The 2016 Doom reboot was a miracle, simultaneously honoring Id Software's original masterpiece while pumping it full of new ideas and energy to make it shine in the modern era. Doom: The Dark Ages ($69.99 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S) introduces fresh spins on the demon-blasting formula, with an emphasis on melee carnage and smart defense. Combined with a more open, newcomer-friendly approach, this Doom prequel is a great entry point for new players and an Editors' Choice winner for first-person shooters.

Story: Doom Goes Back in Time

The Doom series has always been an unapologetic mishmash of heavy metal rock album art imagery. By taking place in the past, Doom: The Dark Ages leans more on the franchise's medieval influence. You still play as a space marine who shoots sci-fi guns against demons merged with robot parts. But you also wear a fur cape, pledge loyalty to your king, and fight under the shadow of huge stone castles. The Doom games are like their shred-heavy soundtracks, more about vibes than logic.

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Unfortunately, The Dark Ages continues the franchise's trend of caring way too much about its ridiculously self-serious story. Before and after every level, you'll see visually impressive but very dumb Diablo-esque cutscenes about the political machinations in Hell, complete with generic characters I found impossible to care about. Sadly, much of Doom 2016's sly humor and satire has been lost. There are some fun, campy moments in The Dark Ages, and the story ramps up once the Lovecraftian, squid-filled Cosmic Realm comes into play, but the game is just a little too enamored with its own dark fantasy.

Gameplay: Shoot and Shield, Rip and Tear

The good news? Doom: The Dark Ages is still all about slaughtering fearsome, demonic foes. Combat is king, and The Dark Ages' substantially altered systems are creatively ambitious and satisfyingly successful. Even by the end of the 15-hour campaign, they kept my full attention.

The new setting is a perfect excuse for an arsenal revamp, with weapons featuring a cool medieval flavor. Alongside your standard shotguns and rocket launchers, there's a gun that grinds bones into a spray of bullets that cover a wide arc. There's also a gun that charges and shoots a heavy iron ball that returns to you. You can upgrade each weapon with loot gathered from the battlefield or discovered in hidden areas. They have alt-fire modes, too.

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The gameplay gains a ton of extra depth with the shield saw, its central new combat mechanic. You can toss it at enemies, block attacks, and hit glowing objects to solve environmental puzzles. The shield comes with a new color-coded parry system that nearly turns The Dark Ages into a Bayonetta-style action game. You can parry everything from projectiles to spear thrusts, eventually activating a bonus effect like paralyzing lightning. 

Along with being a fun tool, the shield creates awesome synergies with the rest of your loadout, feeding into the frenetic combat loop. Shooting enemy armor causes them to overheat. Throwing the shield at overheated enemies, Captain America-style, cuts through an entire horde in seconds. Locking onto enemies and shield-rushing into them deals fast damage and closes the distance. You unlock multiple melee attacks, from a simple punch to a heavy mace, but they operate on a cooldown. However, a successful parry creates the perfect opening for a guaranteed hit. The shield fits so naturally into Doom tactics that I'll have a hard time going back to a series entry that lacks it. Shield combat is now baked into my muscle memory. For more on the Shield Saw, check out I Just Finished Playing Doom: The Dark Ages, and These Are My Top 5 Tips for Beating the Game.

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2020's Doom Eternal received criticism for being too fast and technical, forcing you to perform precise techniques that were more frustrating than fun. The Dark Ages is slower and less vertical. As in classic Doom, many enemy projectiles are big, obvious orbs you must manually avoid while returning fire. Instead of dumbing the game down, these systems encourage a more improvisational, empowering approach. As long as you remember to shield every so often, you can try whatever you want and probably find a way to win. It’s very welcoming to new players.

Granular difficulty options let you adjust the game's speed, parry window, enemy aggression, and other options. So Doom veterans can still turn The Dark Ages into the brutal experience they crave.

Mechs, Dragons, and Other Epic Moments

Blasting its way onto current-gen consoles, Doom: The Dark Ages embraces a "bigger is better" mantra best exemplified by two of its shiniest additions. Several levels let you take control of a giant mech and punch gargantuan demons like something out of Pacific Rim. These sequences can't sustain an entire game, but they are just complex enough to justify the spectacle. As in the main game, you'll need to carefully dodge and weave to find the right opening for offense.

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A few levels let you mount Doom Guy’s trusty steed: a flying dragon. Once again, the game emphasizes correctly timed dodges to enhance your guns. More interestingly, you can ride the dragon to access new map areas. This makes it feel like an actual tool instead of a scripted sequence. On some levels, you'll start by attacking the enemy in the air, land on the surface for an on-foot shootout, return to your dragon, and move on to restart the process. 

Overall, many of The Dark Ages' 22 levels have a more epic scope than previous Doom titles. You'll run and gun down numerous corridors, but several stages are open fields. Like Halo's Silent Cartographer stage, the levels offer a fair amount of freedom in where to go and how to complete objectives. Mowing down an entire army of darkness, not just a handful of monsters, occasionally tips the game into Dynasty Warriors territory.

The one drawback to these larger maps is that The Dark Ages sometimes loses that aggressive sense of forward momentum. In Doom 2016, it felt like you and the demons were trapped together, and the only way out was to rip and tear as fast as possible. Doom Eternal arguably raised those stress levels too high. The Dark Ages' pressure and stakes are a little lower. In fact, I found the game relaxing at times. Doom should put you on the verge of a panic attack without tipping over.

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The Dark Ages also doesn't feature multiplayer modes, a less beloved but still appreciated part of the recent Doom games. If anything, the bigger arenas could've lent themselves to something like Doom's take on the Battlefield series' environmental chaos. Still, if a choice had to be made, focusing on the solo campaign was the right call.

Graphics and System Requirements

Doom has a proud history of running on just about anything. However, with its gorgeous, cutting-edge graphics, The Dark Ages is a bit more demanding. For example, the game doesn't run on Steam Deck. At the very least, your PC needs an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel Core i7-10700K CPU, an AMD Radeon RX 6600 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super GPU (8GB of VRAM), 16GB of RAM, and 100GB of SSD storage. For a full rundown, check out the full system requirements.

I ran the game on my laptop, which features an Intel Core i9-13900H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. I enjoyed locked 60fps performance with very high settings as long as I stuck to 1080p resolution. This is the first game to run on the new iD Tech 8 engine, and it held up marvelously as I turned countless demons into pulp. I blissfully watched them deform in real time as blood, bullets, and energy blasts flew across the screen.

Check out I Tested a GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop With Doom: The Dark Ages, and It Slays for high-end GPU benchmarks.