Doom: Eternal

Utnayan said:

Best non biased review I have seen so far.

Spoiler

I'm very conflicted over this game. On the one side, the presentation is phenomenal. They really hit it out of the park with the gun models, the environments and the music.

On the other side, they've taken everything that made Doom 2016 good and made it not that way. The UI is bright and crowded. The art style is cartoony and playful. But most importantly, the gameplay is way too complicated and bloated.

From all of the press you'd think that the combat is what makes the game enjoyable. However it feels completely unnatural to play.

So let's start with ammo. There are no ammo drops (or very little of them). The entire concept of scanning the level for ammo drops is gone. Instead, you're constantly without ammo until you use the chainsaw on an enemy. This would be fine if you could do it on many different enemies and if you didn't run out of fuel. But you're constantly running out of fuel, and certain enemies simply cannot get chainsawed (like arachnotron).

Then you've got the monster weaknesses. On paper this sounds great: certain monsters have weaknesses that you can exploit. In practice it's horrific. The cacodemon simply won't die without lobbing a grenade at its face. You can unload your entire machine gun or plasma rifle at it and it won't go down. And before you get to the argument of "well technically, you need to change your playstyle" imagine that you have to get a glorykill on the cacodemon every single time. And the glorykill animation is the same (pull the eyeballs or stabbing it through the eyeball).

To make matters worse you have to pick certain upgrades to enjoy the game properly. For instance, you're basically required to pick the machine gun precision aim upgrade in order to properly kill the revenant. Wait, you chose missiles? Well too bad! The revenant will now be a nightmare. You want to use the autoshotty? Too bad! You need to lob the guns off of the arachnotron.

There's also a lot of stuff that simply doesn't feel like a good addition to Doom. Why is there so much platforming? What are all of these collectables and upgrades? So much shit is thrown at the player at once that it's overwhelming. A good reference for a complex game that continues to introduce mechanics is God of War. You never feel like the game is throwing too much your way. Instead, it feels like the game is expanding. In Eternal it just feels like too much too quickly.

And lastly, the fucking story. I really will keep this brief, but really. What is even going on? How did the Doom Slayer get a fortress? Who is the Kahn Makyr? Who is this Ghost King and what is that orb you pick up? None of this makes any sense! It's been two hours and so much has been thrown my way that I'm ridiculously confused.

I'm really, really disappointed by this game. It plays nothing like Doom 2016. And while I'm all for innovation and improvement, this just feels like a massive departure from what makes Doom 2016 good. Doom 2016 is a simple, straightforward and concise shooter. Shooting the guns feels like a dream. Upgrades are slowly drip-fed and certain upgrades are never required to kill demons. The game looks gritty and realistic, not colorful and playful. And ultimately, the focus is on KILLING DEMONS.

I can't recommend this game. This is a hard pass for me.

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meStevo said:

15% off at Gamersgate so figure I'd pick it up ... only to be put on a hold of up to 24 hours (likely because it's my first order there in 3 years).

#winning.

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j00t said:

so it looks like bethesda included a DRM free .exe in the bethesda.net version.

there's the normal 369 MB denuvo DOOMEternalx64vk.exe in the main game folder. However, under ..\Doom Eternal\original you'll find a smaller 67 MB .exe with the same name. if you copy that onto the denuvo .exe it launches perfectly fine.

personally, i don't have it yet, but the crackwatch reddit is going nuts over bethesda cracking their own game lol

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