This game can be really good. It looks good, an awesome setting, sounds nice, and the gunplay is pretty decent. There is a really good game here, and I absolutely love Remedy games, but in its current state I can't recommend it at all. I don't think the other negative reviews on this game do a very good job other than to say this game doesn't have content. So I wanted to record here all of the glaring problems my friends and I had with the game in our short time with it to help others make a more informed purchase:

There is very little content in the game. There are only 6 levels, and while they are very good, they are not very replayable because there is one scenario per level, there aren't different objectives for each level. When you run it once, you've seen everything it has to offer.

The level modifiers are neat, but there's only a handful of them and they really aren't that meaningful. They also all are dealt with in the same way, through the blackrock gun you find at any ammo station. I thought the supernatural items were gonna have a much much larger influence on this game, that was part of the draw for me buying the game! More on this later.

There are only 3 kits. They are varying levels of bad. I played the water kit mostly, and it was awful. You have a healing tank that gets destroyed instantly and is extremely onerous to even put down. And why would you put it down outside of combat, because most people just run back to the shower and ammo stand! And that's it. You get a water gun and water tank. You don't ever unlock anything else.

The buildcrafting is pretty much nonexistent. No upgrades you get are meaningful. Even good upgrades don't really buff you enough to feel like it matters. Leveling up just doesn't do anything, and any interesting perks are locked to really high levels.

The equipment items are so weird. Why does the water gun have the left click ability at all? It's takes forever to charge and shoots a meaningless water bubble and overheats your equipment super fast. The right click and hold ability is the only usable one, and I've heard the other kits feel very similar.

My absolute biggest gripe with this game is the fact that the supernatural class items are so meaningless. Each kit gets ONE. Thats it. I thought we were going to deal with supernatural items in the levels and maybe capture them, so we could use them ourselves. Instead everyone gets one item and some are better than others. This is my biggest issue with the game. This is the coolest part of Control and it is just a sidenote in this game.

Weapon progression is bad. The only good weapons are the pump action shotgun and the smg. Every other weapon, especially the single shot weapons like the revolver and hunting rifle are just awful. There are way too many enemies and they have way too much health for these guns to be any good. Maybe if you could have two weapons at once? Every weapon feels like it should do a bit more damage to be honest.

The glacial pace you crawl when you are down is really dumb. Let you crawl faster or just remove it!

Environment effects are extremely annoying. It feels like the constant fires in the levels only exist so that the water kit can not feel useless. It is really obnoxious that the turret kit causes fires. Status effects are either useless or annoying, like when you accidentally electrocute yourself or your friends with the electric augment. Or the radiation augment, because yeah I want to irradiate enemies so that they run up to me and irradiate me and my friends with no way to get rid of it without going back to a shower!

Movement feels kinda bad. You are unreasonably slow with certain weapons. And why even have a crouch slide when it serves no purpose? Mantling isn't very consistent.

The encounter design/director is awful. Sometimes you get levels where the enemies will spawn forever. They spawn in front of you, behind you, and don't give you time to rest. Being stuck in a safe room forever is so stupid. This completely breaks the flow of a horde-like game, as you never have the point where you can relax and retool. Not to mention, you'll face infinite enemies while running around, but when you'd expect to be fighting the hordes during defense objectives, the enemies are nowhere to be found and you're left just sitting there. And this is very common we found.

The difficulty levels are also odd, as it feels like it just ups the amount of enemies substantially and that's it? Normal mode is hilariously easy, whereas hard mode is insanely swingy between easy levels vs enemies spawn infinitely levels.

Progression is annoying. The same currency used for actually improving your kit is ALSO used for buying cosmetics! So basically I never got any cosmetics during my playtime. The voice packs that the game director was super passionate about are non-existent? The characters don't really interact and when they do it's for some terrible joke like asking your boss for a raise. I thought they were going to expand the lore of the FBC??? The characters don't interact basically at all in-game, which is wild. The cosmetics also look kinda lame.

There is literally only one boss in the entire game. Sticky Ricky. And he wasn't that engaging to fight. Every other boss is just a buffed up normal guy. THEY ALSO NEVER DID THE "STICKY RICKYYYYYY" YELL IN THE LEVEL!

There should also be a lobby like in Deadlock where you can actually move around and there could be world-building elements in it.

