DOOM: The Dark Ages
May 13, 2025May 13, 2025
May 15, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025May 14, 2025May 15, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025 Bonus: Developers honored regional pricing, making the game much more affordable for players in different regions.
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Would mean a lot if you supported me there, would help me create more quality reviews. May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025chainshot, and the assault rifle secondary mode ) that made using many weapons feel kind of unnecessary if not oftentimes useless. It's a pretty big contrast from Doom Eternal's loop that required using all the tools at your disposal frequently, and I never really felt incentivized to mix up my play in Dark Ages the same way I did with Eternal. Whereas Eternal made swapping weapons second-nature, Dark Ages makes swapping weapons almost feel like a chore--you save heaps of time just hurling your shield instead of swapping to the plasma rifle to take out shieldbearers, for example. It's pretty indicative that the core design of the combat was around the new shield mechanics more than anything else, which isn't bad on its own. Like I mentioned, all the weapons feel pretty viable to use, so if you want to just use one over another you really can without feeling much detriment.
Beyond combat, however, the game nearly broached becoming what I would deem a slog, due mostly to how the secrets and maps are set up. The maps themselves all feel enormous, partially due to the inclusion of mech and dragon set pieces demanding additional scale, and also due to a more open-world approach than previous installments had. This has a large drawback, however, in that many of those maps require copious amounts of backtracking for hunting secrets. The last main level alone has you progress about 70% of the way just to find the secrets key, at which point you go back through the entire previous portion of the map to collect the secrets you had to leave behind until finding said key. This kind of thing occurs often in Dark Ages, and has kept me from immediately jumping back in on Nightmare/Ultra Nightmare after finishing my Ultra Violence campaign on my first go-around.
The mech and dragon portions of the game I could do without entirely--they break the pace pretty hard and the combat with each is pretty lackluster and unexciting. If these portions had been cut or even reduced to cinematics the game would have been improved quite a bit, I think. As the saying goes: "To some, perfection is achieved when there is nothing more to add. To others, perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away". I think in the case of Dark Ages, more could have been taken away to good effect.
On that note, I will say that the soundtrack is sorely missing Mick Gordon. I can remember having those catchy, driving, synth-metal tracks from Eternal stuck in my head for hours after playing, but I couldn't recite a single riff from Dark Ages if I tried, even after my first campaign over 17 hours. It's an unfortunate blemish for Dark Ages that Id and Gordon's relationship faltered the way it didMay 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 15, 2025
76561199794253594
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Doomed by the Dark Ages of Optimization
⭐☆☆☆☆
(Note: I have about 2 hours in but steam is showing a lot less because I switched to offline mode due to crashing)
AAA gaming in 2025 has officially gone to Hell, and not in the fun, shotgun-in-each-hand kind of way. I'm so tired of fighting the game before I can even fight in the game. Trying to play DOOM: The Dark Ages feels less like ripping and tearing and more like begging and praying that the game doesn't turn my PC into molten slag.
Look, I just want to enjoy a video game. I shouldn’t have to run tech support for an hour just to squeeze out a stuttery 45fps. I have good hardware. Like, stupidly good hardware. Most people would assume a 4090 and a 7900X would tear through a DOOM title considering that it's the original universal game that runs on everything. But nope. What used to be "plug and play" is now "tweak and pray." Owning high-end hardware doesn’t mean much when every new release tries to turn your rig into a sacrificial offering.
That said, if you've ever wanted to watch your GPU burst into flames while rendering a torch-lit corridor at 17fps, DOOM: The Dark Ages has you covered. Forget demons, your real enemy is the graphics settings menu, which might as well be the final boss. Every AAA game now needs DLSS and Frame Gen just to hit a desired framerate that's even close to what my monitor supports. It’s absurd—especially when the last two DOOM games were optimized so well. So who at id thought baking ray tracing into the engine permanently was a good idea? Whoever it was, they deserve to be trapped in a mirrored lava room where every surface reflects their mistakes.
I booted it up on “Ultra Nightmare” thinking it was a challenge mode—not realizing it was describing the optimization. There’s literally a preset called that. Bold choice. You can’t turn off ray tracing either. Even on “Low” settings I'm barely hitting 60fps natively, which also changes almost nothing visually, you’re stuck with ray tracing so aggressive it might as well be tracing your soul. The whole game looks like a demonic funhouse with RTX on cocaine. It’s like they cooked ray tracing into the engine with a Hellforge and now it’s fused at the molecular level.
It’s almost poetic. A game set in the Dark Ages ends up representing them in terms of modern tech. What’s next? A $70 "Performance Pass" that lets you turn off bloom?
But besides that how's the game actually play? Well, yes, the game is metal as hell. But look, we need to talk about the elephant in the blood-soaked throne room: they removed Glory Kills. Gone. Axed. The very mechanic that made DOOM 2016 and Eternal feel so visceral, so kinetic, so alive—ripped out like a Revenant’s spine. Glory Kills weren’t just for flair; they were the heart of the loop. The brutal ballet of staggering a demon, charging in with a spine-shattering finisher, and getting a reward for your aggression? That was pure game play genius. It kept the tempo fast, rewarded skill, and let you control the chaos. Now? You just charge and parry like you're playing some weird version of first person Sekiro. It sucks the fun of getting to see all of those gory and bloody finishers right out of the combat. For a game all about ripping and tearing, it’s wild how much less satisfying it feels to, well... rip and tear.
It's also missing a fundamental that made the first two Doom reentries an amazing audio experience. Mick Gordan. Let's not forget the real hellish saga behind the scenes. Remember the Mick Gordon debacle during DOOM Eternal? The man who gave us the iconic, pulse-pounding soundtrack was subjected to a development process that was, frankly, infernal. Gordon worked for months without pay, was excluded from key decisions, and was blindsided by the announcement of the official soundtrack before he even had a contract. When he finally did get to work on the OST, he was given a mere 29 days to complete it, only to find out that id Software had been working on an alternative version for six months without his knowledge. The final product included a mix of his tracks and poorly edited versions of his in-game music, leading to a public fallout that saw Gordon distancing himself from the project entirely. It's a stark reminder that the demons aren't just in the game—they're in the boardrooms too.
But wait! There's more! DRM: Kernel-level anti-cheat in a single-player game. Fantastic. Just what I needed! An angry daemon scanning my background processes while I try to rip and tear. Apparently, RGB lighting software is more dangerous than a baron of Hell now. My BIOS hasn’t been this insulted since I let Windows auto-update during a firmware flash.
I miss when you could just... buy a game from a respected company and expect it to be pretty good. We had that era. Now it's rolling dice with the odds against you while everyone points and laughs at you for pre-ordering a game in 2025.
Well I'm glad I did, because now I can warn some of you reading this to please stay away from this game. At least until they fix it 8 months from now when it's 75% off (Gotta love that)
At the end of the day, DOOM: The Dark Ages probably a genuinely fun game buried alive under the smoldering rubble of modern PC gaming sins. It doesn’t feel like I’m playing a shooter—it feels like I’m participating in an interpretive dance about the death of optimization.
If you listen closely while your PC wheezes, you can hear Carmack somewhere in the distance… screaming in binary.
Final Verdict:
DRM+RTX/10
They promised Rip and Tear — Instead I got Lag and Despair.
114 votes funny
76561199794253594
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Doomed by the Dark Ages of Optimization
⭐☆☆☆☆
(Note: I have about 2 hours in but steam is showing a lot less because I switched to offline mode due to crashing)
AAA gaming in 2025 has officially gone to Hell, and not in the fun, shotgun-in-each-hand kind of way. I'm so tired of fighting the game before I can even fight in the game. Trying to play DOOM: The Dark Ages feels less like ripping and tearing and more like begging and praying that the game doesn't turn my PC into molten slag.
