Badass!ĭeveloper id and publisher Bethesda have invested small mountains of money in cutscenes, but even our hero seems bored by them, never saying a word, literally walking through the cinematics, and cutting one-sided conversations short with the occasional bullet to the noggin. Badass! Instead of a pistol, you start the game with a shotgun. Badass! You can tell how badly a demon is injured by how much skin and muscle you’ve blasted off its skeleton. The super shotgun has a grappling hook that can catch demons on fire. Friends, they did it.Įverything is more “badass” (and I never say the word “badass”). Doom Eternal, on the other hand, feels purposeful, like every team member had strived for one goal: to turn the magic of death-metal album covers into a video game.

Doom (2016) felt like a game that happened despite itself. Doom (2016) infamously fell into development hell, with its developer, id, spending years reimagining the project like a person in a desert chasing after hallucinations before finally locating actual water. Your quest to kill three space witches will take you from the aforementioned demon-infested Earth to a demon-infested Mars and back, with some pit stops at your space base, the Fortress of Doom, a hybrid space station and medieval castle floating somewhere (best I can tell) near the moon.ĭoom Eternal is like Doom (2016) but with greater scope and clearer intent. You are a literal one-man army, on the path to becoming either a god or a killer of gods. The story picks up where Doom (2016) left off: Demons have overtaken Earth. Most of the time, you simply need to kill something a little more challenging than the thing you killed in the previous room. Sometimes you need a keycard to open a locked door. You move from point A to point B, killing everything in between. When you play Doom Eternal (and you should play Doom Eternal), you will see a space marine running and jumping across blood-soaked torture chambers, while shooting, burning, freezing, chainsawing, and generally mangling demons. If you want to see the very best of the best for your platform(s) of choice, check out Polygon Essentials.

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