Doom (2016) felt almost like an experiment at the time. It felt like they started designing it thinking, “Is this gonna work? Is this too much? Have we gone too hard?” And so they pulled back in a lot of areas: it wasn’t that difficult most of the time; Doom Guy seemed to have some logic to his actions; the story still had some mystery to it and seemed to be at least a little rooted in reality, maybe even providing a modicum of social commentary; and while the hell levels were a little over the top, the Mars base levels felt more like standard sci-fi. Now, if you know much about Doom (2016) you might be thinking to yourself, “You’re crazy. You go to hell and kill a giant spider robot thing whose body is a massive brain. It’s in no way rooted in reality, and is more over-the-top than Devil May Cry 3.”

Allow me to introduce Doom: Eternal. The headline of Doom: Eternal is MORE. They took everything that was in Doom (2016) and tripled down on it. More areas, more demons, more projectiles, more pickups, more damage, MORE CHAINSAW, RIP AND TEAR!!!

You think Doom (2016) was hard? How about double the number of enemies, increase their speed and aggressiveness, and cut player resources in half. You think the levels couldn’t get any crazier? In Eternal you go murder your way into a giant “Super Gore Nest” which is a huge amalgamation of flesh wrapped around a city center, surrounded by a river of blood and lava, to destroy its massive, beating heart. You think Doom Guy in Doom (2016) was unhinged? Take a look at the only time he talks in Eternal:

I’ve seen a lot of people say that this new generation of Doom games (sometimes known as Nu-Doom) is the ultimate power fantasy game. An accurate assessment—to be sure—but it fails to capture what a game bearing that title can do to the human psyche. I had never heard a game called a “power fantasy” before. I thought, “Aren’t most games ‘power fantasies’? Aren’t I usually the super-powered chosen one who’s always getting stronger on his quest to destroy the ultimate evil?” It didn’t sit right with me because I thought, “The Legend of Zelda could be described as a power fantasy, but those games usually involve a little boy fighting sentient flowers.”

Nu-Doom was something greater, something more. Nu-Doom feels more like how I’ve read Norse berserkers described:

“Odin could make his enemies in battle blind, or deaf, or terror-struck, and their weapons so blunt that they could no more cut than a willow twig; on the other hand, his men rushed forwards without armour, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or mad bulls, and killed people at a blow, and neither fire nor iron told upon them. These were called Berserkers.”

-Snorri Sturluson (c. 1225), translated by Samuel Laing (1844)

The power fantasy that’s going on in Nu-Doom isn’t the standard hero’s journey you see in most games. It’s not finding the master sword and defeating Ganon like in Zelda. It’s not hitting level 99 and one-shotting the final boss like a JRPG. It’s not even the visceral combat you might feel in games like God of War (2005) or Rocksteady’s Batman games. In Nu-Doom you start the game as an immortal berserker, whose whole drive is to do nothing but kill demons. Doom Guy never loses his powers, there’s no second act where he’s at his lowest point. All he’s doing is killing demons, and unless you start reading the lore pages you find littered around, it’s unclear if Doom Guy even cares about saving Earth, or if it just happens to be where he can kill the most demons at that particular point in time.

What truly pushes Doom: Eternal into the stratosphere is the gameplay. It is a frenetic, breakneck affair designed to guide the player into a red-misted frenzy of lead and steel. By the end of the game I think they wanted the player to just let muscle memory and instinct take over, step outside their bodies, and watch themselves churn hundreds of demons into a thick chum.

It might come as a surprise that the combat in Doom: Eternal actually requires quite a bit of strategization. Even as you’re swimming through the blood of your enemies you need to stay keenly aware of your abilities and resources at any given moment. How much armor do you have? Can you survive a few hits if you engage that Cyberdemon? Where’d that Arachnotron go? Did you destroy his turret? How much time is left before you can use your next Freeze Grenade? These questions flood my mind during any combat encounter, and are probably the most important part of combat. If I wasn’t constantly thinking about these factors my mind would have time to wander and I imagine I’d start to feel bored, and the few flaws of the game would eventually grow to a nauseating degree.

