Why not go all out? Let’s crank Doom: The Dark Ages’ difficulty settings to the absolute maximum.

I recently got three hours of hands-on time with Doom: The Dark Ages, which included a ride on dragonback and a fist fight with a massive mech. But one other sequence saw me wrecking demon lads in one of the more expansive, explorey levels this newest FPS is promising. For a lark, I decided to throw all the difficulty sliders up in an effort to hurt myself spiritually and physically. In doing so I discovered there are some interesting options for players who want a brutal challenge. I also recorded it, so you can see how chaotic, silly, and abrupt it can get (and so you can say “I’d do better” than the disgusting journalist).

As you can see, death comes quick and pickups barely give you a sliver of health or a couple of bullets. Your shield’s parry – a normally reliable defensive measure – is reduced to a fussy disc that works for only fraction of a second. The whole game is also sped up to 150% of normal speed – which makes things slightly frantic.

All this is done through a set of options that makes difficulty much more tweakable than in previous games. You can still select a simple preset, but for anyone wondering how they can custom-build their game to be tough in just the right way, here’s a breakdown of the difficulty options you’re able to tweak in Doom: The Dark Ages. It’s possible these might get changed before release, but take a gander anyway.

• Difficulty level – Lets you quickly select a difficulty preset. “Aspiring Slayer” is the lowest, and “Nightmare” is the highest. But you can push things further into either extreme with the below options.
• Parry window – There’s a lot of parrying flashy attacks, and this determines how forgiving the window of time to parry is, ranging from “small” to “large”
• Enhanced targeting – Auto aim by a fancy name. This setting reduces the need for precision if turned on.
• Empowered attacks – This makes enemies more likely to have their attacks interrupted when hit. It can be turned on or off.
• Damage to player – Modifies how much demon attacks hurt you. Ranges from 50% to 500%.
• Damage to demons – Modifies how much your attacks hurt enemies. Goes as low as 50% and as high as 1000%.
• Enemy aggression – Multiple enemies are more likely to attack at the same time when this is high, and they’ll attack more often. Has four settings ranging from “least” to “most”.
• Game speed – Simply slows down or speeds up the game. Goes as high as 150% and as low as 50%.
• Daze duration – Determines how long demons remain “dazed” and vulnerable to your executions and “Glory Strikes”. Slides between 50% and 150%.
• Enemy projectile speed – How quickly ranged enemy attacks move, with five settings from “slow” to “fast”. Not all projectiles are affected, warns the game.
• Resource values – The lower this is, the less health, armour, and ammo you’ll get for each individual pickup. Comes with five settings ranging from “low” to “high”.

As for how it actually felt to play with all these modified to toughen the fight up – it was horrible. I sweat under normal conditions in Doom games, the intensity of the shootouts demanding a lot of quick-thinking with very little breathing room or downtime in any given level. Increasing the game’s speed is enough by itself to make my nose bleed. I’ll stick to a regular preset, thanks.

I did also try the opposite, cranking all the sliders down fully and turning the game into a slow motion shooter of baby steps and instantly exploding bad guys. And yes, this simply un-Dooms Doom. But it was enough to prove that for accessibility purposes alone it might be useful to some.

Doom: The Dark Ages is due out May 15th, and it’s one of our most anticipated games of the year.