Doom: The Dark Ages – A Kingdom of Blood and Backtracking

The first thing you notice isn’t the silence. It certainly isn’t the demons, or even the guns. Doom: The Dark Ages does not thunder to life like how Eternal did. Instead, it creeps in, a slow-burning inferno of gothic spires and rusted siege engines. It is a world where every brick feels like it was chiseled from ancient bones. Lore here is not spoon-fed codex drops; it is etched into the architecture, whispered in the echoes of war hymns long past, buried under layers of ash and iron. It is history you have to unearth. And for a while, that unearthing feels like uncovering a lost gospel—one more reason players continue to buy cheap games that offer more than just surface-level thrills.

But then you hit a wall—literal, not metaphorical. Stupid big wall that’s locked because the game decided it was time for a backtrack through a half mile of corpses to unlock the thing.

Doom Eternal vs. The Dark Ages: A Shift from Ballet to Brutality

Doom Eternal was a ballet. An exquisitely violent ballet in which every single moment demands a pirouette with weapons, grenades, and glory kills just to survive. The Dark Ages isn’t like this. Here, combat requires more blunt force—a shield bashing through a line of imps like a battering ram through limp parchment.

And that’s the thing—the shield is not simply effective. Rather, it's too effective. Why spend time plasma rifling a shieldbearer when you can arm-cannon him? Why waste ballista precision when the chaingun’s mindless chewing of anything in its path is more than sufficient? The weapons aren’t bad. Rather, they’re solid in their own right, simply lacking the need-to-have sharpness of Eternal’s sandbox. There is a choice. You just… do not need to.

Firing the super shotgun brings to mind medieval images with its weighty essence. Pulling the trigger feels as if one is wielding a shotgun which is similar to swinging a warhammer. Strong as they are, the mech parts emphasize the violence of this period as they transform you into a siege tower stomping on everything and anything in your path. With such power, balance is sacrificed—now a brawl instead of a dance.

The Levels: Cathedrals of Empty Space

Eternal’s maps, as previously mentioned, are not to be compared to the ones here. In this game, however, the maps are expansive in terms of abandoned empires which are hollow and decaying. Players will climb toward crumbling towers and navigate through siege trenches while even riding a dragon (which is far less enjoyable than how it sounds). Every single texture bursts with dark and extravagant details, proving that Vencer's design is nothing short of obsessive. You step further into these spaces and realize how vast portions of them are completely devoid of any content.

Rather than clever corners, the secrets are sited behind careless walls, hidden shackled until an elusive key is found three-quarters into the level. The most glaring example is the last mission where all progress is erased and players are shackled until they re-enable the blockade through a liberate zone that has already been liberated. This is not exploration, but rather mundane tasks.

And the worst part? The lore—the enticing bits, the murmurs of decayed royalty and ancient treacheries—tends to be hidden behind these same sealed pathways. You’re curious as to why the cathedral is soaked in blood? Tough luck. Solve the skull key puzzle first and wait two hours to find out.

The Mythos: Bloodstains on a Page

When The Dark Ages leans one way, the atmosphere is transcendent. Unlike other Doom games, this is a folk tale, this is a saga etched into walls by frantic palms. The entries in the codex are not bare recounts, they are confessions told by survivors who lived through a never-ending nightmare. Even the demons are different; instead of feeling like intruders, they’re curses, eternally festering in the dark.

The pacing is executed well—until it does the unthinkable.

Halfway through the game, as you descend into a crypt, the musty air saturated with the scent of rot, you encounter a mural depicting the Doom Slayer not as he is now, but as he was then—a knight draped in crude armor. Better yet, it is bone-chilling. But the impact is diminished because you spent ten minutes retracing your steps through the same corridor.

The Verdict: A Domain to be Conquered, but Not Revisited

I didn’t hate my time with The Dark Ages. It feels as if there are promising ideas, something raw and powerful, that could have been magical, but were ultimately discarded because of the excess. Though good, the combat is not great. The world, breathtaking, but disjointed, not streamlined.

Would I play it again? Perhaps. But not yet. Not until the memory of all that backtracking.

In case I do return, it won’t be for the guns, but instead, the narrative, the one overshadowed by the violence and rubble.