Look, I just want to enjoy a video game. I shouldn’t have to run tech support for an hour just to squeeze out a stuttery 45fps. I have good hardware. Like, stupidly good hardware. Most people would assume a 4090 and a 7900X would tear through a DOOM title considering that it's the original universal game that runs on everything. But nope. What used to be "plug and play" is now "tweak and pray." Owning high-end hardware doesn’t mean much when every new release tries to turn your rig into a sacrificial offering.
That said, if you've ever wanted to watch your GPU burst into flames while rendering a torch-lit corridor at 17fps, DOOM: The Dark Ages has you covered. Forget demons, your real enemy is the graphics settings menu, which might as well be the final boss. Every AAA game now needs DLSS and Frame Gen just to hit a desired framerate that's even close to what my monitor supports. It’s absurd—especially when the last two DOOM games were optimized so well. So who at id thought baking ray tracing into the engine permanently was a good idea? Whoever it was, they deserve to be trapped in a mirrored lava room where every surface reflects their mistakes.
I booted it up on “Ultra Nightmare” thinking it was a challenge mode—not realizing it was describing the optimization. There’s literally a preset called that. Bold choice. You can’t turn off ray tracing either. Even on “Low” settings I'm barely hitting 60fps natively, which also changes almost nothing visually, you’re stuck with ray tracing so aggressive it might as well be tracing your soul. The whole game looks like a demonic funhouse with RTX on cocaine. It’s like they cooked ray tracing into the engine with a Hellforge and now it’s fused at the molecular level.
It’s almost poetic. A game set in the Dark Ages ends up representing them in terms of modern tech. What’s next? A $70 "Performance Pass" that lets you turn off bloom?
But besides that how's the game actually play? Well, yes, the game is metal as hell. But look, we need to talk about the elephant in the blood-soaked throne room: they removed Glory Kills. Gone. Axed. The very mechanic that made DOOM 2016 and Eternal feel so visceral, so kinetic, so alive—ripped out like a Revenant’s spine. Glory Kills weren’t just for flair; they were the heart of the loop. The brutal ballet of staggering a demon, charging in with a spine-shattering finisher, and getting a reward for your aggression? That was pure game play genius. It kept the tempo fast, rewarded skill, and let you control the chaos. Now? You just charge and parry like you're playing some weird version of first person Sekiro. It sucks the fun of getting to see all of those gory and bloody finishers right out of the combat. For a game all about ripping and tearing, it’s wild how much less satisfying it feels to, well... rip and tear.
It's also missing a fundamental that made the first two Doom reentries an amazing audio experience. Mick Gordan. Let's not forget the real hellish saga behind the scenes. Remember the Mick Gordon debacle during DOOM Eternal? The man who gave us the iconic, pulse-pounding soundtrack was subjected to a development process that was, frankly, infernal. Gordon worked for months without pay, was excluded from key decisions, and was blindsided by the announcement of the official soundtrack before he even had a contract. When he finally did get to work on the OST, he was given a mere 29 days to complete it, only to find out that id Software had been working on an alternative version for six months without his knowledge. The final product included a mix of his tracks and poorly edited versions of his in-game music, leading to a public fallout that saw Gordon distancing himself from the project entirely. It's a stark reminder that the demons aren't just in the game—they're in the boardrooms too.
But wait! There's more! DRM: Kernel-level anti-cheat in a single-player game. Fantastic. Just what I needed! An angry daemon scanning my background processes while I try to rip and tear. Apparently, RGB lighting software is more dangerous than a baron of Hell now. My BIOS hasn’t been this insulted since I let Windows auto-update during a firmware flash.
I miss when you could just... buy a game from a respected company and expect it to be pretty good. We had that era. Now it's rolling dice with the odds against you while everyone points and laughs at you for pre-ordering a game in 2025.
Well I'm glad I did, because now I can warn some of you reading this to please stay away from this game. At least until they fix it 8 months from now when it's 75% off (Gotta love that)
At the end of the day, DOOM: The Dark Ages probably a genuinely fun game buried alive under the smoldering rubble of modern PC gaming sins. It doesn’t feel like I’m playing a shooter—it feels like I’m participating in an interpretive dance about the death of optimization.
If you listen closely while your PC wheezes, you can hear Carmack somewhere in the distance… screaming in binary.
Final Verdict:
DRM+RTX/10
They promised Rip and Tear — Instead I got Lag and Despair.
114 votes funny
76561198888390167
Recommended0 hrs played
I remember the first time I played Doom.
It was December 25th, 2016. I was a ten-year-old kid living with a condition known as MD.
I couldn’t walk. My world was a bed, a ceiling, and the slow crawl of time. To escape, I sketched heroes battling devils in a notebook which was my only outcry against the stillness.
That morning, my mother gave me a Christmas gift.
A single blue game disc case and a PS4 console.
It was the first game she ever bought for me.
But it wasn’t just a game.
It was the beginning of something much bigger, and I played until my hands ached. For once, the pain didn’t come from my muscles failing. It came from living that moment fully.
That game didn’t just save me from boredom.
It reminded me I could still be strong.
Doom 2016 became my lifeline.
Suddenly, the world around me changed.
The pain. The stillness. The silence.
They all vanished like smoke on the wind.
The music thundered like it came from the core of the Earth.
The title screen roared with fury.
And in that moment, I was no longer a fragile kid in a broken body.
I was the Doom Slayer.
I tore through Hell like I belonged there. Chainsaw in hand, my movements felt like instinct. I didn't just kill them, I lived it.
The rhythm of destruction was its own kind of healing.
In this world full of fire, demons, and rage, I somehow found peace.
Time slipped away. Hours felt like seconds. I memorised every level, every rune trials, every secret wall. I had no guide. No YouTube. My slow 2G GPRS internet was no good, all I had was huge patience and luck. And I reached 100% completion. Every achievement, all challenges, on my own.
Back then, that game was everything to me.
And even now, I see it with the same wonder I saw at ten.
Every now and then, my mother would sit beside me.
She'd watch the screen, quiet and wide-eyed.
She came from the days of Ludos and Tetris.
To her, this world of demons and metal was like looking into the future.
I still remember the day I handed her the controller.
She stepped into the arena, tried to fight a Hell Knight.
She lost. She laughed. I laughed.
She wasn’t made for Hell.
But she liked being there with me.
She liked seeing me strong.
Unstoppable. Free.
It was my refuge.
It became our bridge.
And now, nine years later, it returns with The Dark Ages.
The world has changed.
I have changed.
I’m 19 now.
And she… well, she is no longer here.
She passed away from COVID in 2021.
I missed Doom Eternal, things were rough then, money was tight, and life became very challenging over here.
But that storm has passed, since I earn now. I can finally buy what I want.
This new Doom looks different, but the heart is still there, at least for me.
As I stare once more into the red skies of Hell,
I hear echoes of a younger me.
And somewhere inside it, I hear her laugh again.
That same laugh when she lost to the Hell Guards.
That same warmth of her hands on mine.
This game is a window now. A way back to a time when she was still here.
Sometimes a tear slips out. I don’t know if it’s sorrow or gratitude.
Maybe both. Maybe it’s love that never found enough room in words.
All I know is that I miss her. More than I can ever say. And Doom is the bridge.
Wherever she is now, I know she’s happy, free from pain, wrapped in light, at peace.
Thank you for everything, Ma.
Love you Forever ❤️
79 votes funny
76561198338776245
Recommended2 hrs played (1 hrs at review)
It’s not just a game. It’s a pilgrimage. A brutal, blood-soaked, 120-FPS pilgrimage where your only god is a spiked flail that turns skulls into prayer beads.
