The Dark Ages’ Is My First Game in the Series—and It Absolutely Rips (and Tears)

I’d always known Doom was a highly regarded video game franchise. Still, up until now I’d only watched from the sidelines—seeing an amalgamation of wild Let’s Plays of its chaotic run-and-gun combat in my poor college days, witnessing folks play it on unconventional computer appliances, and blasting composer Mick Gordon’s heavy metal original soundtrack in my leisure without fully grasping the context to why its gnarly songs went so unbelievably hard on Doom (2016).

Now, with id Software and Bethesda Softworks’ latest entry in the 32-year-old first-person-shooter series, Doom: The Dark Ages, serving as a prequel to its newly christened trilogy—while wedding two action genres I have a high affinity for and am coming around to, sci-fi and fantasy—I’ve finally jumped into the deep end on the series with its newly released game on my PlayStation 5.

I went into Doom: The Dark Ages expecting its signature FPS chaos mixed with the demonic, style-switching combat I love in the Devil May Cry—a series I use as my metric for action games. I got something far more wild: a Doom game that somehow also channels other greats like Halo and Gears of War and yet remains purely, unapologetically Doom, packed with relentless action and satanic madness unlike anything I’ve played before.

After sleeping on the series for too long, I’m wide awake now—Doom absolutely fucking rocks.

A delectable pastiche of sci-fi and dark fantasy

As a prequel, Doom: The Dark Ages eases players into its mayhem, setting the stage for an all-out war between alien overlords, medieval warriors, and hell’s demons. The game sees Doom Slayer under some mind control, caught in a battle where Tonka-toy-built knights (equipped with high-tech comms like the Avengers) face off against a horde led by a warlord rocking Dracula’s muscle armor. Early on, Doom Slayer is treated with the same gravitas as a Final Fantasy summon, given a simple directive: annihilate everything in his path with the same cold efficiency as a walking nuclear weapon.

The Dark Ages‘ story? It’s there. Granted, it mainly serves as an epic backdrop, blending dark fantasy with a touch of sci-fi, all while ferrying players from one bonkers WatchMojo “Top 10 Insane Doom Slayer Kills” video moment to the next. Among the standout sequences that had me sit forward in my chair were Doom Slayer piloting a giant mech like a Pacific Rim veteran—and riding the back of a cybernetic dragon armed with a matching gun that looked like it was lifted straight off a metal album cover.

Even beyond Dark Age‘s massive set-piece spectacles, its moment-to-moment gameplay is pure old-school gaming bliss. Throughout the game’s 22 levels, frenzied players run and gun through an ambush of demons, grabbing shields, ammo, and health potions littered around the battlefield or offered as an incentive for ripping and tearing through demons with their bare hands.

Combat and platforming that’ll light every neuron in your brain

Despite the sheer chaos of the Dark Ages‘ setting, its combat is where it truly shines, offering a wealth of strategy beneath the madness. As its killer box art suggests, Doom Slayer fights off demons with firearms that drop from the sky like orbital supply capsules, ensuring each battle feels like an escalating arms race where hell is on the back foot. New weapons enter your arsenal at every level, allowing customization and fluid switching via the weapon wheel. After adapting to the speed and ferocity required to survive as the Doomslayer, I found myself favoring the following weapons:

• Grenade Launcher: Perfect for starting and finishing fights, delivering quick and effective crowd control like Junkrat from Overwatch 2.
•  Impaler: A needle gatling gun ideal for long-range enemies, stacking damage before detonating with the Shield Saw.
• Accelerator: An energy weapon that feels like Halo’s plasma pistol, offering precision and raw stopping power

Another pleasantly surprising part of Dark Age‘s combat that felt as rewarding to solve as its combat encounters was platforming its environmental puzzles. I found Dark Ages’ emphasis on stopping and smelling the roses by heavily encouraging exploration to be just as much of a brain teaser as its experimental offering of combat combinations. Exploration is heavily promoted, and Dark Ages continuing the series’ implementation of a map that smartly separates hard progress from side content with icons and markers for where hidden items like gold and gems to upgrade equipment was a godsend, making it easy to double back and hunt down upgrades, codex entries, or skins without losing momentum. I found it the perfect blend of action and curiosity-driven exploration for a game about killing demons.

And then there’s the Shield Saw—a new weapon introduced in Dark Ages that I doubted would fit Doom’s FPS combat. But once I mastered it, it became my favorite weapon in its inventory.

Shield Saw is my new best friend

While I was initially apprehensive over whether or not the game’s implementation of a shield would bog down its lightning-fast combat, it quickly became my favorite weapon in the game. Not just because it saved my ass a ton in sticky situations, but for how much more texture its added to its gameplay. The Shield Saw isn’t just for blocking oncoming sword slashes and fireballs; it also doubles as a Mjolnir-like tool, letting you grapple to secret areas to uncover treasure, execute enemies with a shield bash, or ricochet into a line of overheated enemy shields from a hail of the Doom Slayer’s gunfire for explosive crowd control. By far, my favorite use case for the shield saw was with its perfect parries.

Like in Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Dark Ages‘ Shield Saw transforms parrying into a high-stakes rhythm game, rewarding players who seek out oncoming green fire balls and sword slashes and send them flying back at enemies. Even if I was underleveled in a brutal boss fight, or fighting uphill in a handicap battle, a perfectly timed parry could turn the tide in my favor and eke out a satisfyingly primal win in an otherwise unwinnable battle. The DMC sicko in me loved the sheer Royal Guard-style power the Shield Saw empowered me with, letting me stunlock enemies in the most disrespectful way possible.

While melee combat in some games takes a backseat, here it’s everything, not just for style, but for survival. Landing brutal in-your-face punches (or mace flails) funnels health-regenerating orbs, shields, and ammo into Doom Slayer like a vacuum. The game rewards ruthless aggression, encouraging players to embrace the chaos, chain Glory Kill whenever possible, and dominate the battlefield instead of hiding behind cover and playing it safe.

The music doesn’t quite live up to the moment

Oddly enough, my biggest gripe with the game is its soundtrack. It never hit as hard as I wanted it to. While it does an okay job of underscoring the game’s bedlam, it never quite amplifies the gunplay, shield throws, and eyebrow-raising boss reveals the way I felt it should. If anything, it went unnoticed the more I played; even to a newbie, that struck me as a sacrilegious takeaway from the game.

A few hours in, I barely noticed the music ramping up before fights, like it was struggling to punch above its weight (more than I was in a boss fight) to match the sheer insanity on screen. Finishing Move (known for Borderlands 3, Halo Wars 2, and The Callisto Protocol) composed the soundtrack, but for a game like Dark Ages, music needed to be a driving force, not just background noise. Eventually, I turned Dark Ages‘ music volume down and blasted Gordon’s old tracks instead to make up for what the game lacked sonically.

Overall, Doom: The Dark Ages is an electrifying genre mash-up and an incredible entry point into the franchise that lives up to the hype it’s garnered over the past 30 years, and I’m glad I stopped sleeping on it.

Doom: The Dark Ages is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.