The melee-heavy Doom: The Dark Ages is extremely my thing — but it might not be yours

Doom: The Dark Ages is going to be a love-it-or-hate-it entry in the shooter series. I’ve only been playing the game for a few hours so far, but I already love it. That said, it’s very different from Doom Eternal — and unless you can adjust to a game that feels very different to play, Dark Ages will be a tough hang.

But if you’re me, Dark Ages is a nonstop thrill. While Doom Eternal put a huge emphasis on speed, the motto of Dark Ages is “stand and fight.” That’s because the game actually revolves around parrying and meleeing, not running and gunning. So, if you like parrying and melee fighting, aka if you are me, this is the Doom for you.

The star of the show in Dark Ages is the shield, a new addition to the Doom Slayer’s arsenal. Soon after acquiring this circular shield, you get a power-up for it that adds buzz saw blades around its edge. This means that when you throw your shield at a demon using a Captain America-like frisbee toss, you can leave them stunned and twitching on the battlefield; this won’t kill them, but it will immobilize them, and you can use that time to take them out or clean up small fries around them first. This affords you a lot of control over how fights play out.

Flinging a circular buzz saw around the battlefield feels great, and the demon-splattering, bone-crunching sound effects are supremely satisfying, but that’s not even the best part. The big selling point of the shield is a shield-bash move that’s a new traversal mechanic; you aim at an enemy and use the shield-bash to zip towards them instantly, bashing smaller demons to bits or dealing a hefty blow to the bigger guys. This move is what makes the game feel fluid and fast, once you learn the rhythm of it. Because the shield-bash involves this dashing move that can zip you across huge distances, you don’t necessarily need the super-fast run speed you had in Doom Eternal.

This is why it’s also interesting to me that “stand and fight” is this game’s marketing one-liner. I was spending so much time zipping around the battlefield with the shield-bash that at no point did I really feel like the game’s combat design had slowed me down. But there is something else important to note about the mechanics here that is new and different: Your focus now is on up-close-and-personal combat.

I have always been a parry sicko and a melee-obsessive who tends to pick the heavy attacker in any game where I have that option, so I love this aspect of the game, too, but it will make or break Dark Ages for you depending on whether you can stand it. Most people probably think of Doom as a game where you shoot at demons. And don’t worry — it still is.

Dark Ages is also a game where you can parry certain incoming attacks and, in so doing, build up charges for a three-part melee attack that does major damage. Is it weird to need to stack up charges in order to perform a melee attack, rather than just being an infinite punch machine? Yeah, kinda. The guns in this game do often feel like they have infinite bullets, after all; ammo tends to be plentiful, unless you’re playing on the hardest difficulty settings. And this isn’t like a Dark Souls game where you need to consider every move you make because stamina is so hard to come by. So it might feel weird to have a limit on a crucial game mechanic.

But in Dark Ages, the melee attack is so powerful and so satisfying that I get why the game’s designers didn’t want you to be able to perform it every single second. If they had let me do that, I might never draw a rifle again and would be punching my way through the Hellspawn. Having to rebuild melee charges by using the parry mechanics feels good, because I’m already parrying with my new shield, anyway, so whenever I really need to land a trio of big punches on a big guy, I’m ready.

All that said, I’m only a few hours into Doom: The Dark Ages. I’m still at the beginning of its story about how the Doom Slayer is under the thrall of some strange religious organization that’s using him against his will (although at least the task they’ve forced him into is his usual fare, which is to say, brutally killing a shitload of demons). I don’t know how the rest of this game is going to play out. 

I do know one thing: The combat instantly clicked for me. And if you love the sound of it — and you’re willing to let go of all of your Doom Eternal muscle memory — it might just click for you too.

Doom: The Dark Ages will be released May 15 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a prerelease download code provided by Bethesda Softworks.