REVIEW: ‘DOOM: The Dark Ages’ Is Aggressive As Hell

Doom’s comeback arc has been interesting. Doom (2016) opened the door with a fair reception from fans and critics, only for Doom Eternal to come in even hotter. Still, id Software has been finessing the balance between the aggressive rip and tear attitude of the Doom Slayer and a pace accessible to all players. With Doom: The Dark Ages, id has struck a perfect balance. But much of that comes down to embracing player choice.

Published by Bethesda, Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to the franchise’s modern series, which began in 2016. Set in a dark and never-before-seen medieval war against Hell, you’ll fight through hordes of Hell on layered battlefields. During the developer videos shared with players, id Software developers made it clear that they listened to player feedback from the last two games to inform the changes made in Doom: The Dark Ages. 

When it comes to combat, the goal was to turn the Doom Slayer into more of a “tank” and less of a “fighter jet.” The result is that you are a tank… that you can turn into a fighter jet if you wish. Much of the combat in Doom: The Dark Ages requires movement and placement, largely due to the addition of a parry to the Doom Slayer’s kit. Combat could have easily been slowed down to a halt, but, to be honest, it wasn’t.

If you want to succeed, you have to parry constantly. There is no way around it. However, the standard parry window is more than forgiving, which shouldn’t stop players drawn to the series because of the kinetic movement you’ve been used to. While a parry in Doom initially drew some ire when it was announced, in practice, it feels natural. The shield is essential to your survival as you fight through the hordes, and it isn’t only there to parry green objects being flung at you.

Adding a parry to DOOM was a good idea, actually.

The shield has been fitted with a saw blade that allows you to throw it and hold mid-level enemies in their place to buy yourself time. It also lets you cut through trash mobs with a satisfying spin, and then it can also be flung to interact with the environment and solve puzzles to find collectables. Making the shield essential to gameplay beyond just the parry lessens the parry burden and lets the player find that quick pace they’ve come to expect.

Additionally, upgrading the shield gains you passive effects that help deal with hordes more easily. But the real fun comes about midway through Doom: The Dark Ages when you unlock runes. With these, your parry also becomes an offensive attack when activated, granting players that satisfying constant damage output that matters in an iconic franchise.

The shield is one way that Doomguy becomes a tank; the other is the balanced health and armor refills you get when killing enemies. To be honest, amid 22 chapters, I didn’t die for the first time until Chapter 10, and much of that is because of how easy the base level of the game “Hurt Me Plenty” is. With stellar tutorialization, you get your bearings quickly. It’s probably the smoothest on-ramp for a Doom game, and that opens the door for new players.

While I started to get frustrated with the ease and speed at which I was clearing chapters, all of that shifts as you approach the midway point of Doom: The Dark Ages. The chapters get longer, bigger, and more ambitious, and so do the mobs, almost as if id Software knew where the pressure point was and then turned the dial up. But as the game gets more challenging, you get better at it.

With each combat action tied to just one input (melee, trigger, and parry), the focus is on quick combat, but not with an escape route. Instead, the environments and enemy quantity force you to stand and fight. Moving and raw power are still essential when staying alive in more difficult fights, especially boss battles, but Doom The Dark Ages feels much more grounded than its predecessor. With some classic enemies making a return, movement isn’t just focused on verticality and platforming; knowing how and when to strafe is essential.

While enemies may become slightly predictable, weapon diversity keeps everything fresh.

To help fuel combat diversity, the weapon choices and the variations they switch to have the right time and place. Some weapons, like the super shotgun, give you good old-fashioned power. However, ammo management, especially with every mob being a certified horde, is essential, and the most powerful weapons run out of ammo quickly. Additionally, as you progress through Doom: The Dark Ages, the steady rotation of mini-bosses and bosses can become repetitive. However, that repetition helps you better understand all of the weapons at your disposal.

