Doom Eternal

Earth has gone to hell in a handbasket and it’s up to the doom slayer to bring the fury

- Adam Bryant

The 2016 Doom reboot raised the bar pretty high for both the franchise and first-person shooters as a whole. Its ‘push-forward’ combat was such a revelation and made the demonslaying exhilarating. But where do you go from there? Well, for its sequel id Software has no choice but to increase the stakes.

“If we don’t raise the bar, and you come back and it’s like when you watch a sequel to a movie that just does the same thing as the first one, then it won’t have the same engagement,” says creative director Hugo Martin. “Push-forward combat was new in 2016. It’s not going to be new when we come out this time.”

Of course that push-forward combat is still at the core of the experience, there’s just a lot more going on this time. You’ll still need to stay on your toes to survive, but resources like health, shield and ammo are at a premium and you’ll need to rely on killing enemies in specific ways to replenish them. Raining flames down on demons using the new shouldermounted launcher weapon will give you shield pickups; Glory Kills, which are even gorier thanks to a new retractable blade, will net you health, while carving beasts apart with the chainsaw will shower you with ammo. You’ll find yourself dancing around the enemy and thinking about what you require at any given moment. Which, is about as ‘Doom’ a concept as you can get: taking what you need by slaughtering your enemies.

HELL WALKER