DOOM Eternal

This 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.

Treat 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]

These 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]

More 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.

Doom 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.