Recent reviews by ThoolooExpress

I found this game visually unappealing and lacking in character, the parry mechanic felt forced, and I was very unhappy with the performance due to the forced ray tracing.

Overall, the levels lack the charm of 2016 and Eternal. A lot of the environment is just a muddy mess. The animations are much less interesting too.

I can tell that early play testers weren't using the shield as much as the designers wanted them to, because there are a ton of enemies that seem to be designed with the sole purpose of forcing you to parry as much as possible. I don't hate parry mechanics, but it just gets old when the ideal strategy always seems to parry. It feels like the only skill that actually matters is timing parries, you can get away with being terrible at aiming and still have a pretty easy time if you just spam right-click any time you see green.

It's especially annoying that you get punished harder for missing a parry than pretty much any other gameplay mistake because the only dash you have is connected to the shield. If you mis-time a parry and get shield broken you're often just screwed because you have no way to move out of the way of the next attack. I am so tired of this damn shield, I want to run around fast and shoot demons, not stand around waiting for a green flash so I can right-cilck and send it back at them.

The forced ray tracing makes it impossible to play at 165fps for most GPUs, even on low settings, unless you're okay with an extremely low resolution. This would be one thing for a slow-paced RPG, but this is DOOM, and the fast-paced gameplay really benefits from higher frame rates. The worst part is that even with the settings cranked up it just isn't that visually appealing. Sure, the lighting engine can produce accurate effects, but the overall design of this game just isn't that visually appealing. It just feels like a waste, making this game run like crap just for lighting features very few players actually value.

Easy enemies plus punishing save mechanics equals frustration with zero feeling of accomplishment.

Seriously, on anything but the hardest difficulty, anybody that's used to playing pretty much any 3d melee action game will be able to hack down any individual enemy with ease. The thing is, the game is really stingy when it comes to giving you health pickups, and checkpoints are really far apart, so you often get stuck in situations where you have just beaten a challenging group of enemies, but because they took all your health, your only choices are 1) press on and die no matter how well you play, because you simply are not equipped to enter the next fight, 2) backtrack a freaking long way hoping to find one of the chests with health that are extremely few and far between, or 3) go back to your last checkpoint and "meditate," which replenishes your health but respawns all the enemies.

I want a challenge, but I want options while I'm facing that challenge. Playing on the easier difficulties is unsatisfying, because most of the enemies don't stand a chance against even a moderately skilled player. Playing on the highest difficulty bring the individual enemies right into a skilled player's sweet spot difficulty wise, but the punishing save mechanics and lack of regenerating health outside of combat mean that you end up facing encounters that you stand no chance in simply because you took a few too many hits in the last encounter way more than is even remotely enjoyable.

Also the lock-on system and camera control is iffy at best, and if you play with a controller the camera sensitivity cannot be adjusted (although it can for a mouse). The game will constantly point the camera where you don't want it to, and because the sensitivity is locked relatively low, you can't quickly tap the right stick to flip it around to where you want it in the middle of combat to make up for it like you can in other games.