In Doom (2016) you had a number of factors to consider, but most of them were in relation to your enemies: remembering their abilities, their locations, and their level of threat. Doom: Eternal keeps all that, but also doubles the effectiveness of the enemies, and your character. What I find so interesting about the game’s design is how they double your character’s effectiveness. They don’t just simply multiply your stats by a factor of two; if anything Doom Guy has worse raw numbers than last time. Instead, you have so many more ways of dealing with enemies. The most powerful addition in my opinion is the new Flame Belch. Doom: Eternal gives Doom Guy a shoulder-mounted flamethrower that you can use to light them on fire regularly, which causes them to drop precious armor pickups, dramatically increasing your survivability. He is also given a Freeze Grenade that can stop enemies in their tracks and eventually cause them to take increased damage.

But the most complex addition is the lack of ammunition. This initially forced me to frequently switch weapons and consider which should be used at any given moment. As I got better at the game I realized the lower ammunition quantities didn’t change my weapon usage that much as I grew more skilled in resource management. As I grew even more skilled, I started getting bored with sticking to my favorite weapons. I found encounters to be more enjoyable the more weapons I used. So I started switching just for the hell of it. And that’s when the game went from my game of the year, to one of my favorites of all time. The opportunity for style is what I think sets Nu-Doom apart from nearly every other shooter I’ve played. It’s not just that you’re playing as an immortal berserker ripping and tearing through the armies of hell, it’s that you’re handling whatever they can throw at you, and it’s not even close.

In Eternal I always feel like I have so much higher to fly as I—to this day—endeavor to master its mechanics. On my second playthrough combat encounters stopped being challenges and started being performances. I danced between the monstrous hellspawn, methodically switching between my weapons, trying to use each one to kill a different demon, until nothing was left. Sure, it meant I died a lot more as I was no longer just trying to reach the end of an encounter, but each death was just another opportunity to put on another stunning performance.

When I tried playing on the hardest difficulty, Nightmare, for my third playthrough that feeling began to fade. In Doom (2016) Nightmare felt pretty great, I thought. Once you had a solid understanding of all the mechanics and your arsenal, as well as the general behavior of the monsters, Nightmare felt like a greater challenge Doom Guy was perfectly capable of handling with some elbow grease. But, like I said, Eternal is all about more. Unfortunately, that also means more of the problems too. Doom: Eternal’s Nightmare makes monsters hit too hard, there is too little margin for error, especially in the early levels where you don’t have your full arsenal yet. Hard to put on a good performance when I only have two weapons to switch between. The game doesn’t have many problems, but this is the point when I began to take notice of them. It became obvious that, at this difficulty level, the weapons and their mods were not created equal. I couldn’t use any weapon to kill any enemy just for the heck of it. Now, if I wanted to kill a Tyrant, he needed to die now. And the only option that didn’t end in my death was to freeze him, and blast him down with one of three or four high-DPS weapons. But that’s not that big of a deal. I just don’t play on Nightmare.

The other “more” that I feel holds the game back is the story. Thankfully, in Eternal, the story is still optional. If you want to keep believing Doom Guy is so fucking angry he can’t internalize language, you can. My first playthrough I just thought all these people were just monologuing at him out of sheer desperation to try to get him to stop ripping and tearing, even if just for a second. But after playing Dark Ages, I realize that’s not the case, and that the story is less campy parody, and more generic sci-fi/fantasy. I hadn’t attributed this as a problem because you can skip almost all of it if you want to. Dark Ages, with its multitude of cutscenes full of exposition dumps and more generic characters, reframed how I see the story in Doom: Eternal. Now I think of it as the start of the designers’ concern with the lore of the franchise. I understand they’re probably thinking, “rip and tear can’t be our only story if this franchise is going to go the distance,” but I disagree. Sure, this is a big budget game that needs broad appeal, and that almost exclusively means cinematic story, but I feel Doom (2016) struck a great balance: there was just enough to make the more narratively inclined curious enough to read the lore, but not to inhibit the ADHD bloodlust of impatient players like myself.

