- Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
- Release Date: Mar 20, 2020
- Also On: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
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- Critic score
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Apr 1, 2020Doom Eternal’s core shooting is strong thanks to grand weapons and enemy variety, but it buries the action under irksome resource management and stilted combat arenas. The bland multiplayer and silly platforming only hurt it more, driving this sequel below previous games in the series.
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Apr 16, 2020The Doom I loved is in here somewhere, but it’s buried under excess, like a perfectly-seasoned meal that’s had a mound of salt dumped onto it. Perhaps any sequel to 2016’s extraordinary reboot was bound to disappoint, but this is one of those rare times where “more of the same” would have been the preferred option. I’d have taken the safe route over Eternal’s messy brand of overcompensation any day.
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Apr 1, 2020It can be tedious and exhausting. Its faux angst and exuberance and hellstory can be grating. It’s probably a level or two too long. But in the end, there’s something so lovable about Doom Eternal, so endearingly goofy about the gory glory kills, so affectionate in the way a monster looks at me cross-eyed as I shove a blade up through its chin and out of the top of its skull. The conventional wisdom is that the monsters in this rebooted Doom gameplay are resources, and what I call shortage is just the necessary harvesting of a monster crop. But more to the point, they’re my playmates in this hopped-up jungle gym with its trampolines and swing bars and tunnels. We’re all in this together to make a colorful over-the-top playground with blaring metal music and blazing quick movement and splatter gunplay and chainsawyering. It’s enough to win over even the coldest critical heart.
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| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
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Mar 17, 2020Doom Eternal is a thrilling return to form and a high-water mark for fast-paced twitch shooting. Buy it.
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Mar 18, 2020This is still ostensibly just an arcade shooter from the 1990s with some beautiful graphics layered on top, but the way Eternal finds a balance between intelligent design and utter chaos is near flawless.
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Mar 17, 2020Treat Doom Eternal like dessert — something to be savored, not hurried. When you have the rare moment between feeding one demon its own heart and breaking another demon’s arm and hammering the freshly protruding bone through the demon’s skull, take a breath to admire the engineering and artistry that makes your actions possible, how the world encourages playful movement, how the specific design of an arena and the placement of each enemy invites you to chain your violence in one ecstatic flourish. Always be moving, but never rush. [Polygon Recommends]
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Mar 17, 2020These are minor transgressions. They don’t come close to souring a delightfully bloody pudding, a tour de force of grizzly decapitation. The highs in Doom Eternal come thick and fast and towering, in the midst of battles that demand total attention. New-new Doom nails that marriage of twitching and planning, the calculated deployment of rampant aggression. It makes you feel godly. I haven’t been able to try the multiplayer mode, but it promises asymmetric, player-orchestrated arenas that sound much more intriguing than the underwhelming marine-on-marine action of the last game. And if winds up as another disappointing side-show, so what? [RPS Bestest Bests]
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May 16, 2020More intense and aggressive, Doom Eternal gives the player more tools to play with, and an increased pressure to use them. Coupled with the fluid environment traversal, the result is one heck of an engrossing game.
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Mar 19, 2020Doom Eternal isn’t quite as focused as its predecessor, and sometimes it gets bogged down in unnecessary additions. But they don’t compromise the core experience, which is as giddily indulgent as anything else you’ll play all year. Doom Eternal is a bigger, more ambitious version of Doom, and for the most part, that’s exactly as much fun as it sounds.
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Mar 17, 2020Doom Eternal is the platonic ideal of a Doom game. The combat, level design, and enemy encounters have never felt better. And it sure does have a story. Not just plot contrivances to get the player from point A to B, but elaborate lore with multiple cultures, planets, characters and sci-fi and fantasy tropes. Page after page of fucking lore that I puzzled over as I moved through the legion’s of hell, ripping the eyes out of cacodemons and decapitating the damned.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 4,798 out of 5639
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Mixed: 378 out of 5639
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Negative: 463 out of 5639
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Mar 20, 2020
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Mar 20, 2020
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Mar 22, 2020