A shield saw, an iron flail, an electric gauntlet, a doom spike mace, and some of the “most powerful” guns that the franchise has seen, all give you the option to wreck everything in your path.  With six guns that can be switched into different stances (combat shotgun to super shotgun, for example), you end up with 12 ranged weapons in total. Add in three melee weapons; the shield seems simple, right? Well, the shield has its own upgrade tree with three additional variants of equipable runes that change the skill that activates when you parry.  

To compensate for the one-button input, when it comes to complexity, projectiles force the player into movement patterns and complicate the battles without complicating the inputs themselves. Movements, parries, and weapon choices keep combat varied so that the single-button inputs never feel too simple.

Right when the enemies begin to get stale, Doom The Dark Ages starts trying other ways to overwhelm you. When you stand back and look at the progression across each level, the shift from standard demons to the Old Gods is fascinating from an art direction perspective. What was once one boss, two mini-bosses, and a horde of easily disposable demons that might as well just be ammo and armor refills, shifts to include more mini-bosses. That constant ramping up helps keep the game engaging.

Combat is one of the clear focuses of Doom The Dark Ages, and a new and improved Glory Kill system comes with that. The new system allows players to choose when to do them and from any angle. This stands out because it breaks from the animation-locked Glory Kills we’ve all come to expect. This also impacts combat when you’re being swarmed, allowing you to keep from being locked down.

Still, Doom: The Dark Ages’ best feature when it comes to combat is its difficulty system. With five pre-made difficulty levels, the part of the difficulty that gets interesting is when you customize it. You can shrink or increase the parry window at any time, increase or decrease the damage you take and deal, add in the different aim assists for both guns and your shield, but most importantly, you can speed things up. As I got almost too familiar with the combat, and the challenge started to wane, I upped the difficulty. And then, I turned into a fighter jet.

By cranking the speed up to about 110 percent, the challenge increased. Going even higher gave the scratched itch of a Doom speed run. This addition doesn’t reduce the speed of certain animations. However, the speed of attacks and parries increases greatly, as does all movement speeds. It’s thrilling to say the least, and it tapped into the part of me that plays Doom to feel like a powerhouse. It captures the mess and challenge of shooters, and it helped find new ways to invest in the game.

Id’s new take on combat is refreshing, but what makes it bloody good is allowing the player to choose their challenge.

Everything about combat in Doom: The Dark Ages just feels good. It’s a quick and tactile experience that pushes you the more you let it. While the normal difficulty setting may be a bit too easy, once you find that sweet spot, it’s easy to sink hours into clearing chapters and not even look up.

To top it all off, there is a built-out collection feature and a percentage bar to show you how much you cleared based on both collectables and challenges. This adds a level of replayability that is almost instantaneous. During the review period, I told myself I would move through the game quickly. Doom The Dark Ages had other plans for me.

Right after I finished Chapter 1, a 60-ish percent bar came up like an insult, and I was immediately back in. Playing through the short intro level just to reach that 100 percent on the bar. While gamifying completion has been core for many games, id Software has pushed Doom The Dark Ages into a new territory for the franchise because of how robust each Chapter is in terms of level design. With verticality, platforming, and puzzles to solve to get every collectible, this is a game that embraces the hunt, and once again, it just feels good.

While Doom: The Dark Ages’ map design could use some substantial work to be more legible, the areas themselves feature unique enough elements that you can usually get around just fine without it. If you keep the quest marker on, navigating the world is never frustrating. There is depth to each map, and the joy you get from finding Secret Areas never stops being rewarding.

Collect gold, rubies, crystals to level up, life spheres to keep from being booped to the last checkpoint upon your death, and find toys, codices, and skins as you explore each nook and cranny. At 22 chapters, Doom The Dark Ages is a large game, and each Chapter feels tangibly different from the last. While the consistent moody color palette can make certain elements look similar, how you engage with them makes all the difference.

Doom: The Dark Ages nails exploration as much as it does combat. 

Additionally, jumping from a castle in the sky to a battlefield to Hell to a Forest and more keeps the areas feeling fresh. Doom The Dark Ages does this by doing just enough to keep environmental puzzles just out of sight to be engaging without becoming frustrating. When you’re stuck in The Dark Ages, look up. The deeper you get into the game, the more each Chapter expands and uses every bit of space. You shouldn’t be too worried about jumping off a cliff. There may be some gold or a Secret there to find.

