Recent reviews by Criceto

you have a lever action double barrel shotgun, a gun that grinds up skulls and uses the resulting shrapnel as ammo, a chainsaw shield, a medieval flail, a giant mace, a mech, a cyber dragon, and more. need i say any more.

In all seriousness, the game is fantastic. I'm glad id is trying something new with every entry and they didn't just resort to making Eternal 2. And I'm saying that as someone that has like 100 hours in Eternal. The gameplay here is of course superb and all the new weapons, as well as the melee system and parrying, feel amazing, and the slo-mo adds a ton of weight to each melee strike. The game has less verticality than Eternal but your on-foot movement speed is faster and movement feels much more impactful overall, you really do feel like an iron tank shredding through hordes of demons. Adding to that feeling is the amount of destructible objects that litter every combat arena. The shield is so much fun to use whether it's slicing a group of fodder enemies in half or using it to move around the arena by bashing into enemies. As I got better at the game I found myself using the shield almost like the dash from Eternal by putting the shield up and strafing to the side. The destructible demon system from Eternal has been expanded so you can now blow off enemies' limbs entirely. The dragon and mech sections are a little repetitive but they don't overstay their welcome, and the sheer spectacle more than makes up for it imo. They also break up the on-foot Slayer gameplay and keep it from potentially getting stale. The sound design for weapons, parrying, etc is also great. On the subject of sound, the music is pretty great. It's not Mick Gordon great, and I definitely preferred the iconic sound he brought to DOOM, but Finishing Move did a goodeffort of their own and the music fits the game very well. The music volume is pretty low by default though, I'd recommend cranking it up to 100 and turning SFX and voice volume down to around 60% or so. The narrative isn't anything groundbreaking but it's a fairly engaging and interesting prequel story for the Slayer and the Sentinels which is all it really needed to be. I also had a lot more fun with the boss fights here compared to 2016 or Eternal, mostly just because of the parry and melee mechanics that sometimes make it feel more like I'm playing one of the new God of War games or something but I'm not complaining.

As for performance, the game runs at 70-100 FPS most of the time on my 2080 Ti and Ryzen 5 5600 which is by no means a high end system. The game is optimized very well, anyone saying otherwise is either experiencing a bug or doesn't understand what the word optimization means. A game being more demanding does not mean it's unoptimized. And no, they can't "just" release an update to disable ray tracing. Almost all of the game's lighting is done through RT, so either the game would be pitch black, or everything would be fullbright. That, or they'd have to go through every area and either hand-place lights or bake the lighting. Neither would look good considering such a solution wouldn't be able to factor in the destructible or otherwise dynamic objects found in every area of the game. DOOM has always been a series that's quick to adopt new tech since it's inception. The original games and DOOM 3 were both boundary pushers, and it's the same story here. 2016 and Eternal were outliers in this regard because there wasn't really any new game tech being developed when they came out. Eternal came out just as ray-tracing started being adopted into games at all and making it mandatory would've SIGNIFICANTLY limited the number of people that could play the game, not to mention they still had to target the aging PS4 and Xbox One hardware that wasn't capable of hardware RT at all. They added RT reflections in a later patch but that's about it. Nowadays, the vast majority of people own a ray-tracing capable GPU and it's become a standard even on low-end consoles. It's been nearly 7 years since the first RT-capable GPUs released, and this game's minimum-spec GPU is a mid-range card from nearly 6 years ago, RT is not a ridiculous requirement anymore. You're gonna have to upgrade your hardware eventually.

Sorry for the tech rant, but the amount of flat-out misinformation I've seen surrounding discussion of this game is nuts.

Luckily, the game makes great use of RT and the increased hardware demands. The levels are sprawling and far beyond anything in 2016 or Eternal, some of them are almost reminiscent of classic DOOM levels in terms of their scale and pacing, as well as the sheer amount of enemies, and each level's art direction is unique and beautiful. For one reason or another I also found finding secrets more fun here compared to the previous games, the way each secret area loops back into the main level makes it satisfying just to navigate the levels. It seems id mostly focused on expanding the scope of the game as opposed to just cramming more detail into smaller spaces which I think was the right move. Not that the actual graphical fidelity of the game hasn't increased, models are more detailed, lighting is better, etc. The game also loads INSANELY quickly. As in, just a couple seconds most of the time.

