DOOM: The Dark Ages

Every studio eventually has to answer the question of what to do after a masterpiece. DOOM Eternal was, mechanically, one of the most demanding first-person shooters ever shipped to a mass audience — a resource-juggling, air-dashing, weapon-swapping puzzle box disguised as a power fantasy. It was also polarizing enough that a large share of its audience bounced off it. So id Software did the thing almost nobody expected: it didn’t iterate. It reversed.

DOOM: The Dark Ages, released May 14, 2025 on Steam, is a prequel that drags the Slayer back before he was a myth, when he was a weapon on loan to gods and kings. The framing is medieval dark fantasy — ruined castles, blighted forests, siege lines, hellscapes — rendered with the kind of oppressive scale id has been building toward since 2016. Bethesda Softworks publishes; id develops; the marketing pitch was “you are Iron Man, now you’re a tank,” and for once the marketing was accurate.

Commercially and critically it landed well, with a Steam reception that skews strongly positive. But aggregate scores flatten the interesting part. The most argued-about entry in the modern trilogy is not a game people are lukewarm on. It’s a game people fight about, because id asked its most invested players to unlearn the exact skills the previous game spent a full campaign teaching them.

That’s the market position, really: not a sequel that sells to Eternal’s fanbase, but a divergent branch that trades one kind of expressiveness for another and dares players to meet it halfway. Some never will. The ones who do get something id hasn’t made before.

• The Shield Saw: A circular buzzsaw strapped to the Slayer’s arm that blocks damage, deflects green-flashing projectiles on a parry timing, and can be hurled to bisect a room. It is the game’s thesis statement, its defensive tool, its offensive tool, and its traversal tool all at once.
• Stand-and-Fight Combat: No dash. No double jump. No glory kills. Movement is grounded and heavy, enemies are tankier, and survival comes from facing incoming fire rather than escaping it.
• Melee Loadout System: Flail, gauntlet and mace — swappable, each with its own rhythm and crowd-control profile — sit alongside the returning Super Shotgun and a new arsenal of bone-and-gore-fed weapons that grind demons into ammunition.
• Exploratory Level Design: The largest maps id has ever built, seeded with secrets, upgrades and gold that feeds a gear-improvement economy. Closer to sprawling arenas connected by open ground than Eternal’s corridor-to-arena metronome.
• Atlan Mech & Cybernetic Dragon Missions: Set-piece interludes where the Slayer pilots a skyscraper-sized war machine or flies a mechanized dragon into aerial combat.
• Granular Difficulty Sliders: Independent control over enemy speed, enemy damage, player damage, resource drops and — crucially — parry window timing. Among the stronger accessibility-and-tuning implementations in the genre.
• Revelations DLC: New levels, new demons, the Chain Spear, and Ripatorium 3.0 for arena-style combat practice.

The Gameplay Loop

Eternal’s loop was a chain: identify threat, select the correct tool, execute, refuel, repeat, at a relentless pace. Break the chain and you die. The Dark Ages replaces that chain with a pulse. Incoming fire, parry, punish, reposition, absorb, punish again. It’s slower on paper and considerably more physical in practice.

The Shield Saw is the whole game. Not an addition — a foundation. Blocking is passive and generous; parrying is not. Enemies telegraph parryable attacks with a green flash, and hitting that window doesn’t just negate damage, it converts a defensive act into an offensive opening, often staggering the attacker and setting up a shotgun blast or a flail swing. Once the timing internalizes, combat stops reading as “avoid the bullets” and starts reading as “harvest the bullets.” A room full of Mancubi becomes a source of income.

This is where the design earns its keep. In Eternal, incoming projectiles were a hazard to dodge. Here they’re a resource. That inversion is clever, and it’s the reason the “slower means dumber” critique doesn’t hold up. The Dark Ages isn’t less demanding; it’s demanding along a different axis — read and timing rather than movement and inventory management. It’s closer to a first-person character-action game than to an arena shooter.

Whether that’s an upgrade depends entirely on what a player valued. And the loudest criticism in the Steam reviews — that the loop is less skill-expressive — is partly right. Not because parrying is easy, but because the skill ceiling is lower and the path to it is shorter. Eternal’s mastery curve ran long. The Dark Ages’ parry timing clicks relatively fast, and after that the primary escalation is enemy density rather than new demands. There’s a plateau here that Eternal didn’t have.

Weapons and Enemies

The arsenal is excellent, and the gore-fed weapons in particular have a nasty, mechanical tactility — the sound design does enormous work selling the idea that these things are grinding bone. The melee options are more than flavor: the flail’s arcing crowd sweep, the gauntlet’s close-range brutality and the mace’s single-target stagger all serve distinct combat situations, and swapping between them mid-mission changes how a room is approached.

Enemy variety is the quiet triumph. The roster is large, the behavioral distinctions are legible at a glance, and the parry system gives even trash mobs a reason to exist — a lesser demon is a low-level enemy that dispenses shield charges. That’s smart economy of design.

