Heard about the changes to Doom? They’ve gone medieval with it, sort of. Also, they’ve added bowling. Sort of.
Actually these two things are related. Doom: The Dark Ages is certainly a bit more medieval than you might have expected. The Doom Slayer’s now dropped into a sort of techno-middle-ages. There are still giant robots and weapons powered by bubbling spheres of purest plasma, but there are also allies decked out in chainmail and armour plating, and there’s much talk of keeps and castles and sorcery. It’s medieval-adjacent, I would say: fantasy as much as sci-fi. There’s a vogue on TikTok these days for finding old charity shop pictures of ancient bucolic scenes and then painting modern video game characters into them. The Dark Ages feels a bit like that.
Doom: The Dark Ages reviewPublisher: Bethesda SoftworksDeveloper: Id SoftwarePlatform: Played on Xbox Series XAvailability: Out 15th May on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/Sand Xbox PC. The game will be available day one on Game Pass.
But bowling? Okay. So because the Doom Slayer’s now stuck in this rejigged middle ages, he’s got a cool shield, and while the shield can be used to deflect damage, and is right at the core of a pleasantly simple parry system in which you wait for neon-green-coloured attacks to arrive and then knock them back where they came from for massive damage, you can also use it for much more kinetic stuff.
You can do a shield charge if you lock on to a foe or a weak bit of scenery, which makes you extremely mobile, zipping huge distances across the map like a holy snowplough to cave someone’s head in or open up a new route. That’s fun. But the shield also reacts in interesting ways with hot metal.
DOOM: The Dark Ages Review – It’s Classic DOOM With A Medieval Twist And An Awesome Murder-Shield Watch on YouTube
This sounds complex but really isn’t. Enemies and parts of the environment often come with armour and shields, and the more damage they soak up, the hotter they get. When they’re so hot they’re glowing a luminous coral colour – neon-green and coral; the Doom Slayer’s clearly fond of mid-noughties TopShop – you fire off the shield and it reacts with the hot metal in an explosive way. If this is part of the environment you’re targeting it means you’re cutting chains and lowering doors or dropping crates into play. If it’s a combat moment, it means that you see a phalanx of shielded baddies up ahead, you get them all nice and hot and coral, and then you blast them all apart with one chuck of the shield. (The shield returns automatically, a la Thor, BTW, and also has chainsaw teeth on the edge because this is Doom.)