Doom Eternal
Developer Id Software
Publisher Bethesda
Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One
Release Out now
Round and round it goes: the most literal combat loop ever conceived. You enter an arena – it might be dressed as an open-plan office, or the public square of a gutted American city, or the shore of an underground lava lake at the centre of Mars. But you come to recognise these coliseums wherever you find them by their furniture: multi-layered, adorned with monkey bars and littered with canisters of chainsaw fuel. As the first monsters wink into view, it becomes second nature to start spinning, a constant circle-strafe your only means of survival.
It’s tempting to’s design. once asked, infamously, whether might be more engrossing if it allowed you to negotiate with the creatures that stalked its halls. Today, of course, many shooter-RPGs fulfil that brief, and Id is happy to leave them to it. The studio has learned, after a painful reboot in the mid ’00s, that doesn’t need dialogue to be smart. It needs an invisible layer of resource management.
