Can Doom: The Dark Ages live up to the gory perfection of 2016's Doom?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

There aren’t enough games out there like Doom (2016)—something that’s starting to look like it still might be the case after the game’s prequel, Doom: The Dark Ages, comes out this May.

These thoughts were inspired by an 11-minute preview video id Software released at Microsoft’s Developers_Direct event this week, taking a deep dive into the game’s combat, exploration, and—somewhat hilariously for a franchise whose narrative typically reads, at best, like the stuff you might find scrawled in between pictures of bloody axes and people clad in chainmail underwear in a teenage metal nerd’s notebooks—story. (Despite being a major bullet point for the video, the “Story” section of the video is actually only 50 seconds long, i.e., just long enough to make my heart sink at hearing that it was going to be taking some of the more entertainingly batshit Nouns safely buried in the previous games’ appendices and put them out on the Main Street of its cutscenes. The hyper-goofy story stuff in those past Doom games is fun as hell, just as long as you never get the sense that anybody making the thing was taking it seriously.)

Exploration was similarly given short shrift, with game director Hugo Martin taking just enough time to make it clear that, while Doom isn’t going formally “open world” for this new installment, it would be adding in a lot more of the “run around a big map doing smaller chunks of gameplay” elements associated with that style inside its individual levels. This aspect could honestly go either way: The exploration in Doom and its direct sequel, 2020’s Doom Eternal, was actually pretty fun, mostly because both of those games made the simple act of moving so joyful. (It helps that both games went out of their way to make the stuff you’d find by poking around at the edges meaningful, either with genuinely fun collectibles or upgrades that felt suitably empowering.) I might roll my eyes a little at Doom becoming another video game where you roam a map, clearing enemy camps. But I won’t lie and say that the idea of scouting out a big group of grotesque enemies and picking out my angle of attack before commencing with the rippin’ and the tearin’ doesn’t have some appeal.

No, the part that had me nervous about Doom: The Dark Ages‘ big turn on the catwalk was also the section that the preview devoted the most time to: its combat. Although I didn’t cover it at the time, my opinions on Doom Eternal ended up aligning closely with my former colleague Sam Barsanti’s: By complicating the basic, but insanely satisfying, gameplay loop of the previous game—exemplified with the addition of the hated Marauder, an enemy who has the absolute temerity to be immune to Doomguy’s attacks unless you did some timing-based parrying shenanigans to make him vulnerable—the sequel compromised the 2016 title’s most vital merit, the sense of bloody invincibility that came from running and gunning your way through the hordes of hell. Rather than attempt to walk back from this direction with The Dark Ages, it looks like id has instead aimed to try to fix it by making these more complex fights more slow-paced and readable. This is ostensibly a step in the right direction, and the addition of granular difficulty sliders that let you adjust things like parrying windows, speed of enemy projectiles, and other elements of the game’s pace, is a huge and unquestionable win.

But there’s also a lot of talk (and video) in the preview about how there’s been a deliberate effort to make the Doomguy hold his proverbial (probably spike-covered) horses, to turn him from a “fighter jet” into a “tank.” A lot of this seems to involve slowing down his pace and giving him more standing still-based defensive options, most prominently the addition of a “shield saw” that lets you block and deflect enemy attacks. Thing is, I can already play a whole bunch of games where I’m a “tank”—Microsoft actually owns a whole other first-person shooter franchise about a human tank who likes to ride around in other, non-human tanks, which is perverse—but there aren’t nearly enough games that make me feel like the fast-moving engine of death that is the player character in Doom (2016). This is not a franchise I go to so that I can pick glowing green projectiles out of the mix and reflect them back into enemies’ faces; it’s not a franchise I go to when I want to think; it’s a franchise I turn to when I just need to see the enemies die fast and glorious and oh, oh so bloody. I’m all for innovation in gaming, and frequently devote this column to championing it. (Although even at my most idealistic, I’m not sure I could look at the new vehicle sections in Dark Ages, where you pilot a dragon or a slow-moving mech, and hope for much more than “painless, and over before they go on too long.”) I understand creatives not wanting to rest on their laurels. But Doom (2016), nine years later, still feels like nothing else in gaming, and that statement gets a little more depressing each time that the only people I know could give me more of it are deliberately choosing not to.

Previews aren’t games: Doom, even more than most franchises, lives or dies in the hands. And I’m still happy to have The Dark Ages on our list of the year’s Most Anticipated Games. I’ll be playing the hell out of the game when it comes out in May. But it still feels a little cruel to leave me craving one particular high, and then go and make something else.