id Software's prequel to the 2016 reboot takes the Doom Slayer back to his origins — and in doing so, takes the franchise somewhere it has never been. Slower, weightier and more cinematic than its predecessors, The Dark Ages is a bold reinvention that doesn't quite match Eternal's mechanical peaks but earns its own identity with conviction.
Director Hugo Martin's pre-release description was precise: Doom 2016 was a truck, Eternal was a fighter jet, and The Dark Ages is an Abrams tank. The mobility architecture of the previous two games — double-jumps, dash mechanics, constant aerial combat — is stripped back in favour of a stand-and-fight philosophy. The Doom Slayer plants his feet, raises his Shield Saw and takes the hits. It is a deliberate inversion of what Eternal built, and players who loved that game's kinetic acrobatics will need a recalibration period of several hours before the new rhythm clicks.
The Shield Saw is the game's defining addition and, in its best moments, its greatest joy. Blocking with precise timing parries neon-green projectiles and charges a counter-attack. Throwing the shield creates a ricocheting projectile that tears through crowds, returns to hand, and can be chained into close-range melee combos. The Flail, the Power Gauntlet, the Dreadmace — each melee weapon has elemental properties (electrocution, fire, armour-shattering) that create strategic variation in how you approach each encounter. Hitting enemies with melee generates ammo drops, elegantly solving the previous games' resource starvation loop.
The levels are id's largest yet — open enough to allow genuine positional choice, structured enough to maintain encounter density. The game breaks from shooter tradition with multiple mech sequences (piloting a colossal Atlan walker through demon hordes) and dragon flying segments where the Slayer takes to the sky on an armoured mount fitted with jet engines and shoulder-mounted machine guns. These sections are brief enough to feel like distractions rather than full alternative games, and they escalate the scale of set-piece carnage well beyond anything in the trilogy to date.
The Dark Ages is unambiguously the most story-focused Doom game ever made. Cutscenes are frequent; the Night Sentinels, Prince Ahzrak and the Maykr mythos are developed with more screen time than the entire lore of the previous entries combined. The narrative is gleefully cheesy science-fantasy blockbuster material — the story of how the universe's most feared weapon came to be feared — and it is executed with enough commitment that the cheese never undermines the impact.
DOOM: The Dark Ages is a confident, inventive entry in one of gaming's most reliable franchises. It is the weakest game mechanically in the modern trilogy, but only because Eternal set an absurdly high bar. On its own terms — as a weightier, more cinematic, more story-driven Doom — it succeeds completely. The Shield Saw alone is worth the price of admission. id Software doesn't miss.
https://ninth-art.de5.net/reviews/doom-the-dark-ages/