Doom Eternal turns ripping and tearing into too much work

To compensate for these new options, the basic Doom loop—charge into an area, shoot everybody, get health and ammo as necessary—has been made a little more difficult. Glory Kills are a little more stingy with health, making it necessary to do them more often. The amount of ammo you can hold is also severely limited early on, making chainsaw kills more important. Also, with ammo in short supply, it’s important to constantly switch up which weapons you’re using rather than settling in on a couple or so favorites. When you run out of everything but rocket launcher ammo, you better be aware of where the demons are around you if you don’t want to blow your own feet off.

Regularly switching weapons also plays into another system that, on its face, seems like an olive branch to the player. Some enemies, primarily familiar monsters you’d recognize from the old games like the Cacodemon and Revenant, now have weak points that can be destroyed to set them up for easier Glory Kills. “Weak point” is kind of a misnomer, though, as they’re more like “the only vulnerable point” for some enemies, and a lot of them are designed to be targeted by specific weapons. Waste too much time aiming for a weak point and you open yourself up to being attacked, or you risk missing shots and running out of ammo. It wouldn’t be a satisfying system if it were too easy, but it’s another layer to keep track of in what are generally hectic fights.

So here’s the basic loop in Doom Eternal: Charge into an area, shoot everybody, aim for weak points, use grenades, use the chainsaw to get ammo, find chainsaw fuel, use Glory Kills to get health, use the flamethrower to get armor, use Glory Kills to get more health, use the chainsaw to get more ammo, then keep shooting everybody and aiming for weak points. When it all works, and you’ve got enough late-game weapons and upgrades (of which there are multiple layers for each gun and multiple layers for your suit) to make it a bit easier, it’s a fantastic expansion of the first game’s clever evolution of classic first-person shooter combat. When it doesn’t work, the breakdown can be so dramatic that it grinds all of that precious forward momentum to a halt.

If you charge into an area when you’re not fully stocked, it throws off the whole loop. If you don’t have ammo and there’s a dozen big demons rushing you, you’ll have to desperately hunt for enemies you can chainsaw, which will open you up to being hit, which will force you to use a Glory Kill, which requires careful weapon use (since you can accidentally kill a weaker enemy before opening them up). And the whole time you also have to keep an eye out for tougher enemies and their respective weak points. It’s also possible to get into a situation where there’s one tough enemy left who cannot be chainsawed and has already chipped away all of your health and armor, so you can’t get more health and the only thing you can do is run away and hope you can land a grenade. It’s just too many interlocking systems that all have to work together, but which don’t all work together as perfectly as they need to.

Which brings us back to that Hell Priest. The game occasionally lets Doomguy interact with other characters, and they’re all either in total awe of his awesomeness, or quickly punished for failing to recognize his awesomeness the way that guy was. The game acts like you’re a one-person, nigh-omnipotent wrecking ball. But far too often, it fails to actually make you feel like one.