DOOM Eternal Review: A Combat Puzzle Disguised as a Power Fantasy

The engine of Eternal is a resource triangle you are never permitted to stop feeding. The chainsaw, running on regenerating fuel, butchers weaker demons into a fountain of ammunition. The Flame Belch sets enemies alight so they shed armor shards as you damage them. The Glory Kill, a melee finisher on a staggered foe, sprays health across the floor. Ammo caps are kept deliberately stingy, so you cannot simply pick a favorite gun and lean on it forever; the game forces you to rotate through the whole arsenal, harvesting what you need directly from the bodies of your enemies as you fight.

This is combat as active resource management, and it is exhilarating precisely because it refuses to let you relax. Run dry on shells mid-fight and you have to chainsaw a grunt to refill or improvise with a weapon you were rationing. Health critical and no fodder nearby? Now you are hunting a Glory Kill under real pressure. The loop rewards planning three moves ahead and punishes tunnel vision instantly, which is thrilling when it works and genuinely stressful when it doesn't. There is no cover to cower behind, retreat is a slow form of suicide, and the only reliable defense is offense delivered accurately.

Mobility is the other half of the sentence. Double jumps, air dashes, monkey-bar swings, and a grappling meat hook welded to the super shotgun turn every arena into a three-dimensional playground you are expected to exploit constantly. Between fights the game breaks into outright platforming, with wall climbs and swing sections that give the shooting somewhere to breathe. It is a smart pacing device, though the floatier jumping puzzles can feel like a gentler, different game bolted onto the flank of a brutal one.

Enemy design is where the craft truly announces itself. Nearly every demon carries a weak point or a specific counter: pop the Cacodemon's gaping mouth, shear off the Revenant's shoulder cannons, blow the turret from an Arachnotron's back. Each encounter becomes a live triage problem, a prioritized kill order you assemble on the fly while everything tries to flank you. Presiding over the whole roster is the Marauder, a shielded, axe-swinging duelist who punishes both aggression and retreat and insists you fight on his exact terms. He is either the finest or the most infuriating enemy the series has ever produced, and reasonable people have come to blows over which.

A light progression layer keeps the toolkit evolving. Weapon mods, upgraded via collectible drones, bolt alternate fire modes onto each gun; runes tweak your rules of engagement; Praetor suit points and hidden Sentinel batteries dole out passive perks and unlock optional caches. Between missions you drift through the Fortress of Doom, a hub that doubles as a trophy room for your growing arsenal. None of it is deep in the traditional RPG sense, but it meaningfully reshapes how you read and attack an arena.

There is plenty to chew on beyond the campaign, which itself runs a generous fifteen-plus hours. Punishing Master Levels remix existing maps for experts, secret encounters and collectibles reward the curious, and the asymmetric Battlemode pits a single Slayer against two player-controlled demons for anyone who wants to take the calculus online. Difficulty scales from forgiving to openly sadistic, and generous checkpointing keeps each failure cheap. The one persistent drag is how relentlessly the game explains itself: pop-up tutorials, on-screen prompts, and floating tooltips interrupt the flow far too often in the opening hours, and the lore has swollen into a self-serious mythology the moment-to-moment carnage never actually needed.

id built a version of Hell you can parse at a full sprint, and that legibility is the whole design philosophy made visible. Everything is color-coded for the fight: stagger a demon and it flashes a sickly blue for a Glory Kill, torn health glows green, armor shards read as pale cyan, ammunition pops against the gloom. The screen is essentially a heads-up display disguised as a splatter film, tuned so that even at peak chaos you can always tell what to hit and what killing it will hand back to you.

The art itself is loud, saturated, and completely unembarrassed. Ruined cathedrals hang over lakes of lava, chrome-and-bone Sentinel architecture crashes into corrupted cityscapes, and the gore is rendered with a gleeful, comic-book exaggeration that ought to be exhausting and somehow reads as pure joy. The Slayer is a walking tank of green plate and barely contained fury; the demons are grotesque in a heavy-metal-album-cover way that suits the register exactly. Nothing here is subtle, and nothing is trying to be.

Then there is the sound, which does far more than accompany the game; it conducts it. Mick Gordon's score is a wall of down-tuned industrial djent and pounding percussion that syncs its heaviest moments to your most desperate ones, so a last stand against a full arena arrives scored like the climax of a stadium set. The weapons bark with satisfying, chunky weight, demons announce themselves with distinct roars you quickly learn to fear, and the whole mix begs to be played loud. Turn it up and Eternal stops being a shooter and becomes a rhythm you bleed to keep.