Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part One
Ho-lee fuck. Where do I even begin? Well how about the fact that this easily takes the difficulty crown from the base Doom Eternal as the most blisteringly hard FPS game I've ever played. To be honest it's so hard that I got frustrated more than once. It's so hard that I actually think it was a mistake for id to let people buy this as a standalone game without playing Doom Eternal first. If you haven't played Doom Eternal, you do NOT want to start with this. Ancient Gods assumes that you have not only played the base game, but mastered it to a degree that first time players will never be able to grasp. No pussies allowed here. There are only three extra large levels in this expansion, which took me maybe 10 hours to beat on ultraviolence, but at least three of those hours came down to dying over and over. The first fight, the first fucking fight in this DLC took me five tries to get past it and by the time I finished these---I repeat, three levels---I had probably died over a hundred times and you bet your ass I mean that literally. I hate to keep banging this drum but I really cannot overstate how much the difficulty has jumped in this expansion.
So what makes it so much harder? For starters the encounters are much, much bigger with swarms of elite enemies, a far greater number of fodder enemies, and arenas that are full of hazards that you're pretty much guaranteed to run into over and over again. The waves are also looooooooong and you get very few checkpoints. Most of the time the game expects you to do the entire thing in one go with no deaths. That alone is tough enough, but the new demons feel specifically designed to give you the finger. The worst of them is an enemy who buffs other demons into minibosses while also removing all their weaknesses and making them immune to freeze grenades. You cannot kill this enemy without killing the buffed demon first, and even after you do that it's only vulnerable to one weapon that kills enemies very slowly, so good luck killing it without getting fucked in the butt in the process. You gotta do it though because otherwise he'll just buff another demon and you have to do it all over again. God damn. And don't even get me started on the final boss. That fight is so overwhelmingly, relentlessly unfair that I would not blame anyone who chooses to accept the super armor when the game offers it to you. Even then you might still get killed over and over.
I appreciate the work that went into this expansion. They made a decent amount of content and the level design is pretty well thought out. It adds to the story and lore in cool ways and the new music, while not as good as the base game's music in my personal opinion, is still solid. My only real complaint is just how carried away they got with the challenge. Doom Eternal was pretty damn hard but it always felt fair and balanced. Ancient Gods frequently feels like the game really doesn't want you to finish it and is willing to do whatever it takes to stop you. If you're an absolute masochist, a true glutton for pain and punishment, then I wholeheartedly recommend Ancient Gods. By all means, dive in and enjoy the suffering. If you are just a casual FPS player who wants to relax and shoot stuff, however, then you might want to ask yourself if you're willing to deal with the frustration. Seriously, this game gave me actual adrenaline rushes while playing it. My hands were still shaking when I started typing this post.