At Gamescom we were invited to play the new Doom: Eternal. By we, I mean “I”. My chief was stuck in another booth. I was the lucky one who went to play it and trust me when I say that we are in for a great treat with Doom Eternal! Bethesda booth in Hall 8, that was my mission location to play the game, not an easy task to get there as this was in one of the public halls. They brought me to a closed room with 3 other journalists. The dev didn’t tell us much, besides a “Enjoy your demo!”. So, I did. I talked to him afterward again.
First, we got a little tutorial. How to run, climb. How to shoot, how to activate secondary options on the weapons. You know the usual… After learning some of the controls the mission started, you get a little epic movie before you jump in the action. And action it was! Monsters jump out from everywhere. There were a lot of them and some were really hard to kill. I died a lot, of course. (Edit Dae Jim: Yeah.. as expected) The level off details on the monsters was really good, especially up close. The coolest part of that where the little slowmo cutscenes when you bash in a skull or used your chainsaw. There are a lot of variants on those. If you used melee on a monster you received health. If you used your chainsaw, you got ammo and using your flamethrower gets you extra shield, but don’t forget your fuel. You will need it. Sometimes I got lost on the map. I also forgot there was the map option, but I got the hang of it. The graphics where amazingly fluent though, but I was playing on a pc. We will have to wait on the finished Xbox version to see if it’s from the same quality, but I’m fairly sure that the Xbox One X version will look incredible. Also, the cutscenes between levels were brilliant. I had zero glitches while playing, everything was smooth from gameplay to cutscenes. No annoying stutter.
I was able to finish the demo map in time and had a little chat with one of the devs. He told me about the gun system, which I found really smart. When your guns run out of ammo, it will show up red in the weapons choice wheel. So, you know what is good to go or not. They really thought about what the player would like to see and how fast a player can switch from one gun to the next. I was really surprised by the game. I can’t wait to play it when it comes out on November 22, 2019.