69 votes funny
76561198321181007
Not Recommended0 hrs played
The gameplay is very solid, do not get me wrong. But I am on an RTX 3070 and the performance of this game REEKS because of the mandatory ray tracing. Save your money until ray tracing can be turned off or when the game goes on sale.
68 votes funny
76561198099825799
Recommended0 hrs played
"Avoid the Slayer" is probably the smartest thing a demon of Hell has ever said.
61 votes funny
76561197995457936
Not Recommended16 hrs played (15 hrs at review)
I don't think DOOM: The Dark Ages is a *bad* game, but I really can't say that I would recommend it. Too much of the gameplay has been boiled down to "stand around and press the parry button when the game tells you to" and it's missing a lot of what I liked about Eternal, which was on the fly thinking and using smart movement, positioning, and enemy prioritization to win fights. Encounter design in this game is especially lackluster - almost every single arena is just in a boring, kind of flat way too big area with maybe a few rocks or walls around in places, and enemy usage isn't very interesting or threatening either.
Mech/dragon segments are cool in concept, but in execution are incredibly boring. Both of them are mainly "hold down fire button, dodge when the game tells you to dodge." You don't ever have to dodge or weave multiple attacks at once in these sections, or make sure to position yourself well to avoid certain attacks. Hold fire, press dodge when you see green on the one enemy attacking you, that's it.
The weapon upgrade system relies too heavily on secret hunting in boring, empty levels where for some reason even though they already fixed this problem in Eternal it is once again possible to get locked out of areas so you have to replay the entire level if you missed a secret too early on - which is a shame because I really like the new weapon upgrades! It feels significantly better than the mod system of 2016/Eternal where you were ONLY using the mods most of the time, but if you want to upgrade everything you're going to need to constantly open your map to make sure that you're not missing out on any important resources. (also... why even bother calling them secrets if now they're just visible on your map by DEFAULT? lmao)
The game is a huge mixed bag. For every genuinely good change from Eternal or fun idea, there's something else that feels bad or at the least confusingly designed. I didn't hate my time with it but I'd have a really hard time saying it's worth picking up over other games.
59 votes funny
76561198249008700
Recommended22 hrs played (4 hrs at review)
PURE TESTOSTERONE
Doom The Dark Ages is a heavy hitter. It’s not fast and twitchy like Doom Eternal. This one slows things down. You’re not dashing around, you’re stomping forward like a tank. You stand your ground. You fight. And it feels amazing. Combat is all about power. Every weapon has weight. Every hit lands with impact. You’re not just clearing rooms, you’re crushing demons with sheer force. It’s intense but not chaotic. The story is there and it adds to the atmosphere, but you don’t need it to enjoy the game. The gameplay does all the talking. You’re dropped into a brutal world, and the goal is simple: survive and destroy everything that moves. The music fits the tone. Dark, gritty, and moody. It’s not as aggressive as Mick Gordons work, and yeah, that edge is missed. But whats here still drives the action and matches the medieval hellscape vibe. Just raw, satisfying violence without the noise. If you want speed, look elsewhere. But if you want to feel like a medieval war machine stomping through hell, this Doom is for you. It’s slow, brutal, and ridiculously fun.52 votes funny
76561199144897304
Recommended28 hrs played (28 hrs at review)
I opened the game, 100%ed it, closed the game, best 28 hours of my life
49 votes funny
76561198213778551
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Forced Ray Tracing is tragic it tanks any potential performance the game might be capable.
46 votes funny
76561198029894415
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Be aware that this game forces Ray Tracing on, and will physically prevent you from booting it up if your computer can't support it.
I suspect a lot of potential customers without high-end rigs will end up getting left behind because of this, myself included.
43 votes funny
76561199539892651
Recommended29 hrs played (4 hrs at review)
It’s incredible to see ID software put out 3 completely different combat frameworks for a FPS in the last decade. Each game is different while being distinctly DOOM. Not many publishers take that kind of risk.
DOOM 2016 asked you to run and gun. DOOM Eternal asked you to jump and shoot. While DOOM The Dark Ages asks you to stand and fight. Imagine these 3 games were your kids. They are all different and You love them all equally for their unique qualities.
36 votes funny
76561197979857409
Not Recommended17 hrs played (1 hrs at review)
annoying awful screen effect you cant disable when sprinting, and auto sprint is disabled by default. as well as the game slows down time EVERY SINGLE MELEE HIT no wonder the developers are claiming this is the longest game theyve ever made, theyre extending the playtime by making half the combat MANDATORY SLOW MOTION. $150 down the drain. what a fucking waste i could have donated it to a palestine charity.
28 votes funny
76561198002901675
Not Recommended21 hrs played (21 hrs at review)
Bethesda shipped my collectors edition to a complete stranger in another city. They have yet to resolve the issue after apologizing for it. They have stopped responding and are expecting me to just eat a 200$ loss.
Edit: Just finished on nightmare. It's also too easy. The first slayer gate in eternal is harder than any fight in this game. Fun combat loop but fights are over so fast. Boss fight is much better than the bosses in eternal though.
26 votes funny
76561197970073600
Not Recommended2 hrs played
The worst DOOM release. Non-existent QA. Simple things like keybinds/re-mapping do not work. Currently unplayable. Not to mention early access is joke. To add insult to injury, horrible performance issues/scaling and poor design choices like mandatory RT. I hope there is a class action lawsuit.
22 votes funny
76561198145256548
Recommended5 hrs played
A Brutal Medieval Bloodbath – In the Best Way Possible
Doom: The Dark Ages is the most metal history lesson you’ll ever get. Forget textbooks, this is a gritty, gory, and glorious trip back to a demon infested Dark Age where you're the one writing the legend... in blood. Taking everything you love about Doom and giving it a medieval twist, this game is bold, brutal, and unexpectedly fresh. You’re not just the Doom Slayer you’re a myth, a warrior, and an unstoppable force of rage with a shield saw.What I'm Really Digging
1) That Setting Hits Hard: Gothic castles, ash-filled skies, towering demons in armor. it's like Dark Souls and Doom had a blood-soaked baby. The atmosphere is thick with dread and badassery. 2) The New Melee Focus: The combat feels heavier, more grounded. Trading some of the speed for pure, unfiltered carnage with that Skull Crusher mace and shield-saw? Yes please. Every hit feels earned and devastating. 3) Dragons. Yes, Dragons: You ride a freaking dragon. And pilot a giant mech. Doom's never been subtle, but this? This is ridiculous in the best way. 4) Doom Lore Goes Deep: There's more story here than you’d expect, exploring the Slayer’s origins adds weight to the chaos. It still doesn’t slow things down, but it gives everything more meaning. 5) It Looks Insane: The visual design is top-tier. From glowing hell-forges to haunted villages, the art direction is relentless. Plus, it runs buttery smooth, even with all the carnage happening on screen.Why I Recommend This Game:
If you're a fan of Doom but wanted something a little different, this is it. The game doesn’t just slap a medieval skin on an old formula. It reinvents parts of it while staying loyal to what makes Doom Doom. The new combat style, the insane set-pieces, and the expanded lore all hit just right.Absolutely Worth Your Time and Money
This game delivers a brutal, cinematic experience with a satisfying balance of old-school carnage and new ideas. It’s confident, stylish, and unforgettable. Whether you're in it for the demon-slaying or the sheer spectacle, Doom: The Dark Ages absolutely rips and tears.22 votes funny
76561198101338083
Not Recommended10 hrs played (1 hrs at review)
I love the setting but this is by far the weakest entry of the three.
Music is rather absent in a lot of places.
Game is much easier compared to the others - even on the hardest difficultly this feels like a cake walk.
I don't play Doom for the story but this one force feeds it the entire game and it is cliche and boring as fuck.
The game relies heavily on the parry/dodge mechanic and the windows to do so are pretty large even turned to the minimum in the settings. Everything you do is in slow mo which is cool the first time then gets old fast with the same animations over and over.
