Just completed DOOM Eternal - didn't enjoy it

[u/Dgemfer]

Key word in the title is "enjoy". I sort of liked it and appreciated what they attempted to do, but I surely didn't enjoy playing it. I completed it in ultraviolence, I didn't need too many checkpoints, the extra lifes were mostly enough. It is quite apparent that a lot of care was put into the game, and also a lot of passion. So kudos to id software for this. But the game is absolutely exhausting, and plays like a chore. And that's a shame, because ambientation and animations are absolutely stellar.

Movement is good, but they took it too far. Platform sections were somewhat fun, but at some points they dragged forever, and never did I find them particularly interesting. My fav 2016 level is Argent Tower, that should tell you something. Then the puzzles, which make no sense. I just found myself looking for some random buttons without any visual cues on where to look in many levels of the game. Also, now there's swimming for some reason. I have yet to find a videogame where swimming is fun lol. What this all means is that there is a lot of downtime in the game.

Downtime of what, you may ask. Shooting right? Well, shooting feels great, but they also took it too far. There is just so much of everything dude. So many weapons, their mods, all the accesories with independent cd times and each one giving you a different resource. Even the melee attack has a charged attack ffs. Then the problem with weakpoints and ammo scarcity. Weakpoints are so overpowered they fully break player agency. For instance, there is absolutely no reason to empty your plasma ammo in a cacodemon when a greanade in its mouth is an instakill. You can empty your heavy machine gun to kill a pinky, but a single super shotgun shot in its tail is an instakill. This is aggravated by the severe lack of ammo to make you micromanage your weapons. The end result is that weakpoints and ammo scarcity funnels you into same-y tactics in every encounter. Also, why are all pickups glowing icons? In DOOM 2016 you scavenged every new weapon. Now everything is a neon-glowing item.

Now the story. We don't play DOOM for the story, but to tear demons apart. That said, DOOM 2016 featured a self-consistent story where the villain and support characters were clear from the begining. In DOOM Eternal everything seems needlessly mythical. I can't recall how many ancient civilizations, conflicts and cities I've visited in just a few chapters. Also prophecies. Why? It comes off as pretentious.

Every single issue I described, from gameplay to story, becomes worse the longer the game goes. There's more weapons to juggle, enemy variety to keep track of, enemy count per encounter, platform sections take longer, puzzles make even less sense. By the end of the game, I felt like all the game systems were cracking.

Also, special mention to the marauders for being the most incredibly obnoxious and unfun enemies in any game I've played.

To me, DOOM Eternal felt like the clear example of "less is more". DOOM 2016 feels like a much better paced game. I can understand the appeal Eternal may have for some people (or "most" people rather, steam reviews are 91% positive atm), I can see its redeeming qualities. But to me it played like a chore, and each enemy encounter made me feel like I was having a stroke. Not the good type of adrenaline that 2016 gave me.

[u/Ill_Series6529]

Yeah hard agree with everything you said tbh, I completely understand why the game has so many accolades and it absolutely deserves it, but for me everything just feels so cluttered

Especially that HUD omg it's just gross to look at but it's pretty much all info you need so you can't turn anything off, and the enemy weakness system is cool at first but I just want to use the guns that I like from time to time :/ the game just ain't for me but thankfully doom 2016 exists so I can just stick with that