Conclusion

DOOM Eternal is the biggest launch this spring. id Software's new action shooter aims at bringing back memories that made shooter history. I still remember how as a teenager we hauled our PCs and CRT monitors around to set up LAN parties—with ancient, crude, DOS networking tools. Times have changed though, and pew pew, running around in corridors, and shooting everything in sight just won't cut it for today's gamers anymore. DOOM Eternal is introducing various character development options that let you unlock additional weapon firing modes, make your character stronger or give him new abilities, and more. Enemies are much more aggressive now, and they spawn in hordes, so you'll be busy taking them out as quickly as possible. The glory kill feature has seen various enhancements, making it a core gameplay mechanic.

Looking at our huge collection of screenshots, you should have noticed that the maps are very well designed in terms of complexity and intricacy. Movement happens not only on the X and Y axis, but also upward and downward, with the map progressively opening up to unfold its layout. id Software created an outstanding auto-map implementation that works great, so you'll be able to navigate the maze more easily. Secrets are of course included, like in every DOOM, and some of them are REALLY hard to reach. Your character has learned some moves from Lara Croft and is now able to grapple to certain walls that are clearly marked with a special "grip" texture. I'm happy to report that some puzzles are definitely challenging, unlike most other titles where things are 100% obvious and you're perfectly aware of what the game wants you to do next. The heavy use of platforming, particularly the timed puzzles, will challenge some, but frustrate the heck out of others who just came for a run-and-gun power trip. An upside to the new movement mechanics is that when in combat, these essentially turn Doomguy into the Predator. The glory kill and side armament, such as grenade launchers, ice bombs, and the retractable blade, are obvious inspirations.

Gameplay is completely linear, which feels like a missed opportunity to me. The story is completely forgettable trash that tries to borrow lore from other universes, but fails to make it convincing enough for you to care about. Much of the story is also told through boring codex entries, which made sense 25 years ago when hardware wasn't fast enough to render cutscenes; gamers today are too lazy to read text. On the other hand, does a story even matter for DOOM? Gun play is extremely fast-paced, almost too fast at times, and it will definitely get your blood pressure up. What I found extremely annoying was the lack of ammunition throughout the game. You're effectively unable to play the way you want and are rather forced to fight the monsters using a mix of run, stun, and melee mechanics—is this still DOOM?

Only a third of the enemies in each encounter are taken out by the ammo in your inventory. For the other two-thirds, you'll find yourself in multiple melee orgies with the demons. Glory kills were introduced as an optional novelty in DOOM (2016), and it should have stayed just that. In Eternal, it's a vital part of the gameplay, and that takes away a big part of the power-trip fantasy or simplicity that made DOOM great. I definitely like that enemies are more aggressive, but they are mostly still just dumb bullet sponges. What reminded me a bit of DOOM 3 is that maps are a chain of encounters that have a fixed number of enemies placed in a certain location that teleport in in waves. Kill, move on, rinse and repeat. Usually, you have to kill them all to progress, no skipping mobs, and sometimes you'll end up looking for that last imp that somehow was forgotten in a corner. Bodies de-spawn very quickly, guess that makes sense or you'd be unable to walk around the maps with all the carnage taking place.

Difficulty in DOOM Eternal is good, even the lowest setting will pose a challenge for less experienced shooter players, while the highest setting definitely requires some skill. Not Dark Souls level, but some encounters can be challenging at times. What's nice here is that you can usually devise a new strategy quickly to make it through those challenges. It would have been nice to have some sort of respec/skill reset option to try various play styles, which would improve replayability as well. I could see how a second playthrough could be fun, trying to find every last secret, but beyond that I doubt I'd pick it up again.

If I had to tick checkboxes and base a buying decision on that, DOOM would win them all. Unfortunately, at least for me, DOOM Eternal didn't reel me in. Somehow, I feel all the improvements won't let me play the way I want, and the glory kill mechanics interrupt the flow. The game definitely does get better after the first or second hour—at first, I thought "this is what we waited for?", but once your character gains more abilities, a sort of Metroidvania effect sets in and you'll start looking for secrets everywhere, and even go back to earlier zones.

DOOM Eternal is powered by id Tech 7, which is id Software's latest iteration of their famous graphics engine. The new version completely removes all OpenGL support and is Vulkan exclusive. This greatly simplifies development as code complexity has gone down and they no longer have to validate every feature for two platforms. DOOM Eternal features proper HDR support, and global illumination capabilities have been enhanced. The engine is now better equipped to handle open-world scenarios, possibly due to the removal of the MegaTexture pipeline. While that tech has given us super-crisp environment details in earlier titles, it was a huge disk space and memory hog.

Graphical fidelity of DOOM at the highest "Ultra Nightmare" setting is "good", maybe even "very good", but I'm not seeing anything that looks "next-gen". Many textures are blurry and some models definitely lack geometry. While the structural level design is amazing, I'd definitely have wished for more love when it comes to floor geometry and textures. It also puzzles me why they gave us six graphics presets yet built them in such a way that high-end hardware will be dishing out super high FPS (which could be traded for better graphics quality). Guess the good thing is that the performance hit from RTX Raytracing will not result in too low FPS. RTX support will be added in a later patch, one of the reasons being that Vulkan Raytracing support has just been released this week and NVIDIA only has had beta drivers out for a few days.

The level of customization for graphics and input settings is certainly high. This yields a lot of granularity in letting you fine-tune the game to your system. You may also adjust field of view and turn off post-processing effects like motion blur and sharpening. Both AMD and NVIDIA have released Game Ready drivers yesterday, which we used for all our testing—good to see that GPU companies got the gamers covered. We also used the public version of DOOM Eternal which includes a day 1 patch.

Hardware requirements are very modest overall—even at the highest setting. For fluid 1080p gaming even a RX 570 or GTX 1060 is sufficient. To achieve 60 FPS at 1440p, a GTX 1660 or RX 580 is enough! Some might say "good optimization"; I'm not denying it, but why not give gamers with the proper hardware the option to crank up the details? Even at 4K requirements are mild; a Radeon RX 5700 or RTX 2060 Super will be able to drive 60 FPS here. DOOM Eternal seems to be a posterchild to show off the improved capabilities of AMD's RDNA architecture, as the Radeon RX 5700 XT beats the Vega-based Radeon VII by quite a big margin at lower resolution. For 1440p and 4K, VRAM requirements are fine. We measured around 7-8 GB, which is something most graphics cards in this segment can handle just fine. At lower resolution, the Ultra Nightmare profile does require 7 GB VRAM, which means cards with 3 GB or 4 GB VRAM will be challenged. The good thing is that our results show no major loss of performance (due to VRAM) for GTX 1060 3 GB and RTX 570 4 GB. What's surprising is that the RX 5500 XT 4 GB is doing much worse than expected. My best guess is that AMD's VRAM management for Navi isn't as refined yet as that for Polaris. What could be a reason is that RX 5500 XT is only physically x8 PCI-Express lanes, which limits the bandwidth between CPU and GPU, whereas the GTX 1060 and RX 570 are x16 lane cards. At least the game doesn't crash when VRAM is exceeded, and continues to run just fine.

Overall, DOOM Eternal is a solid sequel to the epic series, but I'm not convinced it will achieve as legendary a status as earlier DOOM releases.