Doom's Dark Ages: A Halo-Like Renaissance

When I played Doom: The Dark Ages, the last thing I expected was to be reminded of Halo 3. Yet, midway through a hands-on demo with id Software's gothic prequel, I found myself mounted on a cyborg dragon, unleashing a barrage of machine gun fire across the side of a demonic battle barge. After taking out the vessel's defensive turrets, I landed my beast atop the ship and charged through its lower decks, reducing the entire crew to a mere splatter of red. Moments later, the warmachine was obliterated as I burst through its hull and leapt back onto my dragon, continuing my crusade against the machines of Hell.

Fans of Bungie's iconic Xbox 360 shooter will immediately recognize the parallels to Master Chief's assault on the Covenant's scarab tanks. While the helicopter-like Hornet is replaced with a holographic-winged dragon and the giant laser-firing mech with an occult flying boat, the essence remains: an aerial assault that seamlessly transitions into a devastating boarding action. Surprisingly, this wasn't the only Halo-esque moment in the demo. Although the combat core of The Dark Ages is unmistakably Doom, the campaign's design seems to channel the late-2000s shooter vibe with its elaborate cutscenes and push for gameplay novelty.

Over the course of two and a half hours, I played through four levels of Doom: The Dark Ages. The first level, the campaign's opener, echoed the tightly paced, meticulously designed levels of Doom (2016) and its sequel. The subsequent levels, however, introduced me to piloting a colossal mech, flying the aforementioned dragon, and exploring a vast battlefield filled with secrets and formidable minibosses. This marks a significant departure from Doom's traditional focus on mechanical purity, instead resembling the likes of Halo, Call of Duty, and even old James Bond games like Nightfire, which are known for their scripted setpieces and novel mechanics that appear for a mission or two.

This direction is intriguing for Doom, especially considering the series once veered away from such elements. The cancelled Doom 4 was set to mimic Call of Duty with its modern military aesthetic, emphasis on characters, cinematic storytelling, and scripted events. Id Software ultimately decided these ideas didn't fit the series, opting instead for the focused approach of Doom (2016). Yet, here we are in 2025, with The Dark Ages embracing these very elements.

The campaign's brisk pace is punctuated by new gameplay ideas reminiscent of Call of Duty's most innovative moments. My demo began with a lengthy, cinematic cutscene reintroducing the realm of Argent D'Nur, the opulent Maykrs, and the Night Sentinels—the knightly brothers-in-arms of the Doom Slayer. The Slayer himself is portrayed as a terrifying legend, a nuclear-level threat on two legs. While this lore is familiar to Doom enthusiasts who delved into the prior games' codex entries, the deeply cinematic presentation feels fresh and reminiscent of Halo. This continues into the levels, with NPC Night Sentinels scattered throughout the environment, akin to UNSC Marines. Though they don't fight alongside you in the levels I played, there's a stronger sense of being part of an army, much like Master Chief leading a large force.

The introductory cutscene features significant character work, and it remains to be seen whether this is what Doom needs. Personally, I preferred the subtle storytelling of the previous games, conveyed through environment design and codex entries, with cinematics reserved for major reveals, as seen in Eternal. However, the cutscenes in The Dark Ages serve their purpose well: they set up missions without interrupting Doom's signature intense flow.

There are other interruptions, though. Following the opening mission, which starts with pure shotgun slaughter and ends with you parrying Hell Knights using the Slayer's new shield, I found myself in the cockpit of a Pacific Rim-like Atlan mech, wrestling demonic kaiju. Then, I was soaring through the skies on a cybernetic dragon, taking down battle barges and targeting gun emplacements. These tightly scripted levels create a significant shift, introducing new gameplay ideas that echo Call of Duty's most memorable novelties, such as Modern Warfare's AC-130 gunship sequence or Infinite Warfare's dogfighting missions. The Atlan is slow and heavy, making Hell's armies look like Warhammer miniatures from a skyscraper-high perspective. The dragon, on the other hand, is fast and agile, with a wide-angle third-person camera that offers a very different experience from classic Doom.

