Doom: The Dark Ages - A Halo-Like Moment

The last thing I expected from Doom: The Dark Ages was a reminder of Halo 3. Yet, during a recent hands-on demo with id Software's gothic prequel, I found myself mounted on the back of a cyborg dragon, unleashing a barrage of machine gun fire across the side of a demonic battle barge. With the vessel's defensive turrets destroyed, I landed my beast atop the ship and charged through its lower decks, reducing the entire crew to a puddle of red slop. Moments later, the warmachine was destroyed, and I burst through its hull, leaping back onto my dragon to continue my crusade against the machines of Hell.

Fans of Bungie's iconic Xbox 360 shooter will recognize the parallels to Master Chief's assault on the Covenant's scarab tanks. While the helicopter-like Hornet has been replaced with a holographic-winged dragon and the giant laser-firing mech with an occult flying boat, the essence of the experience remains: an aerial assault transitioning into a devastating boarding action. Surprisingly, this wasn't the only moment reminiscent of Halo. While The Dark Ages retains Doom's unmistakable combat core, its campaign design evokes a "late-2000s shooter" vibe, characterized by elaborate cutscenes and a push for gameplay novelty.

Over two and a half hours, I played four levels of Doom: The Dark Ages. The campaign opener mirrored the tightly paced, meticulously designed levels of Doom (2016) and its sequel. However, the subsequent levels introduced me to piloting a colossal mech, flying the aforementioned dragon, and exploring a vast battlefield filled with secrets and powerful minibosses. This marks a significant departure from Doom's traditional focus on mechanical purity, instead resembling the likes of Halo, Call of Duty, and even old James Bond games like Nightfire, which thrive on scripted setpieces and novel mechanics that appear for a mission or two.

This direction is intriguing for Doom, especially considering the series once rejected a similar path. The cancelled Doom 4 was set to resemble Call of Duty, not just in its modern military aesthetic but also in its emphasis on characters, cinematic storytelling, and scripted events. After years of development, id Software decided these elements didn't fit the series, opting instead for the focused approach of Doom (2016). Yet, here we are in 2025, with The Dark Ages embracing these very elements.

The campaign's rapid pace is punctuated by new gameplay ideas reminiscent of Call of Duty's most innovative moments. My demo began with a long, elaborate cutscene reintroducing the realm of Argent D'Nur, the opulent Maykrs, and the Night Sentinels—the knightly brothers-in-arms of the Doom Slayer. The Slayer is portrayed as a terrifying legend, a nuclear-level threat on two legs. While this lore is familiar to Doom enthusiasts who delved into the prior games' codex entries, the deeply cinematic presentation feels new and reminiscent of Halo. This continues into the levels, with NPC Night Sentinels scattered throughout the environment, similar to UNSC Marines. Although they don't fight alongside you in the levels I demoed, there's a stronger sense of being part of an army, akin to Master Chief leading a large force.

The introductory cutscene features significant character work, and it remains to be seen if this is what Doom needs. I'm a fan of the prior games' minimalistic storytelling approach, and part of me wishes The Dark Ages would continue to tell the Slayer's tale through environmental design and codex entries, reserving cinematics for major reveals, as in Eternal. However, the cutscenes in The Dark Ages know their place: they set up a mission and then disappear, ensuring they don't interrupt Doom's signature intense flow.

There are other interruptions, though. After the opening mission, which begins with pure shotgun slaughter and ends with you parrying Hell Knights using the Slayer's new shield, I was thrust into the cockpit of a Pacific Rim-like Atlan mech, tasked with wrestling demonic kaiju. Following that, I soared through the skies on a cybernetic dragon, taking down battle barges and gun emplacements. These tightly scripted levels create a significant shift, punctuating the campaign's rapid pace with new gameplay ideas reminiscent of Call of Duty's most novel sequences, such as Modern Warfare's AC-130 gunship mission or Infinite Warfare's dogfighting missions. The Atlan is slow and heavy, making Hell's armies look like Warhammer miniatures from a skyscraper-high perspective. The dragon, on the other hand, is fast and agile, and the shift to a wide-angle third-person camera results in an experience that feels worlds apart from classic Doom.

