Doom Eternal (2020)

Watching some gameplay footage of the Switch version. Looks like another successful "impossible" Switch port from Panic Button. Unfortunately, IMO, Bethesda dropped the ball with their decision to go digital only with this port. I'm happy buying the digital ports of Doom I, II, 3 & 64 for $5 each, but $60 for a digital only title? That's a pass from me. Even if/when it goes on sale for $40 (or even $30) that's too much for me, especially since I have the option to purchase physically on other systems for that price (or less, if the right sale comes along).

I do hope everyone that does decide to purchase this port right now enjoys it as much as I think I would. I look forward to reading others' thoughts on here in the future.

While I'm loving every second of this game, I do have a complaint:

Not having fast travel auto-unlocked when you replay a mission is dumb.

I usually first play a level until the end, when I have the automap and fast travel, and then before exiting the level I go back and grab all the collectibles, but last night I was tired and forgot to do it and now I have to replay the whole level (almost an hour) just so I can get my sweet, sweet collectible stuff and keep making my ship prettier and my Slayer Slayer...er?

I'd say "well, I can use cheats when replaying missions so it gets faster", but when cheats are enabled, Slayer Keys don't spawn (something by itself dumb since cheats get disabled inside slayer portals), so if I wanna get everything a level has to offer, I have to play it "vanilla".

It's nothing too serious and I'm loving the game, but it annoys me so I'm complaining about it on the Internet.

Compared to most games out there, the original campaign of this game was really demanding, even on Normal difficulty. I got used to it and found the gameplay itself extremely fun by the end, but if there was one thing about the game that I was never fully able to embrace, it was the length of its missions and some of its encounters that seemed to go on for much too long. Pace-wise, something just felt off and I’d leave my sessions tired out and not wanting to continue despite enjoying it moment-to-moment.

The new expansion seems to worsen this feeling, with even less breathing room and more aggressively long encounters from the very start—combined with assuming I have improved at the game in the last 7 months rather than uninstall it shortly after finishing. Before even finishing the first mission, I found myself completely exhausted with the game and needing to step away. The core gameplay is still a blast and I hate to sacrifice my own personal progression by dropping to Easy, so we’ll see how it goes next time... but it may have to happen. Lol

Lately, I've been looking at some skips to do for a Nightmare glitchless speedrun and I came across this channel for some tips. Watching these videos blows me away at how deep an FPS like Doom Eternal can be. Stuff like this make me prefer Doom Eternal over 2016 by an extremely wide margin. Titles and thumbnails can be clickbaity, but I highly recommend you watch these videos if you want to get better. Heck, I'll use them for my 9th playthrough and beyond(yes, I'm playing it for the 9th time).

If you love the Meathook, you'll love it even more. This thing is capable of skipping fights, it's ridiculous.

This is a game that makes me wish for half stars on this site. It's a 7/10.

It still has exciting combat, the weapons feel good, the secrets are fun to find, the locations are spectacular - a real improvement there over the first game. But they added so much bullshit. Way too many cutscenes, tutorials popping up for every enemy that appears (except the one that will hide and spawn demons forever if you don't find and kill it), junky weekly quests and constant reminders to go Battlemode. There's too many things to keep track of in combat, they almost ran out of buttons for them all. The combat is so fast that I rarely even get the time to check my HUD to see when things are off cooldown, or how much chainsaw fuel I have. The combat was very strategic, but also so relentless that I never felt like I had the time to strategize. The first few levels were a real slog, with too much thrown at the player at once and poorly controlled platforming. After that, things started to get more enjoyable, but the last few levels went downhill again with combat encounters that seemed to last forever. I did really like most of the boss fights, but the marauders were a pain in the butt that stood counter to the entire game design.

Still fun overall, but sometimes (like in Doom 2016) less is more.