Doom: The Dark Ages review

Heard about the changes to Doom? They’ve gone medieval with it, sort of. Also, they’ve added bowling. Sort of.

Actually these two things are related. Doom: The Dark Ages is certainly a bit more medieval than you might have expected. The Doom Slayer’s now dropped into a sort of techno-middle-ages. There are still giant robots and weapons powered by bubbling spheres of purest plasma, but there are also allies decked out in chainmail and armour plating, and there’s much talk of keeps and castles and sorcery. It’s medieval-adjacent, I would say: fantasy as much as sci-fi. There’s a vogue on TikTok these days for finding old charity shop pictures of ancient bucolic scenes and then painting modern video game characters into them. The Dark Ages feels a bit like that.

But bowling? Okay. So because the Doom Slayer’s now stuck in this rejigged middle ages, he’s got a cool shield, and while the shield can be used to deflect damage, and is right at the core of a pleasantly simple parry system in which you wait for neon-green-coloured attacks to arrive and then knock them back where they came from for massive damage, you can also use it for much more kinetic stuff.

You can do a shield charge if you lock on to a foe or a weak bit of scenery, which makes you extremely mobile, zipping huge distances across the map like a holy snowplough to cave someone’s head in or open up a new route. That’s fun. But the shield also reacts in interesting ways with hot metal.

This sounds complex but really isn’t. Enemies and parts of the environment often come with armour and shields, and the more damage they soak up, the hotter they get. When they’re so hot they’re glowing a luminous coral colour – neon-green and coral; the Doom Slayer’s clearly fond of mid-noughties TopShop – you fire off the shield and it reacts with the hot metal in an explosive way. If this is part of the environment you’re targeting it means you’re cutting chains and lowering doors or dropping crates into play. If it’s a combat moment, it means that you see a phalanx of shielded baddies up ahead, you get them all nice and hot and coral, and then you blast them all apart with one chuck of the shield. (The shield returns automatically, a la Thor, BTW, and also has chainsaw teeth on the edge because this is Doom.)

That moment! A phalanx flying in every which way, dropping ammo and health and shield top-ups. The Dark Ages lives for this moment, and celebrates it with a lovely cash register chime whenever you pull it off just so. It feels exactly like a strike. It feels like a dream night out bowling. You want to turn around and wander back to your fellow bowlers and sit down smugly and add another tally to your score sheet. So yes, in a way, Doom now has bowling in it.

And it’s funny. It’s funny to think that From Software once took shields out of Bloodborne because shields made players behave conservatively. That’s true for the kind of games From makes, certainly. In these toxic worlds where life was precarious, players would hunker down behind that vital bit of safety, striking only when they knew they could get a shot in, and advancing slowly. They would play the waiting game.

That’s not how shields work in Doom. You don’t hunker behind that toothed shield at all, even if you do raise it in perfectly timed bursts for a bit of parrying. The shield is accelerative. Attacks are reflected faster than they came in, the bash is virtually a teleport, and the shield toss is weapon and puzzle solution in one, hitting distant switches, triggering actual teleport spots, sending the gears of machinery turning and all that frantic jazz. At its best, then, the shield makes you feel invincible, and not at all because it blocks attacks. It is all attack, all the time. Blocking attacks is basically the least of its charms.

And the shield is at the heart of what the developers promise is a new direction for Doom. Or rather an old direction – we’re going back to a heavier, more grounded kind of shooter. The Slayer is more like a tank again. Projectiles move slowly so you can dodge and parry them. Most of the action unfolds at eye-line height and there’s no double jump to distract you. It’s all about being extremely large and powerful.

Well. The Dark Ages is grounded, but it’s not exactly slow, if that’s what you’ve been fearing. Tactical is what it is – it’s a game in which you need to know who to kill first and how best to kill them. Levels are filled with astonishingly large open areas – practically whole battlefields – where baddies drop in and spawn all around and you have to take them all out. Some are simple popcorn foes, but others need a shield bash or a melee (we’ll get to melee in a bit). Some are impervious to certain attacks so need you to save the stamina for the attacks that will do them in – the shield bashes or melees that need a recharge say. Some need you to whittle down other enemies until you can have at them. The key is, it’s not just mindless shooting. It’s mindful shooting. You need to shoot people in the right order a lot of the time, and finding the right order is where you get experimentation and improvisation. It’s where you get to feel cool because you thought to do something cool.

