What’s Good About Doom Eternal: Rip and Tear 2 Electric Boogaloo

“Against all the Evil that Hell can Conjure, all the wickedness that mankind can produce.”

“We will send unto them…Only You.”

“Rip and Tear. Until it is Done.”

The opening narration of DOOM Eternal, much like its 2016 predecessor, tells you the basic thesis of the entire game in the first thirty seconds. This is a game of being an unstoppable force of nature and laying waste to all demons not scared enough to get out of your way. The key difference is in the way Eternal accomplishes the execution of the power fantasy compared to DOOM 2016. One focuses on being a straight-up “You are an Ancient Evil that’s been awoken and must be sated with the blood of the demons foolish enough to trap you” and the other is basically the same thing, but replace the “ancient evil that’s awoken” bit with more of a general feeling of “Rip and Tear, but more tactically”.

I mean that DOOM Eternal goes for an experience that leans more so on being a very video game ass video game, which considering DOOM 2016 was also a video game ass video game, is a bit of an accomplishment. Everything about it from the weapons, enemy designs, level layouts, and even the user interface is meant to convey as much information to the player as humanly possible. This is mainly because of the game’s increased speed, which makes DOOM 2016 feel like you’re wading through frozen molasses in comparison. Everything moves So. Goddamn. Quickly. And this sort of leads to the main issue I have with this otherwise excellent game: information overload. It throws so much at the player so quickly that it can lead to confusion and thus frustration. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t put the game down for a day or two to cool off at it because I was approaching it from the viewpoint of “Well DOOM 2016 was kind of a cakewalk, Eternal can’t be that much harder, right?”. This is to tie into the fact that ammo management is a bigger part of the overall experience and the chainsaw is basically your “Rip into this zombie for bullets” button now.

BUT THEN. You get the Super Shotgun. A Super Shotgun with a Grappling Hook attachment built into it. And everything starts to come together. It was then I saw what the new combat loop was now. The loop works as such: Glory Killing Demons still gets you health and killing demons with the chainsaw still gives you ammo, but your armour level is more of a factor now and the only way to get that armour consistently is to kill demons that are on fire. How do you light enemies on fire? By using the new shoulder-mounted equipment launcher that has a flamethrower built-in called the Flame Belch; And remember that grappling hook on the super shotgun I mentioned? It can obviously be used to reach the unlucky demon it latches onto, but more importantly, it lights that demon on fire when it’s fully levelled up. It’s also how you use your frag grenades and an ice bomb to clear enemy groups and lock them down respectively. To make up for these tools and to balance them against having vastly increased mobility on your part (ground and air dashes that when upgraded can be done twice in rapid succession and have a 1-second cooldown), enemies hit way harder and you have way less ammo. You start with 16 Shotgun shells. 16. Or to Quote Civvie11 on YouTube: “16 Shells? 16 SHELLS?!”

And this ties into my favourite of the new mechanics they added in: The Blood Punch. Aside from sounding metal as fuck, it’s essentially an Area of Affect punch that staggers most enemies and even removes any protective gear they have on, most notably affecting the Cyber Mancubus, which gets downgraded to a regular, wimpy, Mancubus. If all of that sounds way too much, then surprise, that’s what the first four levels are like in DOOM Eternal because it feels like, until you get the Super Shotgun, you are handling things that are balanced around weapons and abilities you straight up do not have until that point. But once you DO get all of those weapons and abilities needed to make use of the combat, it blows DOOM 2016 out of the goddamn water.

For me, I like games that are very systems intense because they appeal to the ADHD parts of my brain and force me to juggle and pay attention to a bunch of different cooldown timers and ammo counts at once, which causes me to hyper-focus and get really into it. DOOM Eternal does just that and it’s fucking great. And that’s not even getting into the Runes and Praetor Suit upgrades that change your abilities and how those tie into combat.

Another change is how weapons and enemies have changed. For the most part, you still have the entire arsenal from DOOM 2016 but with the Gauss Cannon swapped out for an energy Ballista (which still fulfils that Railgun archetype on top of doing double damage to flying enemies). They also serve specific purposes in the combat loop that encourages, nay, DEMAND the constant swapping of weapons. This is reinforced by them all also having two swappable weapon mods a piece, the sole exceptions being the Super Shotgun’s Meat Hook (the aforementioned grappling hook) because it’s more like an intrinsic part of how the Super Shotgun works in the game and the BFG 9000 because it’s the BFG 9000. These can, like the weapon mods in DOOM 2016 be individually mastered and gain a special mastery ability; my personal favourite being the Heavy Machine Gun’s Scope attachment making it so that demons killed by headshots cause an explosion that damages other nearby demons. There’s also the new addition of the Crucible, a sword made of argent energy that’s a one-hit kill and acts mostly as a melee variant of the BFG’s “Fuck this, I’m on a deadline” button.