But far and away my biggest problem with the game is in one of the new enemies they added. And if you’ve played the game you already know what I’m talking about: the Marauder. When I first fought him on release back in 2020 I was curious. An even stronger demon? That I can’t just blast my way through? No more, “shoot it until it dies?” Color me intrigued. As I fought more of them I quickly soured. I am in no way opposed to more difficult demons, nor am I opposed to demons that involve some mechanics. For those who don’t know, the Marauder is an enemy who is (almost) invulnerable until it attacks Doom Guy, at which point you can blast him with two shots of a small pool of weapons. Until they are dealt with, they will hound you with deadly melee attacks and shotgun blasts. They’ll even summon this dog spectre that will also chase you and do even more damage. They are the biggest threat on the board, and the designers know it, which is why they thankfully use them sparingly; there’s only about six in the entire game, and you never fight more than one at once—until the DLC.

I saw a lot of people complain about the Marauders back in 2020, talking about how he was a step too far for difficulty. While I understand where they were coming from, I don’t think the problem is that he’s too hard. I wouldn’t even call him that difficult. I think he’s just poorly designed. Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to put in a demon I have to stand around and wait for in fucking Doom: Eternal!? The game about flying around at mach-5 and eviscerating enemies before they have a chance to sneeze, suddenly wants me to stop and wait for an enemy to attack like it’s a fucking soulslike. I thought the platforming sections were killing my pacing, I had no idea how awful it would feel if the pacing of my fight was decapitated by one of these fuckers. When he spawns, all my plans about what weapons I’m using on which demons, and when I’m going to use my cooldowns are suddenly thrown out the window because I have to stop and start poking the Marauder every time he tries to melee me. Thankfully, this playthrough I realized you could cheese them. Instead of going into this weird dance with the Marauder where you somehow have to stay at a perfect range with all the other demons still trying to kill you, I realized if you timed it perfectly when you saw an opening you could destroy him with a BFG shot:

My final problem with the game, and what is the only thing that stops me from playing it 4-5 times every time I get into it, is that there is a lot of time where you’re not killing demons. I’m not saying I want a constant barrage of demons with zero pacing, but I am saying I only want like 10-15% of the game to be downtime, which is about the ratio I would assign to Doom (2016). I would say as much as 30-40% of my first time playing Doom: Eternal was spent wandering around platforming. Which might not sound like a lot, but the game is about demon killing. To me, it feels like it should only be about demon killing. Like I said, Nu-Doom isn’t the traditional hero’s journey, it doesn’t feel like The Legend of Zelda. So why am I hopping around solving puzzles like Link? Even once I knew the levels inside and out it still felt slow.

The best example of the slower level design is that there’s an entire mechanic where you walk through this purple goo that slows you down and prevents you from jumping. In the game that’s all about staying mobile and in the air as much as possible, they added something that prevents you from jumping and dashing. There’s also plenty of time spent just hopping from place to place, maybe with a couple stragglers here and there as a desperate attempt to spice things up. I understand that they felt they needed pacing, even I would get a little too overwhelmed after 5 hours of pure demon killing, but it destroys the pacing to spend even 5 minutes jumping from platform to platform over a bottomless pit. Whenever there's an actual combat encounter happening, it's a fucking amazing game. But most levels seem they were contractually obligated to insert something to undercut it.

