64hoops Doom: The Dark Ages Review

I was expecting so much more out of this, and most of it felt disappointing. It really feels like the devs spent 90% of the time on the main combat, graphics, and sound design, but the rest was an afterthought or ideas that were never fully fleshed out. And there were lots of cool ideas! A medieval story with cutscenes? Levels where you're piloting mech suits and cyber-dragons? All the while you're enjoying the main doom combat loop? Great ideas! But none of them pan out... And even the Doom main gameplay loop is probably the worst of the three. It's not bad or flawed, it just gets REALLY stale after the first 15 levels, especially when the level design is A. Get to marked location or B. Pull 3 Switches/Destroy 3 towers. It's so tiring doing the same thing over and over again! And even though the weapon variety is cool and doom-esque, there's no reason to switch to your other weapons once you discover your favorite. Once I got the super shotgun, I was using that weapon for 90% of the rest of the game. There's no longer any "strategy" to kill enemies with specific weapons, which makes every encounter feel the same. And the lack of glory kills really brought down the fun a ton. And the story just sucks.... there was very little effort put into it. I was actually looking forward to learning about the lore of this game's world. But very little storytelling is actually done, and by the end you really don't care. BUT, it's still a good game in general game standards, just not worth $70, and it's clearly the worst of the trilogy. Classic Game Pass Game.