Rip & tear

Software is taking us to school. Doom School. The Dallas studio is accepted master of the FPS, of course, having given the world Wolfenstein and Quake, but even 27 years after the release of 1993’s iconic demon-slaying Doom, the team is still teaching us how to play shooters.

Doom Eternal is the latest game in the iconic franchise, but it’s much more than just a sequel to the reboot that blasted its way onto Xbox One in 2016. id has packed Eternal with a ton of new systems and ways of playing that are not merely iterative, they almost form their own language, one that you need to be fluent in, in order to play the game as its creators intend.

“When you look back at Doom 2016,” executive producer Marty Stratton says, “that was a great game and we were very proud of it, and there were people that were playing the right way – switching weapons and using movement as a defence and offense, and all of that kind of stuff – but we didn’t always require players to play that way. You could beat Doom 2016 with just the Super Shotgun. That’s not intended. That’s an exploit, that creates a frankly abhorrent experience, and a repetitive experience, that’s not what we want.” What Stratton also definitely doesn’t want is people just shooting demons in a corridor. That’s so 1993. id’s shooter could potentially suffer from an image problem in 2020, with Doom still thought of as that gloriously gory guns’n’demons corridor shooter – but Stratton and game director Hugo Martin are determined that we should get all we can eat from Doom’s buffet of supercharged demon-splattering.

“Hugo has a funny but appropriate saying,” Stratton tells us, “that Doom is junk food, and we’re proud that it’s junk food, but it doesn’t mean it can’t have a ton of nutrition in it. And that’s what we want people to really experience – it’s super fun on the outside but it’s smart on the inside, and we’ve really refined the experience.”

Refining the experience goes beyond simply remaking 2016’s game bigger and better, which it is, of course, but involves giving players a raft of tools and techniques to master each arena and level. Each gun, it goes without saying, has a different effect and function which will make it more suited to certain encounters; every weapon has a couple of mods, or attachments, activated from the left trigger – and these mods are acquired as you progress through the game. As well as an assortment of BFGs, though, your Doom Slayer will get a shoulder-mounted flamethrower called the Flame Belch, useful for crowd control, a Blood Punch (a killer melee move), a dash ability and the Meat Hook, a grappling hook that you attach to demons rather than the environment, to pull yourself