And yes, there’s an increased focus on melee – there are three distinct melee weapons, all with their own upgrade trees and recharge gimmicks – but it’s worth mentioning that melee here often feels an awful lot like shooting – it is Doom after all. So it becomes a question: well, sire, how to shoot these particular people? Shoot them with a gun, in which case the bullets are the bullets? Shoot them with a fling of the shield, in which the shield is a bullet, or with a shield bash or melee attack, in which, well, you are the bullet? It all feels very harmonious – and that’s before you get to the reinvention of the BFG, which is so good that I wouldn’t spoil it here even if I could. You simply have to experience it for yourself.

As I hope I have conveyed by now, it all works. And into this clever, yet still pretty simple basic design, Doom’s custodians add all kinds of interesting excess. Glory kills, with a slowdown. Those melee weapons, my favourite of which is a legit flail. Modifiers for the shield, which means that parries are met with a crack that runs through the earth upsetting everyone nearby, or an auto turret, say, or some other nasty delight. All the weapons you could want and no reloading – a shotgun and rocket launcher of course, but another class that does lovely things with lasers and another that you feed skulls into the back while hot shrapnel comes out the other end.

Enemies, meanwhile, are giant demons, huge half-crab people, shrouded cultists who can fly, and lots of other things in between. The most shocking for me – I wasn’t expecting it – was just a bunch of tentacles that erupted from the ground. These enemies fill the corridors and the kill-everything arenas of a campaign with levels that take you through horrid churches, haunted forests, caves, shipyards, all sorts. Again, a lot of these areas feel far more open than in any previous Doom game. There are blasted heaths and Hellish deserts you track back and forth across as a level progresses, with enemies laid out almost in the formations of advancing armies. It’s grand, and a step up for a game that once thrived on corridors and monster closets, but it only rarely does it get too much and slow things down as you work your way through the meat grinder. The end result rarely descends into an awe-inspiring slog.

And at heart, level design is still all about quick movement from this kill room to the next, via a very gentle puzzle or two, and the promise of a secret area now and then. The game is stuffed with secrets, while palate cleansers come in the form of giant mech battles with brawler controls and moments in which you… well, I won’t spoil that stuff. It’s lovely, though, and it exists to give the blasting and punching a bit of texture.

Grounded it may be, but it’s also winningly breathless stuff. A lot of the time, The Dark Ages’ campaign feels like it’s less the result of developers tweaking mechanics and more like a writer’s room for some wild cartoon, each member trying to top each other. The Doom Slayer gets inside a massive robot and punches down buildings? Okay, but once he’s in that massive robot give him an equally massive gun. And once he has that gun… Only at the very end is there a sense of a campaign running out of new ideas, and by then you’re into the – slightly protracted – victory lap anyway.

In terms of the design, it’s interesting to see the developers talking about taking the series back to the original games, because The Dark Ages actually reminds me of the games that were inspired by the original games – stuff like Painkiller, with its wide-open spaces and inventive splatter, broken up with a range of different kinds of doors.

And those doors! They are one of many glinting reminders that Doom hails from another era and isn’t trying too hard to hide all that stuff. Levels will drop in blue and red keys to track down, like you’re playing Gauntlet. Meanwhile, trails of gold work alongside a waypoint marker to lead you through a map’s most complex spaces, like you’re Mario collecting coins.

Mario, Painkiller, Gauntlet? There are touches of that. But also, more than anything, there’s Doom. The Dark Ages is nuanced and tweaked, but it’s classic Doom, from the way that camera slides over the ground, ever onward, to the way that your weapons swap out neatly when you’re out of ammo and need to change things up.

And that bowling thing? It’s not just the shield – which is, I need to underline, the absolute star of The Dark Ages. There’s a deeper truth here, I think, a deeper harmony. What could be more wholesome and knockabout than a night out bowling? And in 2025, it’s weird to say, but what could be more wholesome and knockabout than Doom?

Weird, isn’t it? It’s weird to think that back in the day Doom was the game that got parents and politicians worried. Because today it’s such a lark, such an obvious bit of finely crafted silliness and fun. The demons are largely in gibs all around you, and even whole they’ve stepped off the cover of the most classically minded heavy metal bands’ LP covers. They’re horrible, sure, but they’re also filled with a prog-ish charm.

It’s all so simple, so joyously, generously straight ahead. You’re a powerful goody, you’re surrounded by powerful baddies, and you have to finish them all off. Everyone knows where they stand, and they all seem pretty happy with the roles they’re playing. Hooded cultists summoning blood portals? Hey, at least they’re hanging out with their friends. As a parent, the game I’m most concerned about these days is probably something like Roblox. By contrast, Doom feels like an entirely known and understood entity. Let’s savour it. Here’s a slice of pure gaming charisma that has come to us, unfrazzled, from a more innocent time. And it’s kind of lovely.

Code for Doom: The Dark Ages was provided by the publisher.