izigame.me

You know, I saw the reviews for the dlcs and saw that they were mostly pretty bad. I thought to myself, "How bad could it possibly be?", given that the main game was pretty good. While I did enjoy the main game, I had my gripes with it. And those gripes are compounded in this dlc. Some of the combat arenas were just frankly too small for the enemies that were packed in there. While the base game gave mostly balanced enemy encounters, I've found that the dlc had a tendency to just spam enemies at the player, often in arenas that were too small to make it enjoyable.
I thought I was going to absolutely hate the double marauder fight, but I've found that that was actually nowhere near the worst fight in the dlc. Most of the fights were significantly longer than those of the base game. Which is to say that enemies were spammed quite a lot harder. It honestly felt a lot like they were just padding out the playtime at many segments. I never felt like any of the base game combat encounters were too long, because I never really thought about it. But, in the dlc, I've found that in almost half the combat encounters, I felt like they were dragging on for a really long time. It felt like a bit of a chore. Which is very surprising, given how much I enjoyed the combat of the base game.
Furthermore, I didn't appreciate the boss fights. The boss fight with the cubes was more annoying than anything, and the little energy balls that were in the cubes seemed like their hitboxes on their projectiles were unreasonably large, as I found I was taking damage even when they looked like they had completely missed. The energy balls in the final boss fight were infuriating, as they each had a radius of chip damage that was difficult to really figure out, as it consistently seemed to be quite a bit larger than the animation, which was irritating, which compounded with the fact that they respawned after only a few seconds made for a very unenjoyable time.
Next, let me address the new spirit enemy. These things were by far one of the most annoying additions to the game. Their whole purpose was to take any other enemy, turn them into a bullet sponge, practically double their attack speed, increase their damage dealt by like 50%, and then remove the weaknesses that each enemy previously had, making their breakable parts unbreakable. This made any enemy possessed by a spirit into a chore to kill, as they all turned into bullet sponges that spammed their attacks at an even faster rate than they normally do. This was especially awful when they possessed especially strong enemies, like the marauder. The spirit possessed marauder was single-handedly the most tedious single enemy in the game. The only weapon that seemed to work to parry him was the super shotgun, and he was tanky as all hell, and spammed his every attack relentlessly. And then, if you don't kill the spirit in time, which requires you to specifically use the microwave beam from the energy rifle, then they just jump over to a different enemy and turn THEM into another bullet sponge. I really hate enemies that can only be killed in one specific way as well as enemies that require you to use one very specific weapon's specific weapon mod to kill them in a time limit. And on top of that, in order to actually kill them, you have to maintain line of sight until the bar fills up, which means you can't just keep running around and fighting, you have to stop and stare at this one enemy for several seconds to get rid of them. I genuinely don't think this enemy was a good design.
The final boss was probably my least favorite fight in the whole dlc (and believe me, I fought every fight in the dlc to make sure). The arena was small and restrictive, featuring only a relatively small square with a few pillars of various heights, it contained those annoying energy balls that deal constant chip damage across a large volume of space that respawn in seconds, it contained spirit possessed enemies that were accompanied by ranged attackers, and the amount of fodder enemies I could use to regain health, shield, and bullets was very tiny. It also had numerous moving lasers to add an extra environmental hazard that only effects you.
Now, I won't say I hated every fight, nor would I say that I didn't have fun on several of the fights. I genuinely enjoyed some of the fights that gave an arena that was properly big to handle the threats the developers were dropping in. The more balanced of the fights in the game were pretty good. The second slayer gate was actually pretty good. And some of the gore nests were surprisingly pretty good, which is shocking considering the base game's weren't great. But, then again, I could be saying this because I beat all but one of them first try. But, the fights that weren't balanced were so bad that at some point, I started asking myself why I was still playing this game. It almost felt like a fan-made mod made by somebody who doesn't quite understand the reason why the combat of the base game was good, and just wanted to make a harder level set. But, aside from the aesthetics and lore, this dlc really didn't feel like Doom. Not the Doom people love anyway.
Oh, and I should mention that I had multiple moments of noticeable frame stuttering and lag. Which is very disappointing, given how well the base game ran, and surprising considering the fact that I'm running this game on an rtx 4080. This lag made some parts of the dlc very frustrating, as I found that I would momentarily lose track of where I was because it would seem as though I had teleported from where I was.
I'm still probably gonna play the second part of the dlc, mostly for lore purposes, but given how this dlc went, I don't have very high hopes. I just pray that id does better with Doom The Dark Ages.