[h1]Rip, Tear, and Find the Flow[/h1]
I've just finished my last fight with the ultra-final boss, and I'm still riding the emotional high. Short version up front: this is the game that made me understand what "emotional spikes" in a shooter actually feel like - fights where every single second is balanced on the edge of death, and one mistake turning into another can erase you in seconds.
This was my first proper modern AAA blockbuster. Before this, I mostly played games like Portal 2, Kerbal Space Program, Terraria, and indies. The only modern DOOM I'd played was DOOM (2016), and I thought I'd already seen everything this kind of game could offer. It was fast, powerful, brutal.
Then DOOM: The Dark Ages completely rewired how I see the series.
[h2]An unstoppable tank with a very big mace, a shield, and a spear that ruins your brain[/h2]
Here, you feel like an unstoppable tank. You can wipe out hordes just by crashing down among them, and watching the mace charge build up, then going [b]CHKA-BOOM[/b] into a crowd, never gets old.
The Shield Saw is the mechanic that ties everything together. It's not a defensive crutch - you block with it, parry with it, throw it, and launch yourself straight at enemies, which speeds up the ripping and tearing tenfold. Alongside your main arsenal you always carry one off-hand tool, Shield Saw or Chain Spear, and the combinations you can pull off get completely wild.
At first, it's genuinely difficult - you're relearning which button answers which attack. Then something clicks and you stop thinking about buttons. I hit that click twice: once in the base campaign, once again with the Chain Spear in the DLC. Both times it came the same way - a long, furious streak of deaths, me getting angrier and more determined with every attempt, refusing to stop, and then, almost always after a good night's sleep, clearing the exact same fight first try the next day. Screaming and cursing at the demons the whole way through the next few chapters. By the last third of the game you can feel when you've actually mastered the combat: you're switching Shield Saw and Chain Spear on the fly without thinking - shield-dashing point-blank into a demon or yanking yourself out of a crowd to line up a one-shot super shotgun kill, then a second later flying like a fighter jet on the spear, not touching the ground for twenty seconds straight.
[h2]The campaign, then Revelations kicks the door in[/h2]
The base campaign keeps feeding you new weapons and Shield Saw upgrades almost until the very end, so combat never stops opening up - that alone makes this worth the money. Then Revelations arrives (if you bought it) and hands you the Chain Spear, which scrambles your muscle memory even harder than the base game did on day one.
[h3]Please rebind the spear[/h3]
[b]Strong recommendation: rebind the spear controls, most of them onto your mouse's side buttons.[/b] The setup that worked best for me:
[list]
[*][b]Spear Slash:[/b] move it from R to Right Mouse Button.
[*][b]Spear Throw:[/b] move it from Right Mouse Button to Mouse 4.
[*][b]Spear Stab:[/b] move it from G to Mouse 5.
[/list]
Slash is your main spear action for parrying and breaking armor, so putting it on RMB feels natural. This keeps the spear entirely under your mouse hand while the keyboard stays free for movement and weapon selection.
I also tried a controller myself for a bit. Camera control feels genuinely tank-like and it's hard to track enemies with it, so I dropped it fast. It's a real option if you want to play on the couch on an easier difficulty and just relax through fights, but for the way I wanted to play, mouse and keyboard were non-negotiable.
[h2]Nightmare, the numbers, and the road to 100%[/h2]
I don't get why people say the base campaign takes 20 hours and the DLC around 12. My numbers: roughly 50 hours on the base campaign for a full 100% clear (would've been closer to 30 without going for full completion), and about 25 hours on Revelations, including the final boss - which alone took several days.
That ultra-final boss earns the reputation: it uses basically everything you've learned across the whole game and multiplies it by three. A solid two-thirds of its moveset is stuff you only learn by dying on its arena over and over.
Playing on Nightmare is where the real payoff is - I can't speak for Pandemonium or Ultra-Nightmare, those are for actual sadomasochists 😭. I died constantly, and that's exactly why every win felt incredible.
Getting to 100% isn't much of a slog either. In the base campaign you'll probably need a guide for the last few secrets. Revelations is friendlier about this - it doesn't gate its main completion goals behind every secret. The real cleanup work is reassembling all the Relics and clearing the post-game path to the true final boss.
[h2]Performance[/h2]
Quick note for anyone wondering: on an RTX 5060 Ti at 1440p with DLSS Frame Generation x2, I got a comfortable 111 FPS; without, around 60. The game largely ignores whatever you manually set and just pushes the highest settings your GPU can actually handle, and NVIDIA's current DLSS/Frame Gen stack makes that genuinely worth leaning on. If you're on Full HD with a GPU no older than 6-7 years, you shouldn't have any trouble.
[h2]The soundtrack deserves better mixing[/h2]
The legendary DOOM sound design is here, and the music leans more rhythmic and groovy than previous entries - more than once I noticed I was ripping through demons exactly in time with the riff.
[b]My one real complaint: the mix.[/b] Gunfire, combat noise, and screaming usually bury the melody entirely. It doesn't wreck the experience, but the balance clearly deserved another pass.
[h2]The story does its job[/h2]
Nobody buys a game like this for the story, and it knows it: it's built around emotional beats rather than a gripping plot, clearly drawing the line between good and evil without leaning on the most tired clichés. That's exactly what it needed to be. No complaints, nothing more to add.
[h2]Final thoughts[/h2]
Very few games have given me spikes like this - fights lasting five-plus minutes with every second on a knife's edge. The game is stacked with content, and even after the ultra-final boss there's still plenty left to chase. It's almost perfect at being exactly what it promises.
I came away completely satisfied.
[hr][/hr]
[h2]THE FINAL JUDGEMENT[/h2]
[b]🔥 9 / 10 🔥[/b]
