Some great games are clever exercises in thoughtful design while others are dumb fun, but Doom Eternal is the best of both. Ripping and tearing your way through demons with your bare hands is a fun and amazing experience that the Doom games have always delivered on. 

But what Doom Eternal has taught the player is for them to rip and tear their way through demons better, faster, and in multiple different ways as they go. Before long, the player will be thrown into the meat grinder with dozens of Hell’s denizens at once, including resurrected Doom 2 favorites not seen in the 2016 reboot such as the Pain Elemental, a semi-dangerous, Lost Soul-spewing cousin of the Cacodemon, and the demon-buffing, pyromaniacal Archvile, which, as in 1993, is one of the biggest threats you have to beat down. Doom was first released in 1993, and was the first fps game to become a major success and is still considered one of the greatest games of all time.

Doom Eternal marks the ninth game in the franchise and was released on March 20. With it being released during the COVID-19 pandemic, the game reached a new launch sale record for the franchise, doubling the revenue made from Doom 2016. Bethesda Softworks has yet to release the exact units of what they made, but it was the best-selling game on Steam, reaching over 100,000 concurrent players the first week. 

Doom Eternal has some of the best environments and graphics of any game made by Bethesda. Just looking off into the distance, the player will see just how much time and effort the team put into the environments, like titans walking around, giant demons the size of skyscrapers, burning buildings,, and so much more. Then there’s the design of each and every individual demon and glory kill and how each demon dies. It looks way better than the 2016 Doom, and runs way better and more fluidly. 

What Doom Eternal has done differently  is that it implemented the use of weak points on each demon, that the player will need to break in order to better damage the demon, survive longer, and get rid of the majority of their damage. For example, for a mancubus, you need to shoot the rocket launcher arms and break those in order to get rid of its flamethrowers and ranged potential, or for the cacodemons, you just use your shotgun’s secondary fire to launch a grenade in its mouth to immediately stagger it for a quick glory kill. This was not a feature present in Doom 2016, nor were there as many glory kills as there are now in Doom Eternal. Now you can do different glory kills based on where you’re looking at the demon, such as the left leg, head, torso, etc. 

With the Doom franchise always being a first person shooter and platforming game, Doom Eternal has made platforming more efficient and intricate with the addition of monkey bars to swing off of at every moment, a new movement ability of dashing in midair and on the ground, and climbing walls. In every battleground, there are as many jungle gyms as there are arenas thanks to the turbo-mobility that they give you; you can kill time soaring around, away from even the nimblest of monsters, if you need a moment to regroup and strategize. 

A 15-hour single-player game is nothing to sneeze at, but the rest of Doom Eternal offers a lot. In addition to the meaty campaign, Slayer Gates and secret timed encounters hidden in each level serve up one-off rounds of extra challenge, (and extra reward), while the Master Levels let you run the campaign again with a much tougher menagerie of monsters waiting for you at every turn. There’s also the 2v1 demons-vs-Slayer Battlemode multiplayer, which is, on paper, a uniquely Doom take on competitive multiplayer. 

Doom Eternal’s brilliance can be summed up in the road to the first big boss fight, to the very end of the game, which will make any person who’s a classic Doom fan happy, especially with who the final boss is. Simply put, Doom Eternal is one of the best first person shooter campaigns ever. As the second game of its kind, it’s lost some of its novelty but none of the joy of its intense and furious combat style. This excellent refinement of the already outstanding 2016 reboot gives you an unspoken deal: If you can keep up with it, it will keep up with you. It continually teaches you how to play faster, smarter, and more efficiently, with lots of options at every step of the way to tailor fights to your prefered slaying style, and it’s an absolute blast along the way.