Lastly, optimization was one of the best things of Doom on PC. This is not even near the performance of the old Dooms at their time of release and the hardware they had to run on.
One of my biggest gripes is the Mech and Dragon gameplay feels incredibly shoehorned and rushed so they could hype it up in the trailers. When you play it, instead of feeling like a badass, it feels like an old school Spyro minigame.
For a Doom game. This just screams SAFE. They didn't want to do anything crazy or more controversial than just killing Demons or adding any mechanics that would actually change the game up from its predecessors too much.
21 votes funny
76561199466039666
Recommended39 hrs played
Wake the fuck up Slayer, Lets get to work.
Runs beautifully, no slutters, gameplay is smooth and satisfying. OST is good.
RIP AND TEAR UNTIL IT IS DONE!
21 votes funny
76561197989814030
Recommended19 hrs played (17 hrs at review)
Overall recommendation: Series veterans might want to wait for a sale
Overall I'll call this a tenuous recommendation, with the caveat that I don't think it quite lives up to the previous 2 installments (which are both technically sequels to this), but the combat loop itself is worth playing, even if it means waiting for a sale first. The core gameplay is good, with the introduction of shield and melee mechanics to replace Doom Eternal's flamethrower and glory kills. Thanks to the sound and physics design, you really feel the weight of the Slayer when you move, and each of the weapons as you fire. The combat on its own is good, but not Doom Eternal good. It's interesting in that most of the weapons seem pretty viable on their own, but there are a couple standouts (16 votes funny
76561198061255591
Not Recommended22 hrs played (12 hrs at review)
ITS WOKE
update: ITS SUPER WOKE
16 votes funny
76561198123564172
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Absolutely a huge no. No glory kills (it's just basic punches and kicks), generic, unmemorable background music, and on top of this awful performance. 9800X3D and a 9070 xt, at 1440p high settings and I'm getting less than 60? Are you kidding me? The shield mechanic is boring and the melee attacks being locked behind picking up "melee ammo" shows that the devs have strayed far from what made the first two new games so cool. Thank God for steams refund policy. Wait a year and this will be $15
16 votes funny
76561198046973166
Not Recommended7 hrs played (7 hrs at review)
Avoid this garbage.
As if the miserably poor performance wasn't bad enough. The gameplay design team at id have lost the thread. Combat in this game is atrociously bad. They've completely walked away from the run and gun, pulse pounding pleasure of DOOM. Instead, they've decided on a ludicrously involved, stupidly unfun shield and parry mechanic. You're actually penalized for running the field and attempting to play fast and dodge. Shots home in at ridiculous angles, the parry mechanic is a joke, and the slayer is a weakling. Melees are promoted as a key aspect of gameplay, then gated behind stupidly low 'ammo' count. Why in the hell does the slayer need ammo to punch a demon in the face? That's not a rhetorical question, I'd legitimately love to know why the slayer can't just punch demons in the face as much as he'd like. Why does his bare fist have a cooldown and max use limit? Furthermore, you get punished for closing in to perform a melee combo because 90% of the time it leaves you locked into an animation set while everything around you lights you up, and the demon you're supposedly pounding on wakes up immediately after the combo.
Controls are just as whacked out as having ammo for fists. Movement itself feels tight, but sprinting is junk (and only activates while running forward, for real). There are far too many inputs for a game that should be about slaughtering hell's army. Every little thing has a button, and- frequently - once they're established they no longer actually matter. This is most strikingly exemplified in the case of ascending and descending while riding on the dragon. The game stalls out to teach you that ascend and descend are mapped to Q and E. Shortly after, you're expected to perform directional dodges, which don't actually utilize the keys you just learned. Instead, when you need to dodge up or down you simply hold up or down and press space.
Changing weapons with the mouse wheel takes forever, causing serious issues in the flow of combat, because the game forces the player to watch each gun wielding animation before proceeding, rather than letting them quickly scroll through. The weapon wheel option is unresponsive, and takes its sweet time to pop up. Subsequently attempting to select a weapon using the weapon wheel is a buggy experience that also- of course- interferes with aim. Speaking of laggy inputs, everything seems to be on some weird delay. The aforementioned melee mechanic is a highlight of this, the effect seems to happen well after the button press because of the drawn out animation sequence, and then doesn't respond quickly enough to make it feel like it's registered; simultaneously, it has a weird range that feels both too far and not far enough.
Demon shots are abject garbage, with some taking a significant amount of time to actually move across the field, while others seem to hitscan out of nowhere (taking a significant chunk of armor and health with them). The projectiles have strange, counter-intuitive horizontal movement that doesn't seem correct, thanks largely to the weird homing effect they all have, and they regularly ignore walls and other cover. Field awareness is poorly telegraphed and handled at large, with demons regularly spawning out of thin air behind the slayer. In the traditional DOOM experience, this wouldn't be problematic since movement largely helps with avoiding shots. In this DOOM, movement counts for nothing, and thanks to the stupid homing nonsense you get wrecked trying to play the field.
The parry windows are awkward and nonsensical. This is owing to the fact that sometimes enemies slow down dramatically, almost pausing, which screws up the entire flow of combat, while other attacks seem to proceed at lightning pace with no real clear window for the actual parry- you just have to spam and hope you hit it, which contributes to the input lag as the game does a weird slow down effect sometimes well after the fact. On top of all this, you'll frequently be locked into animations that force you to take damage as a result of the mechanics at play. It sucks across the board.
This is the worst DOOM game since DOOM 3. The feel is awful, and entirely antithetical to DOOM. While it's nice to have a story, to then shackle it to this miserable combat system is a travesty. The graphics are nice, but poorly optimized to say the least (a 4090 with a 7950X3D only getting slightly over 60 FPS is g a r b a g e). Why in the hell is ray tracing a requirement for this game? The maps are massive and open, but then hamstrung by the fact that if you try and actually utilize all that space to run and gun you're punished for it.
It's hard to enjoy any of the attention to detail or other things that went into making this game because the combat is just that bad.
DOOM: The Dark Ages indeed, because they've gone back to the dark ages with the controls and gameplay on this one, and it's made all the worse for it. The only saving grace for all this is that I got this key from a friend, though I feel terrible that they paid money for it, because id does not deserve it. This game sucks.
15 votes funny
76561198108022905
Recommended8 hrs played (5 hrs at review)
Dopamine rush. Kind of steroid. Play with caution.
You kill demons in several ways. There’s also a story that enhances the experience, but you don’t really need a story to play this game. The rhythm and music are awesome but you will feel the absence of Mr Gordon.
It’s the best birthday activity for me. By the way, this is the only horror game I can play. (Because I am the monster here.)
15 votes funny
76561198112766051
Not Recommended0 hrs played
I wasn't able to play the game even tho my drivers were up to date... We spend our money for what? Not only they are forcing RT down our throats, forcing you to get better PC parts for these or future games to make more money. I paid extra to play it early but I and other people can't play it early, then why charge them extra? BILLION dollar worth of company under TRILLION dollar worth of a bigger company can't get a game to run properly. You're just making a clown out of yourself bethesda. Funny stuff.
14 votes funny
76561198038931832
Recommended7 hrs played (5 hrs at review)
Doomguy riding a cyber dragon while wielding a chainsaw shield and a flail.. so metal. They even put a gas pedal on the dragon. I'm sold.
Mick Gordon being absent for the production in music for this game is absolutely criminal.
Everything else is a 10/10
14 votes funny
76561198049735378
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Denuvo
Forced ray tracing
"Advanced access" premium 3 days early
Performance sucks
Gameplay is actually worse than Eternal
Only good thing is new slayer armor design, its the coolest design yet
13 votes funny
DOOM: The Dark Ages
May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 15, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025May 14, 2025May 15, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025 Bonus: Developers honored regional pricing, making the game much more affordable for players in different regions.
