Doom: The Dark Ages was never a particularly clever game. It’s a game about smashing demons to pulp, about using a shield that defies the laws of physics to parry and decapitate; it’s about shooting things with ground-up skull fragments, or a massive cannonball on a chain that behaves like a retractable boxing glove. You’ll rarely feel in any actual danger, and it’s incredibly cathartic as a result. Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations turns some of that on its head. A little bit. For a little while. But, I mean, it is a Doom DLC after all.
What the Revelations DLC does to reset the Doom Slayer’s awesome power level isn’t all that unexpected: it strips the shield away, and removes the skills you’d already unlocked in the main campaign. Thankfully, you won’t feel the loss for long. It begins with the Doom Slayer getting his arse kicked, which doesn’t happen often. Banished to the cold depths of Hell and stripped of his gear (well, except all his guns, of course – I mean, it is a Doom DLC after all), you’re aided by a mysterious NPC who seems to need your help as much as you need his.
To make up for the loss of your shield, you’re given the Chain Spear, a new melee weapon that allows you to grapple to certain points to swing over chasms, or grapple onto monsters to swing around them and reposition. It’s a fun weapon, but it lacks the immediacy of the Shield Saw. Everything in the DLC is built around you using the Chain Spear, from new puzzles and enemies to the new upgrade path that sees you unlocking special abilities on it, like a massive Area of Effect ground slam.
While the story itself doesn’t really do anything super exciting with the existing formula (I mean, this is a Doom DLC after all), what it does do is give you plenty of reasons to go ham on the shrieking hordes of Legally-Distinct Hell. I’ll be honest here though, when I was handed the Shield Saw back fairly early on, I switched back to it as often as possible.
The problem with the Chain Spear is that the parry is much less immediate, and there’s no ranged attack or charging slam, both of which I became too accustomed to using. The Shield Saw is just too good to replace, is what I’m saying, so I ended up only using the Spear when a puzzle forced me to. It is a little weird that I was so down on the overall feel of the game until I got the Shield back, and then started to really enjoy it, and I think it’s more about how good the Shield is than how bad the Spear is. Either way, it probably wasn’t what id intended.
Interestingly, the campaign adds a large Slayer Hub, a between-mission sandbox filled with secrets, puzzles and curios to make use of both Spear and Shield. While the 10-hour-ish campaign add-on is a great vehicle for remaking your armour and Shield, and boosting the Spear’s functionality, the main addition in the DLC is the endgame element. The Ripatorium has been overhauled, with new challenges, new secrets, and great new replayable levels. Id have made this a love-letter to fans, introducing revamped versions of missions from OG 90s Doom with updated enemies and that same killer soundtrack.
The new campaign ends with a boss fight, then a series of challenges, and an uberboss, and some more challenges, before you move into the almost endless replayability of the endgame that keeps layering on the challenges with a new difficulty level and a ton of things to unlock including skins and lore entries to make sense of the universe you’re currently tearing chunks out of.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the giant mechs and dragon sections don’t make a reappearance, as neither was super well-received in the original game. They’re not missed though, such is the amount of new stuff to blast your way through. Once again, this is not intended to be a cerebral experience, but an explosive, cathartic rollercoaster with a handful of puzzles to solve along the way.
Most new enemies work well with the Spear, as you’d expect, but a few of them can be slightly annoying, like the unicycling demon with a huge shield, or a teleporting skeleton that summons big flaming representations of demons and teleports away every time you get close to him. Of course, you can always whip out the rocket launcher and deal with him that way. I mean, this is a Doom DLC after all.
Regardless of whether or not the Spear clicks with you, id Software has made sure you’re not left behind here. It’s quite mind-boggling that a studio able to create this level of consistent fun has been strip-mined by XBOX, but at least we have this to keep us going until the next full-blooded Doom game shows up.
Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations is a superb addition to an already excellent game, expanding on the narrative, lore, and mechanics in a way that’s almost worthy of Sequeldom. Just don’t go in expecting it to reinvent the wheel or deliver massive innovations, just demons to slay, a soundtrack to rock out to, and a score of reasons to keep ripping and tearing until you’re done. I mean, this is a Doom DLC after all.
