Recent reviews by MDave

Excellent game - but nailbitingly hard!

Admittedly some of the hitboxes of certain bosses are just outright unfair to make you play the game the intended way: parry, or die. There is no middle ground. Despite some of it's flaws, the gameplay is excellent - it even made me reconsider my stance on soulslike games.

Neat little metroidvania with bullet hell elements.

(Yet to finish the game, may change my review later)

5.5 hours, and around 30 puzzles in, and I am yet to face a task that took more than a few minutes to solve or gave me a sense of accomplishment for figuring it out. The long playtime can be attributed to sometimes ridiculous time spent with walking from puzzle to puzzle, area to area, and foolishly trying to engage with the story of the game which quickly devolves into pointless discussions with boring NPCs.

The game and puzzles suffer (a lot) from the developers spending way too much time/effort building physically large and visually appealing, but ultimately rather shallow and empty areas.

If you are looking for the same consistency and amount of "aha!" moments that The Talos Principle 1 delivered, you will be sorely disappointed.

A beatifully crafted and cared for little mystery with great character designs, and stellar voice acting. What it lacks in the overarching story, it makes up with lighthearted humor, and great chemistry within the cast.

As for puzzles, it is a much more casual experience than Obra Dinn, or The Case of the Golden Idol - as it fails to recapture those "ah ha!" moments due to the lack of sufficiently open ended ways to submit your deductions.

Would gladly fly a space ship built from wood into the sun again.

Great innovative mechanic! Its a bit rough around the edges, particularly when it comes to the final polishing pass on the visuals, but more than makes up for it with the great puzzle design.

A worthy prequel to join the ranks of genre/tech defining masterpieces of the Half Life universe.

I am disappointed in Doom Eternal, for consistently failing to recognize what Doom (2016) did well, and going in the exact opposite direction. To it's credit, it has a few good and novel ideas, which it fails to execute well or are in general just massively outweighed by other annoying things that stop the flow of the game.

It feels like the unholy trinity of the "gaudy User Interface", "modal animations, with forced camera cutscenes", and "EtErNaL replayability by user engagement with meaningless ReWaRds" departments have been given free reign, and ruined the otherwise great formula the original reboot established.

The promising
The game introduces the concept of extra lives, where you can play the game with a life counter. Run out of lives, lose the game. This is a much welcome change from the previous game's Ultra Nightmare difficulty, where if something brazed your shoulder, you were dead, and your save file was gone. This also incentivizes hunting for collectibles, which would be great if their placement was not so bad..

The suspicious
This game does not respect the player. The default settings are terrible. Condescending tutorials, tips, and straight up telling you what comes next is everywhere. To their credit, a decent amount of these can be turned off, or tuned down to a tolerable level.

Gameplay
The game quickly up turns into a weird crossover of Tomb Raider and Doom. Platforming is given too much focus, but is executed poorly. Invisible death walls, bottomless pits, and annoying view transitions await you. That is, if you manage to figure out where the designers want you to go. There is just something unsettling about hanging from a wall in a DooM game, and staring at the abyss towards a collectible, that may or may not be passable with a double jump + double dash combo. (At least the game seems to know this, and is not punishing you for falling off the intended playspace.)

Due to the aforementioned platforming, you have too much mobility, and the designers are struggling with that. Given your double jump + double dash combo, you can outrun any foe, thus any even medium sized arena is just going to be you running circles around demons. Whenever gameplay needs to be tough, the designers place you in tiny rooms, where your maneuvering is nullified, and you quickly get overwhelmed by giant demons.

Progression/Collectibles
Collectibles are annoying. Sometimes they dangle things in front of your eyes, just so that you waste 5 mins of your life trying to get to them, only to realize that it was meant to be collected when looping around the same area later much later in the mission. Sometimes it is the opposite, and once you drop down a ledge, that is it, that collectible is out of reach. This is particularly infuriating when you jump into a big fight from a ledge, come out victorious, and look back only to see a cheeky question mark laughing back at you from just under that one way ledge. Get punished for going head first into fights. Great...

(The problem is so apparent that the designers had to implement a fast travel feature at the end of the mission, where you can teleport to set places on the now empty map to get everything you got cheated out of.)

Unlockables and runes suck, and are only marginal improvements of otherwise horribly underused abilities, which don't contribute much to the game. Their presentation is also subpar compared to the 2016 reboot. Gone are the fun minigames and challenges to get an overpowered or fun ability. Picking up tokens which you can spend later, and tiny percentage boosts to insignificant abilities will have to suffice.

UI
The UI design feels it is straight ripped from an other game (Quake Champions anyone?), and does not fit the atmosphere of the game at all. In addition to being a toxic green, it is riddled with confirmation prompts, post-confirmation animations that last waaay too long, and stupid condescending tips that just keep popping up. "Oh by the way did you know that moving during a fight increases your survival chance?"

The game LOVES to interrupt you, and take camera control whenever it can. Levels are riddled with useless cutscenes: Ranging from showing you the door/barrier that just opened by you finishing your last fight/hitting an obvious button, to the camera panning to a window I am already facing, just to have a marginally better angle at some animation of something getting disemboweled unnecessarily brutally.

Audio
Audio wise, there is a lot of unnecessary dialog from the side antagonists. The music is alright until an obnoxious (and frankly slightly disgusting) growl is laid on top of it for minutes at a time. At least audio cues are solid. (Perhaps even too much, I sometimes find it annoying to hear the 'gulp' sound of cacodemons through explosions, and demons mauling my face.)

Dialog of the henchmen of the main antagonist is annoying, unimaginative, and repetitive. An off-screen enemy cheering (with the same voice line) every time your health drops into critical is incredibly annoying.

Conclusion
Long story short, Doom Eternal feels like a stepback, that reeks of many things the industry does in a terrible way nowadays. Definitely a subpar sequel to a very strong reboot of the series.

If you have time (and urge) to kill some demons, it can be fun. But not at the launching price.

Go replay the 2016 reboot instead.

A nice sequel that manages to stay true to the originals art, and story style. The game has managed to improve a lot in making the general combat more interesting, and giving you more options than ever to fight back in an Ori game. They even managed to add some non-linear exploration, which is a welcome change.

The game is very visibly inspired by Hollow Knight. There are now NPCs, charms, and even bossfights. Unfortunately the game does not don't execute these very well. Characters are rather bland, and sidequests feel forced at times. Bossfights after the first two are particularly bland in terms of your options for fighting back, and not really rewarding to win.

Platforming has marginally suffered, and feels almost too accessible at some places. The energy system has also suffered a blow, I very much preferred when it was used for gating progression, rather than being tied to the combat system.

Regardless, it stays true to the original, while trying to break into new areas where the developers don't have much experience.