Many of the best FPS campaigns thrive on this kind of variety. Half-Life 2 and Titanfall 2 set the gold standard, while Halo's enduring appeal partly stems from its mix of vehicular and on-foot sequences, adding rich texture. However, I'm uncertain if this approach will work for Doom. Like Eternal, The Dark Ages is a wonderfully complex shooter, demanding your complete attention as you weave together shots, shield tosses, parries, and brutal melee combos. In contrast, the mech and dragon sequences feel anemic, stripped back, and practically on-rails, with combat engagements so tightly controlled they resemble QTEs.

In Call of Duty, switching to driving a tank or firing from a circling gunship works because the mechanical complexity of these scripted sequences isn't far removed from the on-foot missions. However, in The Dark Ages, there's a clear gulf between gameplay styles, akin to a middle school guitar student playing alongside Eddie Van Halen. While Doom's core combat will always be the star, when I'm beating a giant demon with a rocket-powered mech punch, I shouldn't be wishing I was back on the ground with a "mere" double-barreled shotgun.

My final hour of play saw The Dark Ages shift into another unusual guise, but one built on a much sturdier foundation. "Siege" is a level that refocuses on id's best-in-class gunplay, but it opens up Doom's typically claustrophobic level design into a vast open battlefield, with geography shifting between narrow and wide to provide numerous pathways and combat arenas. The goal—to destroy five Gore Portals—echoes Call of Duty's multi-objective, complete-in-any-order missions, but it also reminded me of Halo, with the grand scale of this map contrasting the tighter routes of the opening level, evoking the difference between Halo's interior and exterior environments. Like Halo, the novelty here is that the excellent core shooter systems are given new context in much larger spaces. You must rethink the effective range of every weapon in your arsenal, use your charge attack to close football field-length distances, and employ the shield to deflect artillery fired from oversized tank cannons.

Expanding Doom's playspace can lead to a loss of focus—I found myself backtracking and looping through empty pathways, which really does kill the pace. Here, I'd like to see The Dark Ages lean even closer to Halo by incorporating the dragon into the mix, using it like a Banshee to fly across the battlefield, raining down fire before divebombing into a miniboss battle. This would help maintain the pace and make the dragon feel more integral to the experience. If such a level exists beyond what I've seen, I'll be very happy.

Regardless of the full campaign's overall shape, I'm fascinated that so much of what I've seen feels like a resurrection and reinterpretation of ideas once deemed unsuitable for the series. Very little of the cancelled Doom 4 was released to the public, but a 2013 Kotaku report painted a clear picture. "There were a lot of scripted set pieces," a source told the publication, including an "obligatory vehicle scene." That's exactly what we have in the Atlan and dragon sections—mechanically simple scripted sequences reminiscent of the novelty vehicle levels from Xbox 360-era shooters.

In a 2016 interview with Noclip, id Software's Marty Stratton confirmed that Doom 4 "was much closer to something like [Call of Duty]. A lot more cinematic, a lot more story to it. A lot more characters around you that you are with throughout the course of the gameplay." All of that was scrapped, making it genuinely fascinating to see so much of it return in The Dark Ages. This campaign is set to feature large boarding action setpieces, lusciously rendered cinematics, a much wider cast of characters, and significant lore reveals.

The beating, gory heart of The Dark Ages remains its on-foot, gun-in-hand combat. Nothing in this demo suggested that it won't be the centerpiece, and everything I played affirms it's another fantastic reinvention of Doom's core. I believe that alone is strong enough to support an entire campaign, but id Software clearly has other plans. I'm surprised that some of the studio's new ideas feel so mechanically slim, and I'm concerned they might feel more like contaminants than fresh air. However, there's still much more to see, and only time will contextualize these fragmented demo missions. I eagerly await May 15th, not just to return to id's unrivaled gunplay, but to satisfy my curiosity: Is Doom: The Dark Ages a good late-2000s FPS campaign or a messy one?