🎅Would Appreciate If You Follow My Curator Page🎅
Would mean a lot if you supported me there, would help me create more quality reviews. May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025chainshot, and the assault rifle secondary mode ) that made using many weapons feel kind of unnecessary if not oftentimes useless. It's a pretty big contrast from Doom Eternal's loop that required using all the tools at your disposal frequently, and I never really felt incentivized to mix up my play in Dark Ages the same way I did with Eternal. Whereas Eternal made swapping weapons second-nature, Dark Ages makes swapping weapons almost feel like a chore--you save heaps of time just hurling your shield instead of swapping to the plasma rifle to take out shieldbearers, for example. It's pretty indicative that the core design of the combat was around the new shield mechanics more than anything else, which isn't bad on its own. Like I mentioned, all the weapons feel pretty viable to use, so if you want to just use one over another you really can without feeling much detriment.
Beyond combat, however, the game nearly broached becoming what I would deem a slog, due mostly to how the secrets and maps are set up. The maps themselves all feel enormous, partially due to the inclusion of mech and dragon set pieces demanding additional scale, and also due to a more open-world approach than previous installments had. This has a large drawback, however, in that many of those maps require copious amounts of backtracking for hunting secrets. The last main level alone has you progress about 70% of the way just to find the secrets key, at which point you go back through the entire previous portion of the map to collect the secrets you had to leave behind until finding said key. This kind of thing occurs often in Dark Ages, and has kept me from immediately jumping back in on Nightmare/Ultra Nightmare after finishing my Ultra Violence campaign on my first go-around.
The mech and dragon portions of the game I could do without entirely--they break the pace pretty hard and the combat with each is pretty lackluster and unexciting. If these portions had been cut or even reduced to cinematics the game would have been improved quite a bit, I think. As the saying goes: "To some, perfection is achieved when there is nothing more to add. To others, perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away". I think in the case of Dark Ages, more could have been taken away to good effect.
On that note, I will say that the soundtrack is sorely missing Mick Gordon. I can remember having those catchy, driving, synth-metal tracks from Eternal stuck in my head for hours after playing, but I couldn't recite a single riff from Dark Ages if I tried, even after my first campaign over 17 hours. It's an unfortunate blemish for Dark Ages that Id and Gordon's relationship faltered the way it didMay 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 14, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 13, 2025May 15, 2025
76561199794253594
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Doomed by the Dark Ages of Optimization
⭐☆☆☆☆
(Note: I have about 2 hours in but steam is showing a lot less because I switched to offline mode due to crashing)
AAA gaming in 2025 has officially gone to Hell, and not in the fun, shotgun-in-each-hand kind of way. I'm so tired of fighting the game before I can even fight in the game. Trying to play DOOM: The Dark Ages feels less like ripping and tearing and more like begging and praying that the game doesn't turn my PC into molten slag.
Look, I just want to enjoy a video game. I shouldn’t have to run tech support for an hour just to squeeze out a stuttery 45fps. I have good hardware. Like, stupidly good hardware. Most people would assume a 4090 and a 7900X would tear through a DOOM title considering that it's the original universal game that runs on everything. But nope. What used to be "plug and play" is now "tweak and pray." Owning high-end hardware doesn’t mean much when every new release tries to turn your rig into a sacrificial offering.
That said, if you've ever wanted to watch your GPU burst into flames while rendering a torch-lit corridor at 17fps, DOOM: The Dark Ages has you covered. Forget demons, your real enemy is the graphics settings menu, which might as well be the final boss. Every AAA game now needs DLSS and Frame Gen just to hit a desired framerate that's even close to what my monitor supports. It’s absurd—especially when the last two DOOM games were optimized so well. So who at id thought baking ray tracing into the engine permanently was a good idea? Whoever it was, they deserve to be trapped in a mirrored lava room where every surface reflects their mistakes.
I booted it up on “Ultra Nightmare” thinking it was a challenge mode—not realizing it was describing the optimization. There’s literally a preset called that. Bold choice. You can’t turn off ray tracing either. Even on “Low” settings I'm barely hitting 60fps natively, which also changes almost nothing visually, you’re stuck with ray tracing so aggressive it might as well be tracing your soul. The whole game looks like a demonic funhouse with RTX on cocaine. It’s like they cooked ray tracing into the engine with a Hellforge and now it’s fused at the molecular level.
It’s almost poetic. A game set in the Dark Ages ends up representing them in terms of modern tech. What’s next? A $70 "Performance Pass" that lets you turn off bloom?
But besides that how's the game actually play? Well, yes, the game is metal as hell. But look, we need to talk about the elephant in the blood-soaked throne room: they removed Glory Kills. Gone. Axed. The very mechanic that made DOOM 2016 and Eternal feel so visceral, so kinetic, so alive—ripped out like a Revenant’s spine. Glory Kills weren’t just for flair; they were the heart of the loop. The brutal ballet of staggering a demon, charging in with a spine-shattering finisher, and getting a reward for your aggression? That was pure game play genius. It kept the tempo fast, rewarded skill, and let you control the chaos. Now? You just charge and parry like you're playing some weird version of first person Sekiro. It sucks the fun of getting to see all of those gory and bloody finishers right out of the combat. For a game all about ripping and tearing, it’s wild how much less satisfying it feels to, well... rip and tear.
It's also missing a fundamental that made the first two Doom reentries an amazing audio experience. Mick Gordan. Let's not forget the real hellish saga behind the scenes. Remember the Mick Gordon debacle during DOOM Eternal? The man who gave us the iconic, pulse-pounding soundtrack was subjected to a development process that was, frankly, infernal. Gordon worked for months without pay, was excluded from key decisions, and was blindsided by the announcement of the official soundtrack before he even had a contract. When he finally did get to work on the OST, he was given a mere 29 days to complete it, only to find out that id Software had been working on an alternative version for six months without his knowledge. The final product included a mix of his tracks and poorly edited versions of his in-game music, leading to a public fallout that saw Gordon distancing himself from the project entirely. It's a stark reminder that the demons aren't just in the game—they're in the boardrooms too.
But wait! There's more! DRM: Kernel-level anti-cheat in a single-player game. Fantastic. Just what I needed! An angry daemon scanning my background processes while I try to rip and tear. Apparently, RGB lighting software is more dangerous than a baron of Hell now. My BIOS hasn’t been this insulted since I let Windows auto-update during a firmware flash.
I miss when you could just... buy a game from a respected company and expect it to be pretty good. We had that era. Now it's rolling dice with the odds against you while everyone points and laughs at you for pre-ordering a game in 2025.
Well I'm glad I did, because now I can warn some of you reading this to please stay away from this game. At least until they fix it 8 months from now when it's 75% off (Gotta love that)
At the end of the day, DOOM: The Dark Ages probably a genuinely fun game buried alive under the smoldering rubble of modern PC gaming sins. It doesn’t feel like I’m playing a shooter—it feels like I’m participating in an interpretive dance about the death of optimization.
If you listen closely while your PC wheezes, you can hear Carmack somewhere in the distance… screaming in binary.
Final Verdict:
DRM+RTX/10
They promised Rip and Tear — Instead I got Lag and Despair.
114 votes funny
76561199794253594
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Doomed by the Dark Ages of Optimization
⭐☆☆☆☆
(Note: I have about 2 hours in but steam is showing a lot less because I switched to offline mode due to crashing)
AAA gaming in 2025 has officially gone to Hell, and not in the fun, shotgun-in-each-hand kind of way. I'm so tired of fighting the game before I can even fight in the game. Trying to play DOOM: The Dark Ages feels less like ripping and tearing and more like begging and praying that the game doesn't turn my PC into molten slag.