One element of Doom The Dark Ages that deserves immense praise is its sound design. From the Doom Slayer grunts (which you can turn off) to the crunch, squish, and collisions with the hordes of Hell, it’s all good. The immersive sound design works to create an immediate investment from the player, and each of the weapons you use comes with its own satisfying sound. Add in the metal score accompanying combat, and it’s easy to want to go deeper and deeper into the loop.

Combat and exploration are Doom: The Dark Ages’ best features, and they are robust enough to keep you engaged every single second. The game begins to falter by incorporating an Atlan mech and a dragon (Mecha Dragon).  Now, this isn’t a clear negative. However, scripted levels in a game that invests so much into organic exploration can create a tonal whiplash.

The aerial combat and mech combat are fun to play; however, with such good combat on the ground, it’s hard not to get back to it. The combat in both is well enough, but with the dodges held to a single button (plus directional input) and attacks kept to one button, it’s not as polished as the rest of the combat systems that the game excels at. To offset some of this, there are situations where you land the dragon, rip through something you just shot down, and then hop back on. This addition helps balance the simplicity of dragon combat.

Still, there is a large part of me that just doesn’t care about the logic of it all, or even that sometimes these Chapters can be jarring from the pace you’ve set in the previous areas. I play Doom for aggression, for speed, to rip and to tear, and all of that ties into a neat bow via the coolness of Doom. It’s just cool to be the Doom Slayer, and you know what? It’s damn awesome to be the Doom Slayer on a dragon and to stomp through the fires of Hell in a giant horned mech. These sections don’t add much to Doom: The Dark Ages, but again, they just feel good.

Having grown up on the franchise, DOOM: The Dark Ages captures the adrenaline, metal, and carnage I’ve come to love. It’s hard to put into words, but this installment captures the Doomguy feeling I’ve been yearning for in the right ways. And while the scripted levels don’t add much substance, they do work. In the world of Doom, sometimes spectacle is okay.

The Dark Ages lets you ride a dragon, pilot a mech, and rip through Hell. 

If the dragon and the mech are where the fault lines start, it’s the story where Doom The Dark Ages is the weakest. This installment includes cutscenes, a significant shift away from the past two modern games. They’re animated extremely well and ultimately pull the Doom Slayer’s story out of the codices and into the foreground, but it’s also trying to do too much all the time. Doom: The Dark Ages’ story feels like too much and too little, leaving confusion in its wake.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot for the lorehounds to gnaw on. In all honesty, Doom The Dark Ages honors its franchise legacy with 8-bit levels, the inclusion of a classic HUD portrait, and what you can find in the codices. Still, though, the story just doesn’t live up to the grandeur of the combat or exploration.

Ultimately, though, I’m not playing Doom: The Dark Ages for the story. When a game nails its mechanics so well that they trap you clicking the next chapter right after you complete one and effortlessly pulls you back in to try to reach 100 percent, it’s a success. And that’s exactly what this game is. Id Software continues to showcase why Doom is such a beloved franchise. It’s fast, frenetic, and all comes together in a game you can’t put down.

Doom: The Dark Ages is aggressive as hell, loud, fast, and all the fun you want. Sometimes you just need to pick up a shotgun, a flail, and a saw-bladed shield and rip through baddies. To put it simply, Doom The Dark Ages is rewarding. The gameplay matters most and ultimately makes up for any weaknesses in the story.

The execution of the mechanics and the depth of the environments carry this game high and ultimately make for a stellar experience. By giving players ultimate agency and control over the challenge they can undertake, the sky is the limit. As a prequel and as one of the most accessible in the franchise in terms of tutorialization and player agency, it’s a winner for new players and old. Play it easily, play it to give yourself a hellish time, but ultimately, play it.

Doom: The Dark Ages releases on Game Pass for Xbox Series X|S and PC, and PlayStation 5 May 15, 2025.