Back in November, I picked up Doom Eternal on Steam during a weekend sale. It's a relatively old game now (released in March of 2020), but having kids means I don't game as much as I used to. I'm glad I picked it up on sale, because the game was a letdown. How this game got such stellar reviews is beyond me. Maybe it's a sign of the state of first person shooters these days?

As is expected from an id Software game, the game's graphics are stellar. Even on my old rig it looked great and played smoothly. That's about where my praise ends, however. Combat in this game is a chore. Ammo is super limited, which is clearly a design decision to force you to use the game's "glory kill" mechanic. Levels, though beautiful, are the now-typical arena-hallways-arena style design: fight enemies in an arena, then walk through some hallways (or do some jumping puzzles) to get to the next arena.

A few of the enemies were fun, with a number of callbacks to the original, but some of them were a real pain to deal with. I ended up having to lower the difficulty of the game just to get through it; some of the arena battles were just too much of a slog. The story is weak, though I didn't expect much in this department; all id Software games traditionally have terrible story lines.

All in all, I don't envision playing this game again. On my typical letter-grade scale, I'd give it a solid D (for disappointing).