Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part One

This is a solid enough dlc to doom eternal, adding elements they clearly couldn't fit into the main game that add to the overall experience of the title. My main issue is that the story should've ended with the main campaign, meaning that this feels like it's bonus content rather than a necessary expansion of the universe. Other than that, it's worth the price of admission.

Thinking about this DLC a while later and I've realized another reason I'm in love with Hugo's series of ridiculously stupid maximalist shit. I want to back up a bit though to last year when I made one of my earliest reviews for the base game. During that time I was already able to break Eternal into molecular elements and profusely praise the game design from this sectioned-off viewpoint, but now I look upon it feeling like it's an incomplete picture.

Part of that has to do that soon following Doom Eternal, I played a lot of games and read a lot of material that ended up shaping my writing, changed my views on thinking about art, and drew me more to the aesthetic and author side of things. I don't think my core tastes have changed a huge amount, but it's opened doors for a lot of things.

Basically this is a long-winded explanation to say that I've come up with another way of saying Doom Eternal is still the bee's knees, and a lot of it has to do with how The Ancient Gods showcases the maximalism and goes several degrees beyond. The way I'd describe it is that Hugo Martin is the western equivalent to the Ninja Gaiden Itagaki, with a crazy love for major fuck-you mechanics and forcing the player into ridiculous zen states of high octane action. That aesthetic bleeds over to most enemy encounters in TAG, where it'll throw TWO possessed cyberdemons and say "deal with this bitch" while simultaneously not giving you enough BFG ammo to say fuck you back because Hugo Martin has stopped giving you mercy. I'd argue this was still present in the original game, but it's fair to say that a lot of it was masked in having to meet to an overbearingly huge playerbase that needed every weakness spelt out to them, a lot of accessible changes that ironically made the game more explicit and overwhelming in terms of information. It ended up backfiring to a point that a lot of people's coloration of the game is pushed into how it "forces you to optimize to very puzzle block in hole" strategies. So it's refreshing that TAG1 just doubles down on the brutal side, to points of such stress that I had to take several several breaks before I could finish it on Nightmare, and the final boss itself took me a solid hour to complete. If you still find the idea of having to use specific weapons in the balancing act to take out certain enemies and manage certain encounters then you will find TAG1 even more against you. And I'm very glad for it. I very much hope TAG2 keeps this up, and that the finality of Doom Eternal becomes the tower of masochism and extremist energy that I love it for.

Also in case I wasn't clear, I think the idea of the combat being one-note busywork is really stupid for reasons that I could make a whole essay on that may/may not include Sekiro, some metaphor about ham, and some document about player expression. I will save you all some headache.