After playing The Dark Ages for five hours, frankly, I have mixed feelings. Is it a bad game? No, it's quite good, actually. It has a lot of work put into it and it has its moments, that's for sure.
That said, in an attempt to please everyone it has become a game for no one. If there's a concept of "overengineering", then TDA has had an "overdevelopment".
- The game has a surprising amount of story, namedropping, some characters and factions, but strictly speaking I don't give a flying frag about them at all and those resources would have been better spent elsewhere
- The art is still divine and the game works well for me (HDR is especially good), but TDA looks hardly 2 GPU generations better than Eternal. Forced ray-tracing is used here only to save development time at the cost of optimization, and technically the game became somewhat lesser. The system of dynamic gibs is tamer and the number of unique combat animations dropped by a lot.
- Gameplay-wise, game simultaneously collects all the errors of Eternal and all the boredom of 2016. Yes, they've removed the Super Mario Bros jumping puzzles, but at the same time they've completely lost the main achievement of Eternal: insane mobility. Absolutely everything movement-wise is reduced to a shield with a cooldown and you are actually chained until it recharges and cannot move around the arena. Jumping is also nerfed significantly. That would be much less annoying if the arenas were less cworded. Typically, enemies can easily corner you and spam several attacks of different colors in a second. And they hit you in the back without indication and take off the hp to zero. This is not a skill issue, it's just chaos. That being said the parry windows are wider than Atlantic Ocean and the game even on ultra nightmare is more tedious than hard.
- All this spam of color-coded attacks, different types of enemy shields and enemy patterns actually reduces to zero creativity and freedom of playstyle. You can fight off or penetrate certain enemies with a strictly defined weapon or method, the game literally dictates you how to play correctly. At later stages it's simply not fun.
- There isn't enough ammo for any kind of long gunfight, and the radius of all the guns has been reduced to the shotgun radius of other games. Aside from the railgun, not even the stabber shoots that far.
- The music is there, I guess. That's all there is to say about it. Mick Gordon in the background could add a point to my score because game becomes definitely better even with Eternal score. Music is also bugged? Some segments are too silent and some random sounds are too damn loud.
- Levels became bigger, yet much simpler. All these huge empty spaces just killed the complexity of levels from Eternal and 2016. Maybe it gets better after the certain point, I dunno.
- All these attempts to 'make gameplay more varied' came down to completely cheesy two-button segments with a dragon and a mech, and even there they managed to add ripostes and attacks of different colors.
In short, the game has a lot of mechanics (some of them are even good), but most of them are strictly melee-based. Shooting in TDA is quite secondary in nature and often does not really determine the flow of the battle. There is no mobility and you basically play as a tank build from Souls game, not the Doom Slayer. So far, you just grind through the game with two attacks: your fist (and even then you have limited ammo ffs) and a chainshield. On the fifth hour this is getting boring.
There's tons of content in this game, tons of stuff, but it just doesn't add up to a cohesive picture or gameplay philosophy. I feel after meme-reviews like "DOOM IS SO COOL" will die down The Dark Ages will be considered quite controversial entry in the series.
Currently changing regional config, it was set to Spain even tho everything else is set to Latinamerica, really can't believe Id Soft is so far ahead in everything else except for this small detail lol.
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