Ancient Gods Part 2 is a disappointment. It's certainly not bad, and the difficulty curve is a little gentler than Ancient Gods Part 1, but as a finale to Doom Eternal, it's too short, with a frustrating final boss. Now, I've beaten Eternal on Nightmare, including all of the Slayer Gates, as well as Ancient Gods Part 1 on Ultra Violence. The fucking Dark Lord, however, is just too much for me, at least after about two hours, so I finally lowered the difficulty to Hurt Me Plenty and managed to take him out. He's basically a Marauder, which isn't too bad, but he also has five health bars, and every time he damages you, he heals. Oh yeah, he also spawns monsters constantly during the later stages of the fight. The only time you can damage the Dark Lord is when his eyes flash green, which happens much less often than you would think. One wrong move, and several minutes of gameplay, in which you patiently baited the son of a bitch to attack, goes down the drain. It's a slog, much more so than the Icon of Sin, Khan Makyr, or even Samur. I'm not a fan of games that have contempt for your time, and as much as I love Doom Eternal, I think Hugo Martin and crew have made a few misstep in their handling of the franchise. They've doubled-down on the difficulty, on making the game tactical and fast, but in the process they've abandoned the tonal constancy of Doom 2016 and embraced a Saturday morning cartoon vibe that's about as captivating as, well, a Saturday morning cartoon. The Dark Lord is a big muscly dude that looks exactly like the Slayer, only he's in a mech suit stolen from Warhammer 40k. You kill him, all the demons disappear, and you get put back into a box by the alien robot angels. The end. I dunno, it's very unsatisfying. I didn't give a flying shit about the story in Doom Eternal, but I expected something epic, like maybe a fight in a mech suit against a titan demon, for example, or a really far-out trip through hell, but Immora, the game's final stage, is just a generic dark fantasy sci-fi city. Hell, Doom 3 did a lot of things poorly, but its trip to hell was better than what we get in Ancient Gods Part 2.
I think one of the reasons that I love Eternal's gameplay is that it's influenced by Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, with its focus on speed, weapon switching, and movement gymnastics. It's an engrossing combination, and nothing beats blowing the turret off an arachnotron's back, pivoting to blood punch a hell knight into oblivion, and then flying through the air to light a mancubus on fire before blowing it to pieces with the supershotgun and ballista. That said, everything else in Eternal--the cartoony monkey bars, the abandonment of the environment as a realistic place, the green bobbing extra lives, the shit generic fantasy story--isn't great. I think that's why there's a real divergence in opinion regarding Eternal between the hardcore base and the casual gamer. The casual prefers the more grounded and less artificial experience of Doom 2016, whereas the git good gamer loves the brutality of Eternal's demanding gameplay. I can relate to both, and I doubt that Ancient Gods Part 2 will satisfy anyone.
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