The first-person shooter space still has room to grow, and few games prove this better than 2020’s DOOM Eternal, a rip-roaring romp through Hell and back which, for my money, is one of the best single-player FPS games ever made. But just like how regular life might seem humdrum after getting back from a vacation, so too do most first-person shooters feel pedestrian and uninspired after playing DOOM Eternal.
The FPS genre has gone through several iterations over the years, with the DOOM franchise actually playing a significant role in its development. Alongside other MS-DOS franchises like Quake, Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein, DOOM helped establish first-person shooters as smooth, fantastical journeys through the most unlikely of settings; realism was generally not at the heart of these games’ design philosophy. But things started to change with the advent of IP like Rainbow Six, Medal of Honor, and Call of Duty, which grounded themselves not in fantasy, but reality; you were no longer the larger-than-life Doomslayer, but a Private in the US military, or a top-secret special operative in… the US military. This camp of first-person shooters, while not without their merits, began to focus more on spectacle, atmosphere, and realism than compelling mechanics, setting the stage for the likes of DOOM Eternal to make their dramatic entrance.
How DOOM Eternal Makes Running and Gunning Feel Fresh Again
When news broke that Id Software would be reviving DOOM in 2016, many weren’t sure what to think. I, for one, was skeptical about the series’ modern reinvention, as someone who was a bit underwhelmed by DOOM 3 at the time (I’ve since been informed that I should give it another chance), but the revamp actually worked surprisingly well. But if 2016’s DOOM doubled down on the fantasy of the Doom Slayer as an unstoppable, demon-hating force of nature, DOOM Eternal quadrupled down.
DOOM 2016 is a good FPS, but DOOM Eternal plays jump rope with the genre’s conventions. Whereas many shooters encourage the player to stay in one position, utilizing cover and avoiding damage, DOOM Eternal basically requires consistent aggression. Just like in its predecessor, players have to perform Glory Kills on enemies to heal in DOOM Eternal—retreat is therefore often a much riskier strategy than forward movement and further engagement with the combat sandbox. Eternal augments this design pillar through new features like the armor-drop system, dashing, and Blood Punches.
The result of these tweaks, not to mention DOOM Eternal‘s much-improved weapons arsenal (DOOM 2016’s starter pistol is hilariously quaint in retrospect), is an elegant mechanical dance unlike anything offered by most other shooters. Nothing feels superfluous or gimmicky, and its core mechanics are perfectly balanced: it’s not just more fun to be fast and aggressive, it’s the most optimal way to gain health and ammo, and thus stay alive. And with each weapon and attack serving a distinct purpose (e.g. snipers for Maykr Drones, grenades for Cacodemons), DOOM Eternal‘s combat design becomes even more airtight.
DOOM Eternal Is Far from the Only Modern FPS with Unique Mechanics
I would be remiss if I did not draw attention to other, lesser-known games doing interesting things with FPS conventions. DOOM Eternal is certainly not the only creative leader in this genre space. Some of the most compelling and innovative first-person shooters to release in recent years include:
- Ghostrunner 1 & 2
- I Am Your Beast
- Neon White
- Prey
- SUPERHOT
- Severed Steel
- Titanfall 2
- Turbo Overkill
- Ultrakill
These games, while often straddling at least one other genre, succeed through their unique implementation of FPS systems and tropes. Something like Titanfall 2 takes a traditional sci-fi shooter campaign and stuffs it with so many unique ideas and setpieces that it puts any and all modern CoD or Battlefield singleplayer modes to shame, whereas I Am Your Beast and Severed Steel are frenetic and puzzle-like in a way that few action games are.
Although it’s not quite as effective as DOOM Eternal, DOOM: The Dark Ages is also worth highlighting as a hard-hitting, well-crafted modern FPS.
Franchises Like Call of Duty Are Fine, but Can’t Define the FPS Space Anymore
Part of what makes this comparison between something like Call of Duty or Battlefield and something like DOOM Eternal is that, until relatively recently, the former was superseding the other. Certainly, the likes of Medal of Honor, a series so movie-like that it’s literally produced by Steven Spielberg himself, began to overtake DOOM, Wolfenstein, and Quake in the early-2000s. Audiences were hungry for American war stories at this time, and perhaps the honor and glory that such stories depicted served as soothing balms for anxious westerners in a post-9/11 world. Or maybe the drive for more cinematic gaming experiences, which were much more novel at the time, overshadowed the desire for mechanical complexity.
Either way, the genre has clearly evolved, yet Call of Duty and Battlefield seem to have largely abandoned innovation in their single-player campaigns, opting for bombastic spectacle or interesting setpieces rather than deep mechanical sandboxes. For instance, if a new CoD campaign introduces a car chase, I can be sure that it’ll be a flashy, dramatic, intense, but ultimately on-rails gameplay experience. This is fine for the roller-coaster rides that such experiences are meant to emulate, but sometimes, you just want a bit more. First-person shooters like DOOM Eternal and the other aforementioned games, so long as they continue being made, will be here to provide that.
- Released
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March 20, 2020
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence
