The latest Doom formula finally hooked me again with its sharp, gratifying parry mechanics, and Doom: The Dark Ages has executed it flawlessly.

Doom Eternal was a great game, but it was a huge departure from Doom 2016. The ‘run and gun’ behaviour that we’d been conditioned into over the course of the reboot’s 13 spectacular levels was traded in for 2020’s follow-up. What once was a heavy, brutal campaign of destruction and violence was now a floatier affair. Resources became more limited. You were forced to be more mobile. Double jumps, dashes, strafing, and platforming became essential.

It split the fanbase in half. An axe-blow to the center of the Doom faithful. I liked Eternal, for what it’s worth, but I got tired of the connective tissue that bridged the gaps between combat encounters. I’m all for sniffing out secrets, but FPS platforming is a hit-or-miss game, and I think that Eternal often missed its designs. It made the heartbeat of the game irregular and arrhythmic, hobbling that wonderful pace and fluidity that everyone fell in love with in 2016.

Doom: The Dark Ages, for me, is more in line with 2016 than it is Eternal. The combat is designed to have you ‘stand and fight’, not run and gun. The biggest gimmick compared to the two other games in the trilogy is the shield – a ripsaw-modified aegis that sits on your right arm and changes the game in a couple of fundamental ways.

Firstly, you can eat up the attacks and projectiles of ‘fodder’ enemies. Soaking up weak attacks like this means you’re free to focus on the big bastards that are raining death upon you from afar. There’s a shield bash that locks onto targets and rushes you to their location (it actually reminds me of the Devil Bringer from the Devil May Cry games – that’s high praise, for what it’s worth). So, pair these things together, and you’ve got a very simple premise: the little guys are there to give you health, ammo, and armour back. The big guys are there to stop you.

Stomping around the map, you feel like a rook in a game of chess. Moving in bold, strong lines and absolutely obliterating anything in your path, the power fantasy of the Doom Slayer comes back to life. I think in 2016, you felt like a knight; flexible, unpredictable, dangerous. In Eternal, you were a bishop; floaty, mobile, but operating under intense restrictions. Now, in Dark Ages, you’re a rook. A hard bastard. The Danny Dyer of the chessboard. Emboldened to swagger up and headbutt whatever stands in your way, with myriad responses to whatever feeble attempt at revenge they may conjure.

As you move to a new location, you have options: shoot, guard, or melee. The melee is very powerful in Dark Ages, and as such it’s got charges now. You can’t just wang your mace about at will. But that means you’re encouraged to use your shield to attack – it’ll refill charges. So a standard encounter might look like this: you slam into a group of enemies, guard their melee attacks, mow down the fodder with a gun, refill your melee, then splatter the big guys with your mace.

But wait, there’s more. Maybe there’s a group of shield-carrying enemies over there – your bullets won’t do anything to them. So you warm them up a bit with your projectiles (heating up their armoured elements), and then you slam into them with your shield. The resulting impact will ‘detonate’ them all, in a sense, and one well-deployed bit of strategic thinking will bust their defensive line wide open.

Destroying armoured enemies will give you armour, too. Meaning you can risk getting a face full of fireball and dive into another combat encounter quicker, removing the need for the footsies you’ll play with your shield. Using your mace to tenderise flesh will give you back ammo, and shooting guys in the face refills health. So, as with Eternal, you’re encouraged to rotate the deadly arms of your arsenal in order to prolong your survival.

But it feels less beholden to the flow chart than Eternal did. More than once, I found myself on the back foot (I was playing too aggressively and wasn’t watching the odd hit chip at my health). But I rallied, because of the game’s best mechanic: the parry.

Oh, the parry. Now, I’ve written at length about the joy of a good parry (see; Bloodborne), and it’s really not something I expected to see in an FPS, of all things. But Id has nailed it. In Dark Ages, anything green is your friend; whether it’s a p**sed-off minotaur firing green projectiles at you, or a revenant attacking you physically with a green tinge, anything green can be parried. Anything. A simple tap of the shoulder button is enough for you to activate the parry – and you can even alter the timing window in the settings if you’re a bit slower.

Parries are the lifeblood of the game, as far as I’m concerned. They give you great incentive to acutally put yourself into the middle of the melee (like a rook) and they power you up, too. So in reflecting damage and really hurting an enemy, you actually do a little bump of violence amphetamine yourself.

I found myself storming around the battlefield intentionally baiting out green attacks; tempting enemies to get in my space to attack me, and positioning myself in their line of fire to get my parry on. It feels so good. It adds another layer of agency to you as a player, making you think about which route the flowchart can go and how you can power yourself up, instead of relying on Doom Eternal’s flowchart which was just ‘do this, then this, then this’.

It forces you to be tactical and aggressive on a macro level; every single second of a combat encounter makes you feel like you’re making a decision that matters. There are always options open to you, and even being forced into a corner feels exhilarating. ‘The best offense is a good defense’ has never been more valid.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a return to form. As the Doom Slayer, you feel heavy and deadly. If you die, it feels fair. Enemies fall apart like meat in a slow cooker when you run into them, and even something as simple as landing from a big jump has a weighty satisfaction that lives up to the power fantasy of being a horrible bastard in power armour.

After playing for just four hours, Doom: The Dark Ages went from being something I was vaguely curious about to one of my most anticipated games of 2025.

Doom: The Dark Ages launches on May 15, and it’ll launch on Xbox Game Pass for PC and Xbox Series – but it’ll also come to PlayStation 5.