The Ancient Gods is perty.
Doom Eternal is my game of the year, which is remarkable considering I initially returned it because I was disappointed by the changes from Doom 2016. It is a complicated, difficult shooter, sort of a Dark Souls for FPS fans in how it rewards mastery of all of its many systems, and it is that complexity, I think, that's made me spend sixty hours with Doom Eternal, as well as purchase its first DLC, the Ancient Gods.
Let's get this out of the way: the Ancient Gods is HARD. I beat Doom Eternal on Nightmare, and I found that the Ancient Gods on Ultra-Violence (one difficulty level beneath Nightmare) was significantly harder than Eternal's campaign on Nightmare. Did you hate the Marauder in Doom Eternal? Well, you'll eventually face two Marauders at once, as well as one buffed by a totem, and those encounters rank among the Ancient Gods' easier battles. The Marauder was loathed by the majority of the Doom player-base because he's invulnerable except for a split second before he attacks. No other enemy in the base game is like this, and many thought that the Marauder broke up the game's flow. ID have not listened to this vocal contingent, however, because the two new enemies in the DLC share the Marauder's design philosophy. The Blood Maykr is a shielded version of the maykr drones from Eternal, but it can only be killed with a headshot while it's attacking. Unlike the Marauder, it only takes one shot, but these guys have a tendency to finish you off during a big battle. The other new enemy is the spirit, a blue ghost that possesses enemies, doubling their health and making them immune to the ice bomb as well as staggering. Oh yeah, they also move at twice normal speed, and you can't disable their weapons. When you finally manage to kill a spirit, the ghost hovers for a few seconds, and it is at this point when you must hit them with the microwave beam, making you rather immobile as well as extremely vulnerable. The spirit is far more frustrating than the Marauder, and it really seems like a troll job by ID, shrugging off concerns of unfair difficulty with a "Git Gud" attitude. I'm willing to bet that many players found Doom Eternal to be really hard compared to most first person shooters. I found it to be ridiculously hard in spots, and it was only after I beat the campaign on Nightmare that I felt I'd gotten pretty decent at the game. For hardcore Doom fans, the Ancient Gods is a really nice challenge, but I feel as though ID can't jack up the difficulty much more without alienating a large portion of their fanbase. Some battle arenas in the Ancient Gods, particularly at the end of the Blood Swamps, require you to face a ridiculous onslaught of heavies. One of the trials involved multiple mancubui, a doom hunter, a spirited arachnotron accompanied by three other arachnotrons, two barons, and a archivile. So don't fuck up, because you'll have to battle them all over again.
In other news, the three levels of the Ancient Gods are visually compelling, and as well designed as any in the base game. I'm still on the final boss, but I believe I've spent about five or six hours with the DLC so far. If you're a hardcore Doom player who welcomes a challenge, then I think the Ancient Gods is worth it. If you barely made it through Eternal, stay away.
There's a lot of visual spectacle going on in this DLC.
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