Since I’m apparently a masochist and I like to punish myself in all sorts of ways, I decided to buy Doom Eternal again. It’s been over a year since its release and since I first bought and refunded it. It’s been like 15€ on Steam recently and I picked it without the expansions because people say they are shit anyway. So here’s a second take. I thought, surely it’s something wrong with me and not the game, if so many players give it such huge praise and gave it another try…
SAME OLD THING I STILL DON’T LIKE
And I basically still hold the same opinion as in my initial rant. I don’t know what devs were thinking, but this game has so many absolutely and totally unnecessary elements like they are compensating for something. And the biggest offender is still the retarded way of getting health, armor and ammo. You’re always in a clusterfuck of battle and you keep endlessly think if you need health, armor or should I maybe restock the ammo and because you don’t really have much time to decide or your stupid chainsaw is out of gas it’s just an utter and complete annoyance that you can’t even get past or ignore. Doom 2016 had this magic where you could play it in so many different ways. Either all in crazy, you could use more tactical keep them at a distance approach, you could rely on Glory Kills to restock health or just pick health through pickups only. Same for ammo. You could use chainsaw or rely entirely on pickups like I have. In Doom Eternal, there is just NO choice at all. There is just one way of playing it and it’s you being forced to use the trio of dumb Glory Kill, flame thrower and chainsaw while jumping and dashing around like an absolute lunatic. And you’re always out of ammo. Constantly. Jesus christ. I’m sure it gets better if I put all the upgrades into ammo only, but the path to there will be this stupid annoying nonsense I just don’t want to go through. And I basically only play with shotgun in grenade launcher mode and sniper rifle. One for close combat and another for really far away. Plasma gun and machine gun just feel so pointless and I didn’t even get any other weapons yet.
And if that’s not enough, all the monkey swinging nonsense has no place in Doom game. Sorry, it just doesn’t. When double jumping and swinging wasn’t enough, they put fucking double dashing into the game. WHY?! I’m this fucking badass demon slaying motherfucker and I’m swinging around like a fucking preschool kid on a school playground. Fucking hell.
Like I said in initial rant, I never had problems with such mechanic in Tomb Raider game. It’s the core element of it to jump across platforms, do monkey swings over poles, climb and do all sorts of acrobatics. I loved it and Tomb Raider without it wouldn’t be Tomb Raider. When has that been a core element of Doom? Or any first person shooter for that matter. Mirror’s Edge maybe, but that was parkour masterpiece, this is just a mishmash of many stuffs. It’s just so unnecessarily stupid I can’t understand why they put it in the game and I still hate it from bottom of my heart even in second try.
As I’ve been pushing myself through the game, I’ve now also discovered I have this space ship where I “upgrade” my stuff and it’s also this big fucking thing filled with “stuff” to unlock. It’s yet again just so unnecessary and overwhelmingly oversized. Maybe there will be a fight in it at one point in the game which is the feeling I have, but it’s just too big for a “home base” and filled with crap I may or may not unlock someday.
It’s just more of everything and it just feels like they were already past the point of having fuck ton of everything and they crammed even more stuff in it. It’s just bah, overwhelmingly pointless and doesn’t really add up to the feel there is so much to discover as there is “my god, I’ll need to repeatedly fiddle through all this crap” to really make full use of gadgets and guns or be forced into chore with inferior tools? Ugh.
It feels tiny bit better now that I’m playing it from beginning for the second time, but at the same time I discovered so many new unnecessary things I now again hate it.
BONUS RANT
And lastly the bonus rant, something that didn’t bother me initially, all the RTX stuff. Don’t get me wrong, ray tracing is nice and I have the power to run it. Issue is, they selectively used RTX effects, mostly on reflections and some lighting effects, but ignored the rest like shadowing and global illumination which is almost non existent in this otherwise great looking game. And then you’re at a point where reflections in windows and guns look ridiculously good, but then you look across the world and it’s this washed out scene that feels like games from around 1999 that didn’t really have proper world shading, ambient occlusion and global illumination, just objects sticking out of the scene like a sore thumb. It just feels like bare polygons with some general light applied, lacking any kind of depth and feel that light is reaching it and creating shadows or darker areas. And my god, whole game looks like someone smeared vaseline across the lens of a player. It’s just so soft and muddy looking I had to slap ReShade on it with CAS sharpening, FakeHDR to give it depth and eliminate the washed out foggy feel and also use AstrayFX GloomAO which is screenspace ambient occlusion effect that adds the missing world shading and shadowing and overall depth as well as RadiantGI to actually give the game global illumination because it feels like it has none. Now, with all this stuff, it finally looks proper. Textures are sharp and feel like you’re actually using seriously high quality textures, washed out textures are gone and all the gore actually looks like blood is right about to burst out of the tentacles and guts hanging all over the levels, lava actually feels like a scorching fluid and basic things like rocks and stairs around finally have some depth because of AO/GI. Even the main menu portal with Doomguy standing there looks so much better. I mean, just look at this…
I know it fucks up with some distant objects making them too sharp for the distance, but who gives a crap about that when stone literally gets cracks and damage that doesn’t exist in shots without ReShade. Or the banner actually getting textile texture all of a sudden. Or all the little tiny shadows on steps and stones as well as on Doomguy. Sure, I’m grateful they added RTX and DLSS later and all that, but balance things a bit for god sake. You can’t just go all out on reflections and forget your entire game outside of that looks bland and smeared with almost no details anywhere. And this is all maxed out running on RTX 3080!
I’m going to finish it since I like to punish myself and since I bought it at such discount, but this surely won’t be a game I’ll remember fondly. Not at all. Angry sheep in praetor suit, signing out.
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