Levels, Exploration and Pacing

id’s biggest maps to date are also its most inconsistent. The open-ended sprawl rewards curiosity: gold and upgrades are tucked into corners, and the moment-to-moment traversal between arenas has an unhurried, scouting quality the series hasn’t had before. When it works, it’s a war zone to prowl rather than a ride to sit through.

When it doesn’t, it’s empty. Some of these spaces are large in the way a parking lot is large. The gold economy compounds the problem — it’s serviceable, but the upgrades it buys are mostly incremental percentages, so collection becomes a completionist habit rather than a meaningful build decision. Compare this to the Praetor suit points in 2016, which at least gated distinct capabilities.

Then there are the mech and dragon missions, and the critics have a point: they’re filler. The Atlan sequences are slow-motion punch-trading with a two-button vocabulary. The dragon flight is on-rails aerial busywork with a lock-on. Both are spectacular the first time and tedious the second, and neither has enough mechanical depth to justify pulling players out of the best combat system id has built in a decade. They exist because the campaign needed scale variety, not because anyone found a good game inside them.

Story and Presentation

The campaign is the most cinematic in franchise history, which is a compliment id may not have wanted. The lore — Sentinels, Maykrs, the Slayer as a leashed superweapon — is delivered through cutscenes and exposition that stop the game. DOOM 2016 handled narrative by having the Slayer physically destroy the monitor explaining it. That was a design philosophy, not a joke. The Dark Ages abandons it, and every time a well-produced cinematic takes the controller away, the friction shows.

Difficulty Tuning

The slider system deserves specific praise. Being able to independently adjust enemy aggression, damage taken, damage dealt and parry window length is a strong accessibility feature that doesn’t compromise the intended experience for anyone else. Widen the parry window and the game stays whole. Narrow it and it becomes brutal. More studios should copy this exactly.

Art direction: outstanding. The medieval-industrial fusion — iron, rust, bone, cathedral architecture at impossible scale — gives id a visual identity distinct from the Mars-and-hellstone palette it had been recycling. The lighting work is beautiful, and the sense of a world at war, with battle lines and siege engines stretching to the horizon, is the best environmental storytelling the series has produced.

Performance is the asterisk, and it’s a big one. The engine’s always-on ray tracing means there is no fallback path — a modern RT-capable GPU is required, full stop, and the recommended specs are steep for a game whose predecessor famously ran well on modest hardware. That’s a real regression in one of id’s proudest traditions.

Worse, hitting high frame rates leans heavily on upscaling and frame generation. Frame gen is a fine tool for pushing an already-solid frame rate higher. Using it to make a marginal frame rate presentable is a different thing, and the added input latency is exactly the wrong tradeoff for a game built on frame-tight parry windows. Add the black-screen and crash reports that recur across specific driver and GPU configurations in the Steam reviews, and the technical story is: gorgeous, well-optimized for what it’s doing, and asking too much for what it gives back.

On Steam, this is a mouse-and-keyboard game that quietly wants a controller — and the reason is worth understanding. Eternal rewarded KB+M because flick-aiming during aerial movement demanded precision. The Dark Ages shifts the load to timing and directional facing, which controller sticks and rumble feedback handle just fine. Parrying with a shoulder button while the impact registers through haptics is satisfying. Mouse players keep the aiming edge, especially with the precision weapons, but the gap is narrower here than in any previous modern DOOM.

The PC version’s real differentiator is the settings depth — extensive graphics options, FOV control, the full difficulty slider suite — paired with hardware demands that make those options mandatory rather than optional. Check the GPU against the RT requirement before buying. Steam’s refund window is short, roughly one mission plus a settings-tuning session; use it deliberately.

Also worth factoring into the purchase math: the game has been available through Xbox Game Pass, which makes the full-price $69.99 Steam purchase a harder sell for anyone who just wants to see the campaign once. Buy on Steam if you want permanence, mod potential and the settings control. The Revelations DLC adds the Chain Spear plus Ripatorium 3.0, but it’s an expansion for players who already love the loop, not a rescue for those who don’t.

The Dark Ages is a confident game that made one brave decision and several safe ones. The brave decision — rebuilding combat around a shield, converting incoming fire from hazard into resource — works, and works well enough to call the parry loop one of the more satisfying things id has designed in years. It’s heavy, legible and mean, and it makes the Slayer feel like an armored problem rather than a hummingbird with a rocket launcher.

The safe ones drag. The mech and dragon missions are content padding dressed as ambition. The cinematic story keeps stopping a game that never needed a story to justify itself. The upgrade economy is busywork. And the technical baseline — always-on RT, frame-gen crutches, latency in a game built on frames — is the most disappointing part, because optimization used to be the thing id never got wrong.

What’s being weighed is a trade: Eternal’s ceiling for The Dark Ages’ floor. Fewer mechanics, executed with more physical satisfaction. It’s a real loss for the players who put years into mastering the previous system, and a real gain for the larger group who watched from the sidelines. Both reactions are legitimate.

Worth buying for the right player — after checking the GPU, and with the dragon missions skipped.