It's personal preference whether you prefer the gameplay loop here over 2016 or Eternal but I think in basically every other area the game is improved over it's predecessors. As someone who's played every Doom game this is now my favorite. Eternal probanly has the 'better' combat loop and scratches a different itch but to me this one is just more fun. Overall, the game is awesome and I think it was well worth the hype. Truly the first Stand-and-Fight-type game.

The first "FINE, and Here's Why"-type game.

Very fun game, but some gimmicks and boss mechanics are not explained well at all, which can make some parts pretty frustrating.

i finally get to live out my fantasy of getting possessed by keanu reeves

Amazing game, but some things can feel really obtuse to figure out, like certain enemy weaknesses and how to achieve certain style points in particular. I get that the point is probably that you're supposed to experiment but it kinda just feels like I'm bashing my head against a wall.

I'd love to do all of the achievements but I'll probably end up skipping the ones that need me to discover certain style points simply because discovering them isn't fun. There is a style point index you can view after beating a level, but the fact that you can only view it after beating a level severely limits its potential helpfulness, and the description it gives for each action is also pretty vague, having specific inputs shown for each action would be a big help. Not to mention, any given style point is only viewable AFTER you've already done it, so trying to unlock any remaining ones just boils down to trying every possible input combination until you stumble upon the one that you're missing. Like I said, I get what the intention was, but I'm just not a fan.

For the enemy weaknesses, maybe have a book of enemy strategies or something so it's there for people who want a more direct answer but isn't being shoved in your face for people who don't? I just don't want to have to dig through Steam discussions to get a clear answer on how to defeat a certain enemy.

Considering the fact that this review is 99% about the negatives, I have to re-emphasize that I think this game is AMAZING as-is. When you get into that flow state of playing stylishly and everything clicks into place it's an absolutely amazing feeling. I also really love the improvisational part of the combat, it's almost immersive-sim-like where you're quickly making little last-second plans to take down enemies in the most creative ways possible. Not to mention the game runs amazingly, locked 90fps on the Steam Deck OLED along with great battery life, and of course it's been perfectly smooth on my desktop PC.

I'm already loving this game and the only reason I criticize it is because I love it and want to see it improve. But I also understand that my criticisms could be positives in others' eyes and maybe those aspects of the game just aren't my thing.

Either way, like I said, I'm loving this game and can't wait for future updates. Thanks for reading this!

the aces have fallen

I can't think of anything to say that hasn't been said already. It's fantastic, and basically fully featured and rather content-rich already despite just launching in Early Access (like, as in the full base campaign is already here.) Despite that, there's a ton of people bashing on the game for being EA for no good reason which sucks to see.

On a more positive note, the Steam Deck support is great! There's custom graphical presets tailored for the Deck and it automatically sets things like UI and subtitle size to account for the small screen. There are performance issues in a couple areas but hopefully those are cleared up over time.

Play this game, you won't regret it.

Amazing game that everyone should experience.

The issue here is that ~180 countries literally can't experience the game because it's delisted and unavailable to purchase in those countries. They apparently did this because those are the countries that PSN accounts aren't available in, even though a PSN account is only required if you want to play the 'Legends' multiplayer mode. There's no reason why people in those countries can't at least have access to the singleplayer campaign. Or, better yet, just make PSN accounts available in more countries and avoid the issue entirely.

Again, amazing game, Sony just kinda sucks.

microsoft sucks

Excellent game imo and pretty good port, apart from the shader comp. stutters that occur semi-frequently at first, but later in the game can be pretty distracting, the game does compile shaders the first time you run it but I guess it only compiles some. It's a weird issue but the game is enjoyable regardless.