I clashed with Doom: The Dark Ages and its mechanical slugfest.

Doom is going medieval. Id Software’s next brutish shooter, Doom: The Dark Ages, was revealed with a shield-flinging trailer last summer, and we’ve since learned more about how it’ll actually play. Nic already summed up the new features but I gots something that Nic boy don’t: three hours of hands-on time with the Doomlad, including some dragonback dog-fighting, and a fifty-storey fistfight in a gargantuan mech. Let me tell you what it’s like.

In short, it hits heavy. These two levels are the eye-catching setpiece flashpoints to the far more beefy and intense runnin’ and gunnin’ of the usual levels (more on those in a minute). The dragon level saw me doing trench runs over a Byzantine castle skyline, for example, chasing demon ships under arches and getting into hoverfights with giant eyeballs. Much of the sequence has you machine-gunning turrets on bad guy airships, dodging their shots to gain a boost in firepower. Eventually, you clear a landing zone, crash down, hop off, and wreck your way through the innards of the ship on foot until you punch to death the demonic power core that lies within. Just a normal Wednesday for Doombloke.

As for why he’s doing any of this, I’m not 100% sure. This is a prequel to 2016’s reboot, and for reasons that will become clear in the full story, Mr Doom is mostly just doing what he is told. I’ll talk more about the story bits later, but for now just know that the dragon is a good-looking killer who can perform some of the series’ classic execution animations of his own.

If there’s flubber to this flyabout, it’s probably in the hovering moments. You have to hold down the left trigger (I played on controller) to target the aforemantioned turrets, and this immediately snaps your dragon to a particular part of the sky that the game wants you to exist within while you shoot. It can feel a little jarring, like the designers are grabbing you and shoving you to your designated fun zone. “No, you go here!” It’s still metal and stylish, but when you pause in these skyspaces to dodge those turrets’ heavily patterned toxic green attacks, it might feel to some Doomsters like stopping for 30 seconds of Dance Dance Revolution in the middle of a dragon fight.

The big stompy “Altan” mech is its own castle-crushing pleasure. You face giant enemy demons, and pummel them with metal fists to charge up a circular meter, then cash in that meter to deliver a heavy final and fatal right hook. Like the dragon bits, these brawls also require dodging incoming sword swings that glow that poisonous green (this green glow will be something to watch out for across the entire game, you’ll see). For each dodged attack you get the immediate chance to follow up with a severe counterattack. There’s also a ground-closing charge that launches you towards your foe for a slammin’ biff.

It’s a straightforward salsa of suckerpunches, but it does the job. Perhaps more enjoyable is simply walking through the environment in the mech, with bridges and buildings coming down with every step, the ant-like figures warring on their walkways sent tumbling away as the ground they fight on collapses. It’s a fulfilling Kaiju fantasy that reminded me of throwing cars amid the skyscrapers in Slave Zero, of all things. I wasted a little demo time just wrecking stuff for no reason. I have no regrets.

I’m leading with these big setpieces partly because they are the flashy toy-like elements that might catch your attention as a nu-Doom acolyte. Players haven’t seen stuff like this before (well, they have – they just weren’t allowed behind the wheel). Yet despite the inviting promise of riding a laser-winged dragon that cannot decide if it’s a fantasy creature or a sci-fi one, the truly important changes to The Dark Ages exist in the more grounded first-person shooting. It’s down in the dirt where you’ll feel the biggest difference.

To be reductive, it wants to put a little Bloodborne in your Doom. They’ve given you a shield to parry melee attacks from all types of enemies. The common refrain from the developers at id Software is that you should “stand and fight”. This means stopping in front of larger enemies and parrying their glowing green attacks so that you can counter with a fist or mace whip of your own. The bigger the foe, the more likely this is to become a kind of tennis match of ripostes and counterslams, and when it works it’s a satisfying miniduel in the midst of a larger battle. But you’ll have to thin the crowd around you first to prevent irksome crossfire from smaller foes. All this might take some getting used to if Doom Eternal has conditioned you to never stop moving.

Still it functions as part of nu-Doom’s combat economy. To shoot demon dorks you need ammo, to get ammo you need to melee the scum. To melee you need to wait for your fists to recharge (or scrounge nearby gauntlet pickups). It’s a familiar jam of slam and blam, but it has a subtly distinct tempo. Partly because of the parrying you’ll be doing, but also due to other abilities that mix fights up even further.

