DOOM ETERNAL
Playing this FPS sequel is… exhausting. After three hours, I feel like my nervous system needs a vacation. Any good shooter demands something from your reflexes, learning how to aim while dodging incoming fire, but that’s just learning how to breathe in Doom Eternal. Properly operating your entire body – and staying alive – is a lot harder.
The game on ‘ultraviolence’, its version of ‘hard’ difficulty, is the most stressed I’ve been playing a game in a long time, because almost every fight has me feeling like I’m on the ragged edge. It’s been a couple years since I played any of id Software’s 2016 Doom, the surprisingly great reboot that Eternal is following up on, but I don’t remember it feeling like this. Doom was fast, rabid, and satisfying in its brutality and the ways it encouraged aggression to stay alive. You had