Look, I just want to enjoy a video game. I shouldn’t have to run tech support for an hour just to squeeze out a stuttery 45fps. I have good hardware. Like, stupidly good hardware. Most people would assume a 4090 and a 7900X would tear through a DOOM title considering that it's the original universal game that runs on everything. But nope. What used to be "plug and play" is now "tweak and pray." Owning high-end hardware doesn’t mean much when every new release tries to turn your rig into a sacrificial offering.
That said, if you've ever wanted to watch your GPU burst into flames while rendering a torch-lit corridor at 17fps, DOOM: The Dark Ages has you covered. Forget demons, your real enemy is the graphics settings menu, which might as well be the final boss. Every AAA game now needs DLSS and Frame Gen just to hit a desired framerate that's even close to what my monitor supports. It’s absurd—especially when the last two DOOM games were optimized so well. So who at id thought baking ray tracing into the engine permanently was a good idea? Whoever it was, they deserve to be trapped in a mirrored lava room where every surface reflects their mistakes.
I booted it up on “Ultra Nightmare” thinking it was a challenge mode—not realizing it was describing the optimization. There’s literally a preset called that. Bold choice. You can’t turn off ray tracing either. Even on “Low” settings I'm barely hitting 60fps natively, which also changes almost nothing visually, you’re stuck with ray tracing so aggressive it might as well be tracing your soul. The whole game looks like a demonic funhouse with RTX on cocaine. It’s like they cooked ray tracing into the engine with a Hellforge and now it’s fused at the molecular level.
It’s almost poetic. A game set in the Dark Ages ends up representing them in terms of modern tech. What’s next? A $70 "Performance Pass" that lets you turn off bloom?
But besides that how's the game actually play? Well, yes, the game is metal as hell. But look, we need to talk about the elephant in the blood-soaked throne room: they removed Glory Kills. Gone. Axed. The very mechanic that made DOOM 2016 and Eternal feel so visceral, so kinetic, so alive—ripped out like a Revenant’s spine. Glory Kills weren’t just for flair; they were the heart of the loop. The brutal ballet of staggering a demon, charging in with a spine-shattering finisher, and getting a reward for your aggression? That was pure game play genius. It kept the tempo fast, rewarded skill, and let you control the chaos. Now? You just charge and parry like you're playing some weird version of first person Sekiro. It sucks the fun of getting to see all of those gory and bloody finishers right out of the combat. For a game all about ripping and tearing, it’s wild how much less satisfying it feels to, well... rip and tear.
It's also missing a fundamental that made the first two Doom reentries an amazing audio experience. Mick Gordan. Let's not forget the real hellish saga behind the scenes. Remember the Mick Gordon debacle during DOOM Eternal? The man who gave us the iconic, pulse-pounding soundtrack was subjected to a development process that was, frankly, infernal. Gordon worked for months without pay, was excluded from key decisions, and was blindsided by the announcement of the official soundtrack before he even had a contract. When he finally did get to work on the OST, he was given a mere 29 days to complete it, only to find out that id Software had been working on an alternative version for six months without his knowledge. The final product included a mix of his tracks and poorly edited versions of his in-game music, leading to a public fallout that saw Gordon distancing himself from the project entirely. It's a stark reminder that the demons aren't just in the game—they're in the boardrooms too.
But wait! There's more! DRM: Kernel-level anti-cheat in a single-player game. Fantastic. Just what I needed! An angry daemon scanning my background processes while I try to rip and tear. Apparently, RGB lighting software is more dangerous than a baron of Hell now. My BIOS hasn’t been this insulted since I let Windows auto-update during a firmware flash.
I miss when you could just... buy a game from a respected company and expect it to be pretty good. We had that era. Now it's rolling dice with the odds against you while everyone points and laughs at you for pre-ordering a game in 2025.
Well I'm glad I did, because now I can warn some of you reading this to please stay away from this game. At least until they fix it 8 months from now when it's 75% off (Gotta love that)
At the end of the day, DOOM: The Dark Ages probably a genuinely fun game buried alive under the smoldering rubble of modern PC gaming sins. It doesn’t feel like I’m playing a shooter—it feels like I’m participating in an interpretive dance about the death of optimization.
If you listen closely while your PC wheezes, you can hear Carmack somewhere in the distance… screaming in binary.
Final Verdict:
DRM+RTX/10
They promised Rip and Tear — Instead I got Lag and Despair.
114 votes funny
76561198888390167
Recommended0 hrs played
I remember the first time I played Doom.
It was December 25th, 2016. I was a ten-year-old kid living with a condition known as MD.
I couldn’t walk. My world was a bed, a ceiling, and the slow crawl of time. To escape, I sketched heroes battling devils in a notebook which was my only outcry against the stillness.
That morning, my mother gave me a Christmas gift.
A single blue game disc case and a PS4 console.
It was the first game she ever bought for me.
But it wasn’t just a game.
It was the beginning of something much bigger, and I played until my hands ached. For once, the pain didn’t come from my muscles failing. It came from living that moment fully.
That game didn’t just save me from boredom.
It reminded me I could still be strong.
Doom 2016 became my lifeline.
Suddenly, the world around me changed.
The pain. The stillness. The silence.
They all vanished like smoke on the wind.
The music thundered like it came from the core of the Earth.
The title screen roared with fury.
And in that moment, I was no longer a fragile kid in a broken body.
I was the Doom Slayer.
I tore through Hell like I belonged there. Chainsaw in hand, my movements felt like instinct. I didn't just kill them, I lived it.
The rhythm of destruction was its own kind of healing.
In this world full of fire, demons, and rage, I somehow found peace.
Time slipped away. Hours felt like seconds. I memorised every level, every rune trials, every secret wall. I had no guide. No YouTube. My slow 2G GPRS internet was no good, all I had was huge patience and luck. And I reached 100% completion. Every achievement, all challenges, on my own.
Back then, that game was everything to me.
And even now, I see it with the same wonder I saw at ten.
Every now and then, my mother would sit beside me.
She'd watch the screen, quiet and wide-eyed.
She came from the days of Ludos and Tetris.
To her, this world of demons and metal was like looking into the future.
I still remember the day I handed her the controller.
She stepped into the arena, tried to fight a Hell Knight.
She lost. She laughed. I laughed.
She wasn’t made for Hell.
But she liked being there with me.
She liked seeing me strong.
Unstoppable. Free.
It was my refuge.
It became our bridge.
And now, nine years later, it returns with The Dark Ages.
The world has changed.
I have changed.
I’m 19 now.
And she… well, she is no longer here.
She passed away from COVID in 2021.
I missed Doom Eternal, things were rough then, money was tight, and life became very challenging over here.
But that storm has passed, since I earn now. I can finally buy what I want.
This new Doom looks different, but the heart is still there, at least for me.
As I stare once more into the red skies of Hell,
I hear echoes of a younger me.
And somewhere inside it, I hear her laugh again.
That same laugh when she lost to the Hell Guards.
That same warmth of her hands on mine.
This game is a window now. A way back to a time when she was still here.
Sometimes a tear slips out. I don’t know if it’s sorrow or gratitude.
Maybe both. Maybe it’s love that never found enough room in words.
All I know is that I miss her. More than I can ever say. And Doom is the bridge.
Wherever she is now, I know she’s happy, free from pain, wrapped in light, at peace.
Thank you for everything, Ma.
Love you Forever ❤️
79 votes funny
76561198338776245
Recommended2 hrs played (1 hrs at review)
It’s not just a game. It’s a pilgrimage. A brutal, blood-soaked, 120-FPS pilgrimage where your only god is a spiked flail that turns skulls into prayer beads.
