapons have an alternate fire
mode (two each, in fact), these
need to be unlocked, and then
upgraded. Nonetheless, we feel
like the one true Doomslayer
from the beginning, and these
upgrades are just bonuses. In
case you were wondering, yes,
the BFG (Big Flippin’ Gun... or
something like that) is added
to your arsenal eventually. As it
sends a big green blob of death
flying forward to kill almost
anything in the vicinity, though,
ammo is very rare.
While Doom Eternal does an
awful lot very right, there’s one
thing that it does very wrong,
and that’s platforming sections.
Id is brilliant at FPS action, but
terrible at FPS jumping-about-
bits. Some aren’t too bad, sure,
but most of these sequences“THIS IS A GAME THAT
DEMANDS YOU KEEP THINKING
IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE.”
Right Detail on
the character
models is
brilliant; not
that you’ll hang
around to
admire them.Left Don’t let
these chaps get
too close. You
won’t have very
long to regret it.Open up fella,
we want those
lovely juicy
health pickups.