Many of the best FPS campaigns thrive on this kind of variety. Half-Life 2 and Titanfall 2 set the standard, while Halo's enduring appeal partly stems from its mix of vehicular and on-foot sequences. However, I'm uncertain if this approach will work for Doom. Like Eternal, The Dark Ages is a wonderfully complex shooter, demanding your full attention as you weave together shots, shield tosses, parries, and brutal melee combos. In contrast, the mech and dragon sequences feel less engaging, almost on-rails, with combat engagements so tightly controlled they resemble QTEs.

In Call of Duty, switching to a tank or a circling gunship works because the mechanical complexity of these sequences isn't far removed from the on-foot missions. But in The Dark Ages, there's a clear divide between gameplay styles, akin to a middle school guitar student playing alongside Eddie Van Halen. While Doom's core combat will always be the star, when I'm pummeling a giant demon with a rocket-powered mech punch, I shouldn't be longing to return to the ground with a "mere" double-barreled shotgun.

My final hour of play saw The Dark Ages shift into another unusual guise, but one built on a much sturdier foundation. "Siege" is a level that refocuses on id's best-in-class gunplay, but it opens up Doom's typically claustrophobic level design into a vast open battlefield, with geography shifting between narrow and wide to offer numerous pathways and combat arenas. The objective, to destroy five Gore Portals, mirrors Call of Duty's multi-objective, complete-in-any-order missions, yet it also reminded me of Halo—the grand scale of this map versus the tighter routes of the opening level evokes the contrast between Halo's interior and exterior environments. Here, the excellent core shooter systems are given new context in much larger spaces, requiring you to rethink the effective range of every weapon in your arsenal, use your charge attack to close football field-length distances, and employ the shield to deflect artillery from oversized tank cannons.

Expanding Doom's playspace can lead to a loss of focus—I found myself backtracking and looping through empty pathways, which disrupts the pace. I would have liked to see The Dark Ages incorporate the dragon more like Halo's Banshee, allowing you to fly across the battlefield, rain down fire, and divebomb into miniboss battles to maintain the pace and integrate the dragon more seamlessly into the experience. If such a level exists beyond what I've seen, it would be a welcome addition.

Despite the overall shape of the full campaign, I'm fascinated by how much of what I've seen feels like a resurrection and reinterpretation of ideas once deemed unsuitable for the series. Very little of the cancelled Doom 4 was released to the public, but a 2013 Kotaku report described it as having "a lot of scripted set pieces," including an "obligatory vehicle scene." This is precisely what we see in the Atlan and dragon sections—mechanically simple scripted sequences reminiscent of Xbox 360-era shooters' novelty vehicle levels.

In a 2016 Noclip interview, id Software's Marty Stratton confirmed that Doom 4 "was much closer to something like [Call of Duty]. A lot more cinematic, a lot more story to it. A lot more characters around you that you are with throughout the course of the gameplay." All of that was scrapped, making it genuinely fascinating to see so much of it return in The Dark Ages. This campaign is set to feature large boarding action setpieces, lushly rendered cinematics, a broader cast of characters, and significant lore reveals.

The question now is: were those ideas always a bad fit for Doom, or were they just a bad fit when they resembled Call of Duty too closely? While part of me remains skeptical, as fans once decried "Call of Doom," I'm also excited about the possibility of id Software successfully integrating this approach into the now-proven modern Doom formula.

The beating, gory heart of The Dark Ages remains its on-foot, gun-in-hand combat. Nothing in this demo suggested that it won't be the centerpiece, and everything I played confirms it's another fantastic reinvention of Doom's core. I believe this alone is strong enough to support an entire campaign, but id Software clearly has other plans. I'm surprised that some of the studio's new ideas feel mechanically thin, and I'm concerned they might feel more like contaminants than fresh air. However, there's still much more to see, and only time will contextualize these fragmented demo missions. I eagerly await May 15th, not just to return to id's unrivaled gunplay, but to satisfy my curiosity: Is Doom: The Dark Ages a compelling late-2000s FPS campaign or a messy one?