Recent reviews by Fiesta Jose

I don't usually do reviews but this is gonna be fairly in depth. TL;DR at the bottom and no spoilers in this review.

I'll preface this by saying I only got into the series shortly before DOOM 2016 came out so I don't have a long history with the series. Once I did play the games I fell in love with the fast paced shooter. I was happy that DOOM 2016 came to be a success and ushered in a sort of renaissance of retro FPS. Since DOOM 2016 we've gotten Dusk, Amid Evil, and more. So after four years how does Id manage to push the genre forward with DOOM: Eternal?

Guns
A lot of the additions and changes in this game were made from the previous game. In particular the Super Shotgun and Gauss Cannon were incredibly OP and because of the massive ammo pool you had you could use pretty much just those two guns for most of the game. Was it fun? Yea very much so, but it left some challenge and variety out of the game. The SS in this game was given different upgrades and overall balanced better. The GC was replaced with the Ballista and balanced. Both still incredibly fun to use. The plasma rifle was a huge winner in this game, it was not really fun to use in 2016 but wow is it really really good here. Those are pretty much the big ones, the other guns felt generally better than their 2016 versions.

Ammo
The ammo pool in this game is also drastically smaller than before. This is because they chainsaw (which causes enemies to drop ammo) now recharges up to 1 charge from empty after a short time. I have seen a lot of people complaining about the small ammo pool but I think the problem is with them and not the game. The game highly encourages switching weapons and being diverse in your slaying. If you are truly running out of ammo there are always some fodder demons that are easy ammo pinatas.

Resources
That plays into another strong aspect in DOOM: Eternal, resource management. The cycle of resource management is simple: Need ammo? Chainsaw. Need health? Glory kill. Need armor? Set enemies on fire. The best part is you can combine these to set up a resource explosion. You can freeze and enemy (there's an upgrade to make frozen enemies drop health), set them on fire, then chainsaw one of them to get a huge refill on all your resources. DOOM 2016 and other shooters don't usually ask for this much of resource management but it is an absolute requirement in higher difficulties.

Difficulty
That segues into a talk about difficulty. DOOM: Eternal is much harder than the previous game, there are a lot of moving parts in combat that can overwhelm players. Even at the most difficult part of the game, however, it still felt fair. Yes enemies do a lot of damage and some demons become too much to handle but the tools are literally in your hands to handle every situation the game throws at you. The difficulty can be adjusted at any time so don't feel pressured if you're having a hard time.

Levels
Every level is unique and memorable. The levels flow nicely and I never felt completely lost. The artistic direction is also incredible and I always was interested in what I was looking at. Secrets are decently hidden and exploration is rewarded with extra resources or unlocks. There are some levels where there are a lot of walking between combat encounters but those levels are more atmospheric and the walking is mitigated a bit by platforming sections. Quick tangent on platforming, it's good and adds some nice traversal around levels by climbing walls to add a better sense of scale to levels.

Music and Sound
Mick Gordon did an amazing job here as expected. The music got me pumped as hell during combat and I can't wait to get the full soundtrack. My only complaint was I felt there was a bit less diversity in the soundtrack from 2016, most of it is metal (which I love) whereas 2016 was only about half metal and then a lot of synth. The sound design alongside the music keeps you engaged and every action in this game feels like it has a nice heft to it. Every gun, every punch (even if the normal melee is worthless), and every demon sounds great.

Look and Performance
I said before but the art is incredible and the demon designs are super cool, the guns as well. Just everything in this game looks radical and you can't not be amazed by how something looks in this game. Performance wise the game runs damn good. My rig is quite strong so I ran it at Nightmare settings which is a step below the highest settings. My friend who has a prebuilt meh rig could still run the game on all high settings. 2016 was well known for being optimized and DOOM Eternal is no stranger to optimization either.

Story
For anyone that doesn't like cutscenes in DOOM games or in general you can literally skip every cutscene in this game, even if it's your first time watching it. The only ones you can't skip are the 10 second ones that show you were to go after hitting a switch for example. The story is 90% in codex entries that you can find and read for people that care about it. What is in the codex is really fun to read and you can tell Id really put a lot of thought into the backstory of the world here. The other 10% of the story, what is presented in cutscenes, is really straight forward. Id knows people are here to kill demons first so they kept it straight and left the more in depth stuff for lore nerds to read.

Battle Mode
I have not played very much so I can only say what I did play felt really fun and fast.

Criticisms
I don't have very many but I might as well say them here. The regular melee attack is worthless and can't even kill the weakest enemies. The game also has these mastery tokens you can find to bypass a weapons mastery challenge completely. Personally I don't particularly like them because mastery challenges helped replayablity. They're still fine because some challenges I do wanna just skip, the actual problem I have with them is that there are so many in the last half of the game. My final criticism is campaign length. I finished the game 100% in about 16-17 hours. I'm a glutton so I really like my long games and I wanted more. That's completely a personal taste thing though, for an FPS campaign that's a really good length.

TL;DR
DOOM: Eternal is one of the best games I've every played, it's not a perfect game but as a whole package it's really damn close to one. If you had any doubts you wanted this game, get rid of them and play this game, it's worth your time. The only case I would not recommend this game is if you're not big into FPS games, otherwise anyone that likes FPS games SHOULD play this game. Rip and Tear, slayers.

Game of the year since Super Mario Bros 2.

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Plain and simple, DUSK is one of the best games I've ever played.
There is no part of this game where I am not having fun, every part of this game just grips me and brings me endless entertainment.
If you like fast paced FPS and especially if you liked DOOM 2016 a lot this game is a MUST buy.
If you need more convincing just look at all the insane praise it recieves from any reviewer that's played it.

This game can be insanely difficult and does rely heavily on RNG. That being said this game is still insanely fun, I might be saying that because I lost my sanity in the Darkest Dungeon.
- The music is great and atmospheric.
- The sound effects make attacks feel like they have more weight to them.
- The artstyle fits the game perfectly.
- The setting is interesting if you're into any amount of lovecraftian horror.
Overall I would definitely recommend it even though it's insanely difficult sometimes.

I was right! So many people were expecting this game to be trash after the whole open beta MP incident (which I always have to point out to people was BS and shouldn't affect their opinion) but this game turned out to be A M A Z I N G. I so hyped for this game, I'm so glad it's as good as I thought it would be.
- They got the gameplay right.
- They got the guns right.
- They got the story right.
- They got DoomGuy right.
Just buy this game man, I 100% guarantee you'll have fun as long as you're trying to.