The bottled execution animations are gone, for one thing. You now just boot or punch a demon to death in real-time, much like any other fast-paced shooter. This allows for uninterrupted killing and a new sense of flow. But it also changes the feeling of battle in a way that some people might not favour. Doom and Doom Eternal had a sense of punctuation to fights, each mashed skull and torn-off limb a comma of temporary invulnerability in a longer sentence of ultraviolence, where the full stop might only come after a final demon heart is ripped from its ribcage.

That does not exist in the same way here. The developers boast the new approach is a means of keeping the fight flowing, and technically I think they’re right. But it likely also saves on the expense of animating multiple executions for every single demon. Understandable from a development perspective, but perhaps disappointing if those animations are something you have grown to love in these games.

There are a lot of other alterations. Your shield has a zooming attack that gets you right into the fray immediately, while killing everything in its hilariously broad splashdown area. That shield can also be thrown like a buzzsaw into freaks to stun them for a time – a useful “shut the fuck up” button to any Arachnotron pestering you from a distance. The smaller demons feel frailer than ever, mere “fodder” to slurp upon for health and ammo. The flamethrower you used in Doom Eternal to harvest armour from devilish dirtbags is gone (although it can be replaced with a shotgun upgrade that does more or less the same thing).

As much as these changes alter the rhythm of its gunfights, I still walked away from my three-plus hours of The Dark Ages with a heart going like the clappers. So far it still feels beefy, intense, high-pressure, and unwavering. These are all reasons I have never actually finished a Doom game outside of the 1990s originals (and the much slower-paced Doom 3). My body simply cannot handle mainlining this much adrenaline straight to the fingers and thumbs.

But they are the same reasons Nic, our resident Doomer, will likely squeak with glee when he gets his own hands on the game come its May release date. For anyone worried that the changes might water down a hardcore wreck session: the settings screen is overflowing with difficulty options to tweak. I pumped them all up to max, just to see what would happen, and I nearly suffered instant cardiac arrest. It was brutal.

There is one thing that slows things back down in a promising way, though. That’s the larger, more open maps where you can complete objectives in whatever order you please (clear enemies, destroy artillery, et cetera). Here you can explore secret areas that catch your fancy – some with no enemies to worry about at all. There was a lot of gold to collect throughout the biggest level I saw, which you’ll spend at shrines to upgrade your weapons and abilities.

There were even a couple of simple puzzle rooms where I could catch my breath. Here you use the shield to smash metal chains to unlock doors and the like. One tomb held a wonderful weapon as its reward – the “Reaver Chainshot”, which punts a chained medieval ball of iron at any silly sausage unfortunate enough to stand in front of you.

Outside these secret areas, the war raged on, with tons of open spaces chock-a-block with enemies to demean. Some of the bigger threats are “Morale” enemies – minibosses who are more or less invincible until you murder all their bystanding hellgoons.

I don’t know how many of these open levels will feature in the finished game, though I doubt it will make up the majority. The designers at id still want to pre-program the Doomba’s blood hoovering. You can tell as much by how heavily they’re leaning into the story. The Doom guy is enslaved and controlled by some interdimensional robo-barons with a touch of Dune’s House Harkonnen about them. A shackling device gives our guy the glowing yellow eyes of Frankenstein’s monster and keeps him following orders. Meanwhile, the head honchos of hell are invading this world and talking with their usual guttural reverb of ancient evil.

It’s over-the-top metalhead nonsense, sometimes self-aware and tongue in cheek, as when our hero rides a dragon and slams his foot on a pedal like he’s driving a Lamborghini. “Assault mode engaged,” says a robovoice, and the dragon’s wings reshape to suddenly become a reptilian fighter jet. But that same devotion to story is also sometimes worryingly earnest. The human characters pause to look concerned and deliver lore with a voice that suggests what they say should somehow matter to the man who just wants to tear off Beelzebub’s ballsack.

Compare this to the comedic contempt with which Doomfella treated any character who ejected lore at him in 2016, closing his fist in rage and smashing any hologram or audio log that spoke for too long. This drift to truly indulging Doom’s lore with longer cinematics reminds me of the subtle shift when a friend has been using some online slang term ironically, then one day it slips out fully sincere.

Anyway. We’ll have more thoughts on its shield-wieldy, Captain America-style battering in May, when The Dark Ages comes out. There is a feeling with all these glimmering green attacks and clearly signposted pickups that the Doomfeller is being gradually professionalised, honed and toned, made gamier and gamier with each passing instalment. But as far as this nu-est of nu-Dooms is concerned, it seems to be striking a decent balance with that shield. Different but familiar. Slower but not too slow. Defensive and offensive, all at the same time.