These are all needed to get around the Legions of Hell, which this time around seem noticeably more vicious compared to DOOM 2016. Now, before you go all “Time to Put the Fear of the Slayer back into these nerds”, you need to know what you are up against and boy howdy is it a litany of baddies broken up into distinct categories: Fodder demons which are to be killed to regain your resources (your Imps, Zombies, Shotgunners and Gargoyles, which are just flying Imps), Heavy Demons which are higher priority targets that require more specialized tactics to take down (Your Hell Knights, Mancubi, Revenants, etc.) and lastly the Super Heavy Demons; the worst of the demons that absolutely require your attention and need to die Immediately (Your Tyrants, which are basically Cyberdemons in all but name, Your Barons of Hell and others that we’ll get to).

The game uses the entire enemy roster from DOOM 2 and 2016, with some additions. They brought back the Arachnotrons, Pain Elementals, and Archviles because id Software really wanted you to feel the pain for your hubris. But none of them compare to the Marauders. The Marauders hold a special place in my heart because they are a pack of goddamn traitors that sold out Argent D’Nur to the Main antagonists of Eternal for power and are to be exterminated with extreme prejudice. Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t as tough to deal with as a lot of discourse about them online would lead you to believe. They exist primarily as a means to keep the player’s attention at the mid-range and prevent them from killing other demons, as a result, it means that a huge chunk of their threat is diminished when fighting them alone. And here’s a free piece of advice if you are struggling against them: When they swing their Axe, their eyes glow. In that frame, you shoot them with the Super Shotgun, which staggers them for a good second. From there you can swap weapons to the Ballista and back to the Super Shotgun and Frag Grenade to effectively stun-lock them to death.

Now that the unsolicited Marauder advice is out of the way, here’s a quick glimpse of the newer demons you’re gonna be dealing with: the aforementioned Gargoyles, Prowlers (bulkier Imps that teleport; treat with Super Shotgun, if the problem persists, treat with more Super Shotgun), Spectres making a return from earlier games (Invisible Pinkies), and the newest additions of the Whiplash: a snake demon that can close the gap and get in your face with its claws and toss out energy waves with its whips. My personal favourite is the Doom Hunter; it’s basically a mobile heavy weapons platform in the shape of a demon and is the first real boss of the game. It also becomes a recurring Super Heavy Demon and serves as the game’s main spotlight of how awesome the Plasma Rifle is now. There are some other surprises I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say: Combat is no joke in this game.

The game is also to be commended for the story it tells as well. I hesitate to call it “good”, but it doubles down in the #DeepLore established in DOOM 2016 and proceeds to do some Herculean Arc Welding to tie it into the earlier games in a way that I’m not 100% convinced works, but I respect them for trying. It’s a continuation of the events from the previous game with the added expansions to the deep lore I mentioned earlier; and while it feels less self-aware than its predecessor, it still knows enough to not take itself too seriously. At the end of the day, you still get to see the game’s Blood slacked, heavy metal album cover interpretation of Hell and I’m still here for it 4 years later.

The last thing I want to talk about is sound design and music. On a gameplay level, weapons and enemies sound heavier than in the previous game. This goes a long way to helping make said weapons and enemies feel crunchier, the standout among them being the Super Shotgun which sounds more like you’re firing a cannon than a double-barreled shotgun.

And the music in Eternal can be easily summed up as Mick Gordon looking at the Doom 2016 soundtrack and going “You know what? This isn’t metal enough.” He then proceeds to get an entire choir of metal vocalists for some of the best tracks in the game (which will be linked below as is tradition when I highlight music in this series). But overall, from minute one, The soundtrack goes even harder than DOOM ever has and never stops. It takes a more grandiose and operatic tone, a stark contrast from the borderline Industrial tone of the last game and it works way better than it has any right to.

f DOOM Eternal was more of DOOM 2016, I’d have been fine with that. But it’s not. It’s so much more. It’s quite possibly the slickest and most intricate action game of 2020. So if you want a game that expects, if not outright demands you to work for your power fantasy, then slap on the Praetor Suit and get to ripping and tearing. Just be aware of some devilish surprises along the way.

All Images from https://www.igdb.com/games/doom-eternal/presskit and https://www.shacknews.com/article/117081/gladiator-boss-fight-doom-eternal

Editor’s Note: Hey, this is Mo. I’m just putting this here to acknowledge that yeah it’s been around 7 months since I last posted a thing here, and for that, all I got to say is my bad. Life kind of came at me pretty fast in the intervening months what with, you know, an unprecedented global health crisis and all of the baggage that entails. Rather than feel bad about not posting; I’m going to take this as an opportunity to ask that you the reader, take care of yourself. You’re important, regardless of what anyone else may say about that. you are Loved. And You’re Not in this alone. And I want to say thank you for taking time out of your busy day to read these overly ramble-y musings about a video game that I really liked. It really does mean a lot. Thank you for your time, have a wonderful day. And Don’t forget to wear a mask. And Wash Your Hands More. And Wash You Booty. I have no reason why I said that other than Booty hygiene is important.