Doom (2016) is maybe one of my top five favorite games of all time - it's challenging but fun, deep but accessible, all wrapped up with gorgeous level design and a surprisingly fun story. So I was so, so, SO excited to play Doom Eternal last year when it first came out. But due to some PC trouble, I ended up putting it on the back burner until I could get a new video card for my rig, and now that I have it...

Wow, I hate this game.

The entire thing just looks and feels so... game-y. I don't know how else to put it. It's like they took Doom 2016 and just cranked every single thing they could find up to 11, even if it adds nothing and makes the entire experience seem cheap. A lot of the aesthetic changes seem minor - turning relatively realistic health pickups into floating potion bottles, sticking big green question marks in secret areas - but they all come together with the totally unexplained spinning flame wheels and bizarre gymnastics poles to make every environment look like a challenge room you'd find somewhere off to the side of the "real" game that is actually taking place somewhere in reality. It's Doom, obviously - I don't expect there to be "realism," really. But I do expect the game to feel like it's taking place in some sort of coherent world, as opposed to just existing as a set of parkour challenges and combat arenas floating in space. But Doom Eternal trips on even that low bar! It honestly feels like a flashback to Painkiller or Serious Sam, where you get The Snow Level or The Forest Level but it never feels even remotely "real."

Unfortunately, the combat is a much bigger letdown. Like I said before, Doom 2016 is, in my mind, one of the greatest FPS games ever made, with tight controls and a combat model that felt responsive and dynamic to however you wanted to play - there were some obvious bad decisions you could make, but overall anyone who was remotely skilled could handle each firefight as it came up. Doom 2016 rewarded you for switching up weapons and keeping mobile, but there was a fairly low floor to the combat where you could stay if you wanted to. It was a game that I found myself trying harder and harder in precisely because the better you played, the more fun you had.

Doom Eternal is, to me, the exact opposite - it's a game that only punishes you, rather than making high-skill play rewarding on its own. Every single decision you make in Doom Eternal is justified by, "Because if I didn't, I'd die." It's like the developers wanted you to play exactly one way, and designed it so if you don't, you get destroyed. There's nothing more exciting or rewarding about playing the way you need to play. In fact, I'd argue it's less fun, because you don't even have a moment to breathe! Oftentimes, I didn't see my rockets take someone out because I was turning away before they hit, or I didn't watch a glory kill because I was too busy having to plan my next dodge in the one-tenth of a second I had before I was immediately set upon by everyone. The combat is just so demanding that it wraps back around to being tedious - sure, it sounds fun to hear that every enemy has a specific weapon that you need to use to disable them, but in practice that just means that every single moment of your play session is dedicated to navigating the extremely small window of possibilities that the designers have set for you. There's no chance to experiment, no chance to try things out, no chance to do something just because it would be fun to do. Instead, it's just a grueling gauntlet where pausing to actually have fun is a luxury you don't have!

And of course, layered on top of all this is the fact that you now have an array of totally unnecessary gadgets to work into combat. There's a grappling hook, a flamethrower, an ice grenade... all of which sound cool, until you realize that it's just adding one more "Oh, I see X - time to do Y" rule in your head. It's just... exhausting. Add to that most levels being an hour and a half or more to get through, and I honestly don't understand how anyone can get through this without feeling demoralized. I feel like Doom Eternal commits the cardinal sin of video games - whenever I finished an encounter, I didn't think, "Wow, that was awesome." I just thought, "Thank God that's over."

I know I sound like I'm being harsh on the game, but it's really just because there's a version of Doom Eternal in some alternate world that's literally my favorite game of all time. But it feels like the developers went in exactly the opposite direction, and it sucks :( I didn't post this just to rant, though - I'm curious to know if anyone else felt this way, or felt like a lot of the discourse around Doom Eternal when it first came out was strangely quiet on this marked shift towards a new style of play? Everyone I know who liked Doom 2016 loved Doom Eternal, and I feel like I'm going crazy or playing some nightmare version no one else got. What am I missing?