I really liked the combat, especially the weakpoint system. Although it's repetitive, whenever I hit something correctly, it gave me a feeling of severely damaging an enemy, as opposed to the big tanky demons where you just have to chip down their health with a plasma gun for 8 seconds. I kinda don't get why they didn't put more weak points on enemies if they wanted to emphasize that kind of gameplay. Like, you can shoot the guns of the regular Mancubus, but not the Cyber Mancubus? I don't want every demon to be 1-shot kills like the Cacodemon, but it just feels like there's nothing interactive you can do with the second half of the enemy cast aside freeze them. Anytime one of those big Cyberdemon looking guys showed up late in the game, I saved the instantkill sword just for them. Not wasting my time on that...
The platforming was okay, but from how Brad described it, I kinda expected like long obstacle courses or something. Most of this stuff was just: Jump across here, cling to this wall, aim for the green light, maybe dodge some fire. Maybe it's bad on controller, but I had 0 problems with dashing or anything. maybe use the air mobility rune if you have problems?
The things I disliked were the Marauder enemies and the last boss. I thought the Marauder was a great boss fight, but every time they showed up in the middle of a level, I just groaned. I know you can shoot a rocket past them and detonate it, but they move so fast and you do not have enough rockets to deal with that. I have no idea how they expect you to kill one of those guys in 30 seconds for that secret fight.
And the last boss... just didn't wow me. He looks intimidating at first, but when you get to the second phase he looks silly. They make a big deal out of needing the sword to kill it, so I thought it would tie into the fight at some point, but no? They give you all this sword ammo just to kill the respawning trash demons? And there's so much fire, and screen shaking, and things knocking you around; it was just too chaotic for me to really enjoy playing. Especially when he wouldn't stop spawning those shield guys. Fuck those things.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Eternal, but I feel Doom 2016 is probably the more cohesive of the two... despite the efforts the team went through to make Eternal more engaging and interesting.
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