After just five or so hours with Revelations so far, I already feel confident saying that the new combat elements it brings to the table make the encounters in this DLC the very best Doom: The Dark Ages has to offer. We didn’t get early code for this expansion, so my full review isn’t ready quite yet – I still need to finish up the last third of the campaign and then check out what seems to be a fairly robust endgame. But the new Chain Spear and refreshed mobility of Revelations have it inching ever closer to the stratospheric heights of Doom Eternal, which is already enough for me to confidently tell any fellow Doom heads that Revelations is a must-play.
This DLC’s story picks up right where the main campaign left off, and while you can technically jump straight into it first, you’ll be missing out on some pretty necessary context if you do. Of course, you don’t need much context to enjoy blasting a hole in Hell Knight with the Super Shotgun or jamming a spear through a Mancubus’ skull. The bigger reason why you’ll want to make sure you play through the campaign first is to familiarize yourself with the Slayer’s arsenal of weapons and techniques so you know what tool is right for which job, because Revelations throws you into the deep end right from the start and demands that you know what you’re doing. Even as someone who did play through Doom: the Dark Ages on Nightmare difficulty more than a year ago, the first couple of enemy encounters kind of kicked my ass.
And then, just when I started to find my footing again, Revelations did something truly bold and took away the defining element ofThe Dark Ages’ combat: the Shield Saw. In its place, I gained the Chain Spear, which has a lot of the same functions as the Shield, but all handled in very different ways that end up totally changing the flow of combat. For example, the Spear can still parry green enemy attacks, but now you have to time a strike so that you essentially clash with theirs. It’s uniquely satisfying to bat back projectiles and smack away swipes and slashes, but you do lose the safety net of having a shield to negate damage if you mistime the parry.
The biggest difference between the Spear and the Shield is how you get around. With the Shield, you were able to use a shield bash that let you zip towards and slam into any target at high speed, but you didn’t have much mobility outside of that. With the spear, you can no longer instantly close the distance between you and an enemy. Instead, you throw it into a foe and slowly pull yourself towards them, maintaining full directional control as you launch either above, around, or right in front of your target. It works almost exactly like the grappling hook on the Super Shotgun in Doom Eternal, which is appropriate, as the entirety of the Spear’s kit feels designed to inject Eternal’s focus on mobility back into the grounded and heavy feel of The Dark Ages’ combat.
Perhaps the best addition, though, is also the simplest one: the Slayer can dash again! I knew I missed the dash throughout my playthrough of the base game, but I didn’t realize just how much until they gave it back to me. It completely changes how The Dark Ages plays. Instead of basically being required to stand my ground and parry a sequence of attacks, now I can slip past foes, use my grapple to leap over them, dash behind cover, and just stay more mobile overall much like I would in Doom Eternal. It’s an added layer of creative combat expression that was missing here, and while it still isn’t quite at the same level as Eternal, it gets pretty dang close.
These combat options only expand the deeper you get into the DLC, as not only do you get your shield back – with the ability to hot swap between the two sub-weapons at any time – but you can also collect hidden bundles of Platinum to purchase new abilities for the spear. These include a damaging stab, an aerial slam, or a damaging javelin toss, and each of those abilities come with their own upgrades that add either additional utility or a direct counter against specific types of enemies. For example, the stab will deal extra damage to heavy melee enemies; the throw will deal extra damage to flying baddies, and can be upgraded to pierce through the fence-like projectiles that Mancubi toss out; and the slam can be upgraded to make health pickups pour out of foes that get hit by the resulting explosion. It again calls back to Doom Eternal’s style of making different weapons counters against specific enemy types, except here you don’t have to worry about constantly swapping between them. Everything is tied to the many abilities of the Spear.
It’s so much that it can honestly be a little hard to keep all of your different combat tools straight, and I often found myself getting tripped up by the fact that the button to throw the shield is different than the button to throw the spear – the buttons to parry are different between the two sub-weapons as well. This leads to lots of moments where my brain says “parry!” while using the spear, only to press the right mouse button (which is parry on the shield) to do a throw instead and launch myself into a terrible spot. Remapping the controls is something I can do, of course, but because so many abilities have overlapping functions, it’s hard to find a control scheme that feels universally good. Ultimately, it’s a learning curve that I was able to overcome, but the road to retrain my brain was a rocky one, to say the least.
There’s more for me to dive into still, from the expansive hub world that’s filled to the brim with secrets, the aforementioned endgame, the classic doom levels, etc. But that’s going to have to wait for my full review. For now, it’s time for me to get back to ripping and tearing.