69 votes funny
76561198321181007
Not Recommended0 hrs played
The gameplay is very solid, do not get me wrong. But I am on an RTX 3070 and the performance of this game REEKS because of the mandatory ray tracing. Save your money until ray tracing can be turned off or when the game goes on sale.
68 votes funny
76561198099825799
Recommended0 hrs played
"Avoid the Slayer" is probably the smartest thing a demon of Hell has ever said.
61 votes funny
76561197995457936
Not Recommended16 hrs played (15 hrs at review)
I don't think DOOM: The Dark Ages is a *bad* game, but I really can't say that I would recommend it. Too much of the gameplay has been boiled down to "stand around and press the parry button when the game tells you to" and it's missing a lot of what I liked about Eternal, which was on the fly thinking and using smart movement, positioning, and enemy prioritization to win fights. Encounter design in this game is especially lackluster - almost every single arena is just in a boring, kind of flat way too big area with maybe a few rocks or walls around in places, and enemy usage isn't very interesting or threatening either.
Mech/dragon segments are cool in concept, but in execution are incredibly boring. Both of them are mainly "hold down fire button, dodge when the game tells you to dodge." You don't ever have to dodge or weave multiple attacks at once in these sections, or make sure to position yourself well to avoid certain attacks. Hold fire, press dodge when you see green on the one enemy attacking you, that's it.
The weapon upgrade system relies too heavily on secret hunting in boring, empty levels where for some reason even though they already fixed this problem in Eternal it is once again possible to get locked out of areas so you have to replay the entire level if you missed a secret too early on - which is a shame because I really like the new weapon upgrades! It feels significantly better than the mod system of 2016/Eternal where you were ONLY using the mods most of the time, but if you want to upgrade everything you're going to need to constantly open your map to make sure that you're not missing out on any important resources. (also... why even bother calling them secrets if now they're just visible on your map by DEFAULT? lmao)
The game is a huge mixed bag. For every genuinely good change from Eternal or fun idea, there's something else that feels bad or at the least confusingly designed. I didn't hate my time with it but I'd have a really hard time saying it's worth picking up over other games.
59 votes funny
76561198249008700
Recommended22 hrs played (4 hrs at review)
PURE TESTOSTERONE
Doom The Dark Ages is a heavy hitter. It’s not fast and twitchy like Doom Eternal. This one slows things down. You’re not dashing around, you’re stomping forward like a tank. You stand your ground. You fight. And it feels amazing. Combat is all about power. Every weapon has weight. Every hit lands with impact. You’re not just clearing rooms, you’re crushing demons with sheer force. It’s intense but not chaotic. The story is there and it adds to the atmosphere, but you don’t need it to enjoy the game. The gameplay does all the talking. You’re dropped into a brutal world, and the goal is simple: survive and destroy everything that moves. The music fits the tone. Dark, gritty, and moody. It’s not as aggressive as Mick Gordons work, and yeah, that edge is missed. But whats here still drives the action and matches the medieval hellscape vibe. Just raw, satisfying violence without the noise. If you want speed, look elsewhere. But if you want to feel like a medieval war machine stomping through hell, this Doom is for you. It’s slow, brutal, and ridiculously fun.52 votes funny
76561199144897304
Recommended28 hrs played (28 hrs at review)
I opened the game, 100%ed it, closed the game, best 28 hours of my life
49 votes funny
76561198213778551
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Forced Ray Tracing is tragic it tanks any potential performance the game might be capable.
46 votes funny
76561198029894415
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Be aware that this game forces Ray Tracing on, and will physically prevent you from booting it up if your computer can't support it.
I suspect a lot of potential customers without high-end rigs will end up getting left behind because of this, myself included.
43 votes funny
76561199539892651
Recommended29 hrs played (4 hrs at review)
It’s incredible to see ID software put out 3 completely different combat frameworks for a FPS in the last decade. Each game is different while being distinctly DOOM. Not many publishers take that kind of risk.
DOOM 2016 asked you to run and gun. DOOM Eternal asked you to jump and shoot. While DOOM The Dark Ages asks you to stand and fight. Imagine these 3 games were your kids. They are all different and You love them all equally for their unique qualities.
36 votes funny
76561197979857409
Not Recommended17 hrs played (1 hrs at review)
annoying awful screen effect you cant disable when sprinting, and auto sprint is disabled by default. as well as the game slows down time EVERY SINGLE MELEE HIT no wonder the developers are claiming this is the longest game theyve ever made, theyre extending the playtime by making half the combat MANDATORY SLOW MOTION. $150 down the drain. what a fucking waste i could have donated it to a palestine charity.
28 votes funny
76561198002901675
Not Recommended21 hrs played (21 hrs at review)
Bethesda shipped my collectors edition to a complete stranger in another city. They have yet to resolve the issue after apologizing for it. They have stopped responding and are expecting me to just eat a 200$ loss.
Edit: Just finished on nightmare. It's also too easy. The first slayer gate in eternal is harder than any fight in this game. Fun combat loop but fights are over so fast. Boss fight is much better than the bosses in eternal though.
26 votes funny
76561197970073600
Not Recommended2 hrs played
The worst DOOM release. Non-existent QA. Simple things like keybinds/re-mapping do not work. Currently unplayable. Not to mention early access is joke. To add insult to injury, horrible performance issues/scaling and poor design choices like mandatory RT. I hope there is a class action lawsuit.
22 votes funny
76561198145256548
Recommended5 hrs played
A Brutal Medieval Bloodbath – In the Best Way Possible
Doom: The Dark Ages is the most metal history lesson you’ll ever get. Forget textbooks, this is a gritty, gory, and glorious trip back to a demon infested Dark Age where you're the one writing the legend... in blood. Taking everything you love about Doom and giving it a medieval twist, this game is bold, brutal, and unexpectedly fresh. You’re not just the Doom Slayer you’re a myth, a warrior, and an unstoppable force of rage with a shield saw.What I'm Really Digging
1) That Setting Hits Hard: Gothic castles, ash-filled skies, towering demons in armor. it's like Dark Souls and Doom had a blood-soaked baby. The atmosphere is thick with dread and badassery. 2) The New Melee Focus: The combat feels heavier, more grounded. Trading some of the speed for pure, unfiltered carnage with that Skull Crusher mace and shield-saw? Yes please. Every hit feels earned and devastating. 3) Dragons. Yes, Dragons: You ride a freaking dragon. And pilot a giant mech. Doom's never been subtle, but this? This is ridiculous in the best way. 4) Doom Lore Goes Deep: There's more story here than you’d expect, exploring the Slayer’s origins adds weight to the chaos. It still doesn’t slow things down, but it gives everything more meaning. 5) It Looks Insane: The visual design is top-tier. From glowing hell-forges to haunted villages, the art direction is relentless. Plus, it runs buttery smooth, even with all the carnage happening on screen.Why I Recommend This Game:
If you're a fan of Doom but wanted something a little different, this is it. The game doesn’t just slap a medieval skin on an old formula. It reinvents parts of it while staying loyal to what makes Doom Doom. The new combat style, the insane set-pieces, and the expanded lore all hit just right.Absolutely Worth Your Time and Money
This game delivers a brutal, cinematic experience with a satisfying balance of old-school carnage and new ideas. It’s confident, stylish, and unforgettable. Whether you're in it for the demon-slaying or the sheer spectacle, Doom: The Dark Ages absolutely rips and tears.22 votes funny
76561198101338083
Not Recommended10 hrs played (1 hrs at review)
I love the setting but this is by far the weakest entry of the three.
Music is rather absent in a lot of places.
Game is much easier compared to the others - even on the hardest difficultly this feels like a cake walk.
I don't play Doom for the story but this one force feeds it the entire game and it is cliche and boring as fuck.
The game relies heavily on the parry/dodge mechanic and the windows to do so are pretty large even turned to the minimum in the settings. Everything you do is in slow mo which is cool the first time then gets old fast with the same animations over and over.