Gameplay is fun, but this game is chock full of AI generated voices, songs, and likely art. Real people could have been hired to create these things; there is no excuse for a game published by a company as big as EA to be cutting corners with AI slop.

Absolutely adored this game; like others said, once it gets going it was so hard to put down. The 90's anime, pixelart-style combined with the Star Trek x Gundam setting made this one a delight to play through. The story kept me gripped throughout and the cast was pretty well fleshed out. Music and sound design fit the aesthetic perfectly.

Only small gripes are that I felt the game could've allowed your choices to matter a bit more, like by allowing you to "fail". Also felt items were underutilized and a bit spoonfed when they were. Small text display issues here and there too.

Very much looking forward to a sequel!

In isolation, this isn't a bad game and I respect id Software for doing something new with each iteration of this franchise. That being said, at a whopping $70 Dark Ages is worse than both of its predecessors in pretty much every way. For a good portion of my playthrough I have been looking forward to finishing the game just so I can uninstall, because I feel this game is a regression of the masterclass games that came before and has nothing special to offer.

To summarize, I think the gameplay has become way too uniform and simplistic with the introduction of the shield mechanics, which in turn leads to weird difficulty swings. The new additions of the mech and dragon are extremely reductive and boring, exploration might've been interesting if they hadn't done all of your homework for you, the story is nothing to write home about, the music is a downgrade, multiplayer is gone, and overall there is not a single addition that is either exciting or makes this game worthy of its predecessors. And no glory kills!

Major downgrade that brings nothing special to the table and feels confused on what audience its trying to appeal to.


Gory Details:
- The Story: Not a very strong narrative. While I don't subscribe to the idea that Doom shouldn't have a directly told narrative like this, I don't think this game does a very good job with what is here. While the 'twist' in the story is interesting, it comes far too late in the game.
- The Gunplay: The shield is the main gimmick of this game, and takes over the entire combat but not for the better. It makes every combat feel the same, and every combat boils down to 60% shield attacks and 40% super shotgun; there is no reason to use any other weapon. Not to mention by giving you a shield, the devs felt the need to make the game a bullet hell, which makes combat extremely swingy going from full health to dead in a matter of seconds. And the way extra lives are utilized absolutely kills the momentum of fights. The parry mechanic also brings a sense of uniformity to every enemy, making confrontations with any enemy type pretty much go the same way.
- No glory kills was a massive miss. The devs explanation for it made sense, but in practice the game feels lesser without them.
- Upgrades: Overall don't really feel meaningful. The shield runes are the worst offender though, with them all pretty much serving the exact same purposes. They are the same general effect but with different visuals.
- Exploration: The game tells you where most collectibles are, killing any semblance of exploration. This makes running around the map feel like a real slog, but you feel compelled to do so anyway because most of the collectibles are related to gearing up the Slayer.
- Puzzles: Either super easy, solved for you, or extremely obtuse (usually due to needing to come back later or path around the map to it)
- Weapons: Aside from the skull-grinder guns, the weapons in this game are pretty much exactly like the previous games. Nothing too exciting.
- Dragon & Mech: First time you use them, really cool. Every time after that you realize it's just an extremely stripped down section with very little to do and feels like a slog. Worst parts of the game, easily. Made me sigh when I saw the first patch of the game made the dragon sections even easier so you won't have to spend as much time in them. Worth mentioning there were multiple dragon levels where unlike the rest of the game I would find myself wandering around because I couldn't find the objective and it was not marked in any way.
- The Music: Decent, but obviously not as good without Mick Gordon.
- No multiplayer in this iteration! I actually loved Eternal multiplayer!

+ Doom Slayer in a fur cloak is sick.

Been looking forward to playing this one since I got to try it at EVO this year!

Great fighting game core with a really unique mechanic in the lanes feature, letting this game also work part-time as an amazing party game to play with friends. The characters and mechanics are simple enough for a newbie to understand but have enough layers to give someone who might want to play seriously some depth to dig into! This game has all the bells and whistles you could look for in a fighting game in 2024 as well as great couch and online coop support. You can tell these developers have a deep appreciation and understanding of the genre.

Haven't even mentioned the wonderful visual style they took, the great sound design, and the colorful cast of characters. Highly recommend supporting this game and devs! Also SAGA IS THE GOAT.

Game crashes on startup every time. Sometimes it crashes or freezes my entire computer! Tried many fixes and none worked.