Even with these gripes I would still describe the levels as excellent. Despite the fact that most of them have sections I find boring and bog down the gameplay, the presentation and fluidity more than make up for it. Even on my first playthrough I was always able to figure out where to go next, even though some of the paths between arenas can be a little obtuse. Instead of the now endemic “yellow paint,” Doom: Eternal relies on green lighting to point the way forward. And while most of the levels do boil down to the Painkiller-style arena-corridor-arena-corridor pattern, the corridors are usually strikingly realized, with an exceptional level of detail and care put into the architecture and personality of the level. Which is why I feel it’s quite reductive to compare them to Painkiller. Yes, if you just take the blueprints alone, they are broadly similar, but when you actually play through them and see the models, the atmosphere, and ambiance, it blows Painkiller out of the water.

Not to mention the secrets. In Painkiller you were tasked with abusing an engine exploit and levitating up walls by spamming the space bar at a pace fast enough to give you carpal tunnel. Now that I have a lot more classic FPS experience under my belt, I realize Nu-Doom’s secrets are pretty easy and not as “secret” as I initially thought. But, dammit, that’s what I like about them! I don’t want to spend 15 minutes running around a level desperately trying to find something no average human could even find. I don’t want to have to crack open a level editor to find out there’s one single wall out of thousands that has a health pack behind it. I had remembered Nu-Doom’s secrets being more difficult to find, but with more hints to lead the player to them. Instead they are largely just “glance around for a cracked wall, punch it, find a secret.” I do wish they were a little more difficult, but I vastly prefer this implementation to running along each wall hitting the use key over and over in the days of yore.

All of this culminates in Doom: Eternal’s final level, which may be its best. It’s the only level that I feel like nails the pacing. Right out of the gate you have one of the longest combat encounters in the game up to that point. It’s at least five minutes of pure rip and tear in a relatively small arena with at least twice as many demons as normal. And it doesn’t let up from there. Brief and simple platforming sections—the way god intended—punctuate nail-biting, blood pumping sessions of demon-culling, each more intimidating than the last. The action ramps up along a precisely calibrated curve throwing almost every single enemy in the game at the player in every fight, in relatively simple arenas. The designers let the mechanics and the enemies do all the work. No weird hidden jump pads, or constricting tunnels like in some of the more claustrophobic slayer arenas. You have plenty of room to tackle each of these in whatever manner you choose.

They might be some of the hardest fights in the game, but they’re also some of the simplest. I think this is the point the designers wanted everything to “click” for the player. For the player to sink themselves into the combat and enter a flow state. Not so much to test them, but to give them an opportunity to shine, and to show them how much more skilled they’d become throughout the game. While most of the levels were centered around teaching you something, or showing you more unique arena designs, this final level is when they wanted the player to become the Doom Slayer. This is when they reached for that title, “ultimate power fantasy.”

The final boss, the Icon of Sin, is the ultimate expression of this. They give you almost all the resources in the game in unlimited quantities. What few limitations Doom Guy had up to this point are gone. The enemies you’d been fighting the whole game go from varying degrees of “threat” to “piñatas full of fuel” you use to burn the Icon of Sin; this gargantuan goat-headed demon towering above skyscrapers. They strip down and refine the core gameplay loop of “rip, refuel, tear,” into a frantic and nigh-instantaneous cycle of killing a demon, getting resources, and unloading those resources into different parts of the Icon of Sin. It might take you a few tries, as the Icon of Sin’s attack can be debilitating until you internalize its patterns, but that made it all the more rewarding as I watched my bullets rip away its armor and eventually tear its flesh to reveal the bones underneath. When the Icon finally fell, I still felt ready for the next battle. As the credits music faded in, and the credits began to roll, I was still itching for the next Imp to chainsaw, the next Hellknight to glory-kill. Maybe this is what it’s like to be Doom Guy: to always thirst for more demon blood, to be eternally unsated.

Doom: Eternal isn’t just the “ultimate power fantasy,” it’s a simulation of what it’s like to be completely obsessed with one single thing, and being able to do that one thing all the time, for all of eternity.