Lastly, optimization was one of the best things of Doom on PC. This is not even near the performance of the old Dooms at their time of release and the hardware they had to run on.
One of my biggest gripes is the Mech and Dragon gameplay feels incredibly shoehorned and rushed so they could hype it up in the trailers. When you play it, instead of feeling like a badass, it feels like an old school Spyro minigame.
For a Doom game. This just screams SAFE. They didn't want to do anything crazy or more controversial than just killing Demons or adding any mechanics that would actually change the game up from its predecessors too much.
21 votes funny
76561199466039666
Recommended39 hrs played
Wake the fuck up Slayer, Lets get to work.
Runs beautifully, no slutters, gameplay is smooth and satisfying. OST is good.
RIP AND TEAR UNTIL IT IS DONE!
21 votes funny
76561197989814030
Recommended19 hrs played (17 hrs at review)
Overall recommendation: Series veterans might want to wait for a sale
Overall I'll call this a tenuous recommendation, with the caveat that I don't think it quite lives up to the previous 2 installments (which are both technically sequels to this), but the combat loop itself is worth playing, even if it means waiting for a sale first. The core gameplay is good, with the introduction of shield and melee mechanics to replace Doom Eternal's flamethrower and glory kills. Thanks to the sound and physics design, you really feel the weight of the Slayer when you move, and each of the weapons as you fire. The combat on its own is good, but not Doom Eternal good. It's interesting in that most of the weapons seem pretty viable on their own, but there are a couple standouts (16 votes funny
76561198061255591
Not Recommended22 hrs played (12 hrs at review)
ITS WOKE
update: ITS SUPER WOKE
16 votes funny
76561198123564172
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Absolutely a huge no. No glory kills (it's just basic punches and kicks), generic, unmemorable background music, and on top of this awful performance. 9800X3D and a 9070 xt, at 1440p high settings and I'm getting less than 60? Are you kidding me? The shield mechanic is boring and the melee attacks being locked behind picking up "melee ammo" shows that the devs have strayed far from what made the first two new games so cool. Thank God for steams refund policy. Wait a year and this will be $15
16 votes funny
76561198046973166
Not Recommended7 hrs played (7 hrs at review)
Avoid this garbage.
As if the miserably poor performance wasn't bad enough. The gameplay design team at id have lost the thread. Combat in this game is atrociously bad. They've completely walked away from the run and gun, pulse pounding pleasure of DOOM. Instead, they've decided on a ludicrously involved, stupidly unfun shield and parry mechanic. You're actually penalized for running the field and attempting to play fast and dodge. Shots home in at ridiculous angles, the parry mechanic is a joke, and the slayer is a weakling. Melees are promoted as a key aspect of gameplay, then gated behind stupidly low 'ammo' count. Why in the hell does the slayer need ammo to punch a demon in the face? That's not a rhetorical question, I'd legitimately love to know why the slayer can't just punch demons in the face as much as he'd like. Why does his bare fist have a cooldown and max use limit? Furthermore, you get punished for closing in to perform a melee combo because 90% of the time it leaves you locked into an animation set while everything around you lights you up, and the demon you're supposedly pounding on wakes up immediately after the combo.
Controls are just as whacked out as having ammo for fists. Movement itself feels tight, but sprinting is junk (and only activates while running forward, for real). There are far too many inputs for a game that should be about slaughtering hell's army. Every little thing has a button, and- frequently - once they're established they no longer actually matter. This is most strikingly exemplified in the case of ascending and descending while riding on the dragon. The game stalls out to teach you that ascend and descend are mapped to Q and E. Shortly after, you're expected to perform directional dodges, which don't actually utilize the keys you just learned. Instead, when you need to dodge up or down you simply hold up or down and press space.
Changing weapons with the mouse wheel takes forever, causing serious issues in the flow of combat, because the game forces the player to watch each gun wielding animation before proceeding, rather than letting them quickly scroll through. The weapon wheel option is unresponsive, and takes its sweet time to pop up. Subsequently attempting to select a weapon using the weapon wheel is a buggy experience that also- of course- interferes with aim. Speaking of laggy inputs, everything seems to be on some weird delay. The aforementioned melee mechanic is a highlight of this, the effect seems to happen well after the button press because of the drawn out animation sequence, and then doesn't respond quickly enough to make it feel like it's registered; simultaneously, it has a weird range that feels both too far and not far enough.
Demon shots are abject garbage, with some taking a significant amount of time to actually move across the field, while others seem to hitscan out of nowhere (taking a significant chunk of armor and health with them). The projectiles have strange, counter-intuitive horizontal movement that doesn't seem correct, thanks largely to the weird homing effect they all have, and they regularly ignore walls and other cover. Field awareness is poorly telegraphed and handled at large, with demons regularly spawning out of thin air behind the slayer. In the traditional DOOM experience, this wouldn't be problematic since movement largely helps with avoiding shots. In this DOOM, movement counts for nothing, and thanks to the stupid homing nonsense you get wrecked trying to play the field.
The parry windows are awkward and nonsensical. This is owing to the fact that sometimes enemies slow down dramatically, almost pausing, which screws up the entire flow of combat, while other attacks seem to proceed at lightning pace with no real clear window for the actual parry- you just have to spam and hope you hit it, which contributes to the input lag as the game does a weird slow down effect sometimes well after the fact. On top of all this, you'll frequently be locked into animations that force you to take damage as a result of the mechanics at play. It sucks across the board.
This is the worst DOOM game since DOOM 3. The feel is awful, and entirely antithetical to DOOM. While it's nice to have a story, to then shackle it to this miserable combat system is a travesty. The graphics are nice, but poorly optimized to say the least (a 4090 with a 7950X3D only getting slightly over 60 FPS is g a r b a g e). Why in the hell is ray tracing a requirement for this game? The maps are massive and open, but then hamstrung by the fact that if you try and actually utilize all that space to run and gun you're punished for it.
It's hard to enjoy any of the attention to detail or other things that went into making this game because the combat is just that bad.
DOOM: The Dark Ages indeed, because they've gone back to the dark ages with the controls and gameplay on this one, and it's made all the worse for it. The only saving grace for all this is that I got this key from a friend, though I feel terrible that they paid money for it, because id does not deserve it. This game sucks.
15 votes funny
76561198108022905
Recommended8 hrs played (5 hrs at review)
Dopamine rush. Kind of steroid. Play with caution.
You kill demons in several ways. There’s also a story that enhances the experience, but you don’t really need a story to play this game. The rhythm and music are awesome but you will feel the absence of Mr Gordon.
It’s the best birthday activity for me. By the way, this is the only horror game I can play. (Because I am the monster here.)
15 votes funny
76561198112766051
Not Recommended0 hrs played
I wasn't able to play the game even tho my drivers were up to date... We spend our money for what? Not only they are forcing RT down our throats, forcing you to get better PC parts for these or future games to make more money. I paid extra to play it early but I and other people can't play it early, then why charge them extra? BILLION dollar worth of company under TRILLION dollar worth of a bigger company can't get a game to run properly. You're just making a clown out of yourself bethesda. Funny stuff.
14 votes funny
76561198038931832
Recommended7 hrs played (5 hrs at review)
Doomguy riding a cyber dragon while wielding a chainsaw shield and a flail.. so metal. They even put a gas pedal on the dragon. I'm sold.
Mick Gordon being absent for the production in music for this game is absolutely criminal.
Everything else is a 10/10
14 votes funny
76561198049735378
Not Recommended0 hrs played
Denuvo
Forced ray tracing
"Advanced access" premium 3 days early
Performance sucks
Gameplay is actually worse than Eternal
Only good thing is new slayer armor design, its the coolest design yet
13 votes funny
