Examining the terrors of The Ancient Gods expansion.
Doom Eternal was a fantastic evolution of the Murder Gras that was Doom 2016, focussing more on resource management and exploiting enemy weaknesses, it tasked the player to put greater thought into their demon killing. While some prefer the satisfyingly simple combat of the prior game, I would hold up Doom Eternal’s monster slaying as superior. Weaving back and forth between demons with the dash alone provided a sense of almost Devil May Cry style and allowed the developers to racket up the speed of battle. It is almost like the enemies’ attacks are built around being able to evade quickly and removing that ability would be a stupid idea – more on that later.
So obviously Eternal’s expansion The Ancient Gods would provide more of that sweet, bloody goodness the main game so lovingly bestowed on us – well, kind of. As you likely know by now if you’ve played The Ancient Gods, it is extremely hard, and it isn’t always hard in a fun way. The first level of the first part takes place on a facility in the middle of a stormy ocean, and it wastes no time in throwing as many baddies at you as possible to illustrate that it is indeed not fucking around. Demons are packed everywhere and usually in very confined places, including one where a Cyber Demon fruitlessly fires upwards with all its rockets hitting the low ceiling in the process.
There is sometimes an air of amateur with Ancient Gods, resembling those fan made levels in which the maker decided to cram in enemies by the boat load because they mistakenly thought increasing the difficulty always increases the fun (also known as the Dark Souls 2 mentality). Fighting a Marauder in a room that could be charitably considered cozy is not enjoyable when every three-seconds you’re getting caught on one of the fodder zombies, which need to be there so you have a source of health and ammo. It’s a problem that crops up more in the first part of The Ancient Gods than it does in the second, which mercifully gives you some larger areas to battle in.
But let’s get into the meaty centre and examine the enemies introduced in the expansion. And Ancient Gods shows you that it isn’t exactly going to blow your socks off when the first brand new foe is a turret, but it is a turret that will annoyingly hide if you aim at it for too long, and flirtatiously only reveal itself if you look the other way for a second or two. And of course they are mostly placed in locations that make it very hard to dodge their fire, forcing you to take cover and pop out to fire off a few quick shots, the very thing that modern Doom is supposed be a reprieve from. The Blood Maykr is a little more interesting and it’s the type of angelic opponent I thought we’d be seeing a lot more of in the expansion, but it suffers from being far too easy to vanquish. You simply wait until its you-can’t-kill-me-now shield goes down and then summarily blow its head clean off.
Now we get to the Spirits, and this is when I started to develop a frowny face when playing. Spirits can possess other demons to give them a boost to their defence, but what really makes possessed demons such a pain in the arse is the fact they can’t be stunned, frozen or have their weak point destroyed, hugely limiting your options against them. The act of firing untold bullets into a possessed Hell Baron while constantly having to back-peddled becomes tiresome quickly, and nightmarish when they have you in a corner.
Next on the list is the Stone Imp and I actually kind of enjoy this enemy simply because you have a number of ways to destroy it. But the most encouraged (and fun) way is to use the Combat Shotgun’s Full Auto mod, and what makes it work is that every time you shoot a Stone Imp with the shotgun you receive shotgun ammo. This gives you moments of glorious, cathartic violence as you continuously mow them down without the worry of running out of ammo, all while keeping in mind to dodge their attacks as they roll around at the speed of sound, much like the demonic blue hedgehog himself. And the good times keep on going because I’m also fond of the Armoured Baron since again you can employ a number of tactics against it. You can shoot its mace when it charges it up, causing its armour to fly off in a manner reminiscent of Ghosts ’n Goblins, but you can also destroy its armour with sustained fire from the Plasma Rifle and you can prevent that armour from regenerating with the mighty Sentinel Hammer.
But the good times end here because the Riot Soldiers are everything wrong about The Ancient Gods: a re-skin of an existing enemy with very few options available when it comes to killing them. With a shield that’s pretty much indestructible, your only real choice is to set off a remote detonation rocket behind it, which isn’t even a new strategy. Moving on to the Screecher Zombie, we find an enemy that tests your restraint since you are not meant to shoot them. If you do, they buff surrounding demons which is a clever twist, but the Screecher Zombie again shows the expansion’s lack of flexibility. When I first saw what the Screecher Zombie does, I tried to be smart and freeze it with an ice grenade with the plan to quickly shatter it before it could scream. However, the scream sounded off in defiance of my idea, and I could hear the game whispering into my ear “you’re going to play it the way I want you to asshole.”
And finally, we’ve reached it, my most loathed enemy in Doom Eternal, and while there are tougher, stronger and more aggressive demons in the game, none can conjure the same amount of pure rage inside me like the Cursed Prowler can. It acts much like your garden-variety Prowler, that is until it hits you. If it does, your health slowly ticks down and you lose the ability to jump and dash. The Cursed Prowler then proceeds to run away like the dishonourable coward it is, as you waddle your way towards the slippery bastard – taking fire that you can’t possibly avoid – only to realise that you don’t have a charged Blood Punch and the Blood Punch is only thing that will kill it because the game hates you!
But as a change of pace, here is a whole two good things about the DLC. The grapple points for the Super Shotgun’s Meat Hook help further increase the player’s mobility, and they mix wonderfully into the combat as you fling yourself high into the air to begin raining down a scrumptious lead lunch on your victims during your fall. The star of the show, however, is easily the Sentinel Hammer, which I greatly prefer over the Crucible. The Crucible is fun yes, but its lack of ammo for most of the game meant you hardly used it. The Sentinel Hammer on the other hand recharges quickly and provides a chance to stun enemies (aside from possessed demons, naturally) to get a breather and go on the offensive. It even incorporates nicely into your arsenal as you can use in conjunction with your ice grenade or flamethrower to get a big refill on health or armour.
But those two positives don’t really justify the purchase of The Ancient Gods in my eyes, and for the money, the recycling of enemy designs is extremely disappointing. But the festering issue underneath is this my-way-or-the-die-way attitude Doom seems to have picked up. In the main game you could shoot the Soldier’s energy shield with a plasma weapon to make it explode, you could freeze a Whiplash with an ice grenade to stop it slithering around, you could fire a grenade into the mouth of a Cacodemon to stun it, but these tactics weren’t required, they were choices. Even the widely detested Marauder didn’t need to be killed by a specific mod from a specific gun.
I know that some have enjoyed the stricter nature of The Ancient Gods, savouring having to jump through the tricky and taxing hoops it summons, but the cost to the player's freedom is too great for me. The little text boxes that pop-up when a new demon is introduced are almost mandatory reading in the expansion, since you’re not likely to figure out the solution on your own without a helping of trial and error. And if you need to slap on the screen the precise way to beat a demon even before the player has had a chance to fight it, then that might be an indication that you need to rethink the way you construct them.
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