DOOM Eternal Demands You Dance

AKA Ranking of DOOMs Part 4 (it is 4, right? Eh, it doesn’t matter that much)

I am, in spite of everything, a little reluctant to talk about this one. There’s a couple of reasons for this, which are as follows:

1. Mick Gordon got fucked over by id, and that’s fucked up. Gordon seems like he takes his work super-seriously, and maybe that bit him in the ass a little here, but also it sure does seem like id (and Bethesda’s) efforts to get the soundtrack out the door were Not Cool. Is it also kind of uncool to go out of your way to shit-talk the soundtrack release? Absolutely! I think the most he should’ve said was “hey, I wasn’t really involved with the final mix of the soundtrack, I know some of you are disappointed, that’s how it goes sometimes” but, you know, hindsight. It makes me feel conflicted to see one of the guys responsible for specifically what we think about when we think about modern DOOM get basically shoved into a corporate memory-hole, even if – and here’s the part that will get me yelled at – I agree with Alex Navarro’s long-stated opinion that yes, Mick Gordon’s soundtrack is very good, but he is not the only guy to do drop-D tuning and produce some heavy fuckin’ riffs to kill demons by.
   Case in point, I think David Levy and Andrew Hulshult’s contributions to the Ancient Gods soundtrack are great, bordering on phenomenal (I am extremely fond of the music in the Blood Swamps, as an example), and I also think whoever they have doing the DOOM: The Dark Ages soundtrack has a good handle on things. It’s still a bummer! Meathook is a fucking incredible track, as is Gordon’s use of the original Icon of Sin theme and, especially, the way he mixes in the E1M3 theme during the Arc Complex and Phobos facility sections. It’s so good!
2. I am, to some extent, trying to be kind of objective when I rank these things, but look, DOOM Eternal is in my top five games of all time. It altered my brain chemistry on a fundamental level – DOOM 2016 got me to go back and play the other DOOM entries, yes, but DOOM Eternal is responsible for me replaying the other DOOM entries more in the four years since its release than I ever did before. It is also a game that I have, at a conservative guess, over 200 hours in. That might not seem like a lot to most people (I know people with like 300-400 hours in the game, they are Built Different), but let me tell you it is a rare game that even cracks 100 for me – much less a game with a campaign you can beat in (according to How Long to Beat, anyway) 28 hours – add another 10 hours to clear the DLC completely. Also, consider the fact that I have beaten the game a frankly stupid eight times (I’ve done the dlc three times, and finished my fourth run of Part 1 not too long ago. I am even now a third of the way through part two). This isn’t me bragging, this is me establishing that I am into this game the way people are into, I don’t know, religion?
   During a work trip, a colleague asked me about the whole “do guys really think about the Roman Empire every day” thing and I said I didn’t, and while at the time I did not have a ready answer to what my personal Roman Empire is – I said Mac Tonight, which is actually true – I think of that moon-headed rascal at least a couple times a week – I realized later that the real answer is DOOM, which I mean fuck a couple times a week that shit is in my brain a couple times an hour, easily. DOOM Eternal is the thing that made my brain that way. I fucking love this game. I am constantly on the cusp of spending atrocious amounts of money on DOOM Eternal art to put on my walls, and the only thing that keeps that from happening is the fact that I already have a SIGIL II poster on there and also I can’t find a DOOM Eternal poster I really like (yet, there’s a real nice Cacodemon design I might break down and get). What I am saying is that if you are surprised at how high in the rankings this game is by the end of the essay, I have both done a bad job of describing why it is tremendous and also you somehow failed to read the previous two paragraphs where I talked about how much I fucking love DOOM Eternal.

Okay, that’s out of the way, and it only took like 800 words for me to get through the caveats and whatnot. Brevity!*

The Sophomore Album is the Hardest Album

While it was unequivocally rad as hell to see the release of DOOM 2016 be such an overwhelming success, part of me was still a little curious to see whether or not the game’s success would earn it a sequel – and if it did, would it come immediately? Would there be a return to Quake before that? Would id do the obvious thing (to me, anyway) and follow up their (sort of) reboot of DOOM with a (sort of) reboot of DOOM II? What if we just got DLC for DOOM 2016 that explains where the fuck the Doomslayer got sent at the end of the campaign?

Turns out, they did in fact go for the obvious thing – and they did it relatively quickly. We got the announcement of DOOM Eternal at the Bethesda E3 conference in 2018, and it was immediately clear we would in fact be doing Hell on Earth. I remember watching the reveal live and the less said about the noise I made when I realized what was happening, the better. Pretty sure I scared my neighbors.

In the initial gameplay reveal at QuakeCon, we got some more information about what the game was promising: first, you’d be faster and deadlier, second, that you’d get more movement options, and third there would be an invasion mechanic where (if you wanted to), other players could enter your game as demons hunting you. I was pretty excited about the whole thing, as were, you know, a shitload of other people.

The development process for this game was, at first, believed to be relatively smooth – although later reports of crunch in the back half of 2019 ended up putting the lie to that one. Video games are, as we all know, hard to make – and one of the casualties of that was the inclusion of the Invasion mechanic being delayed (and then, eventually, canceled after the onset of the pandemic threw off post-release development plans – instead of invasion mode, we got a two-part DLC campaign, which feels like a fair trade to me). id also included Master Levels, which were basically just levels of the game but with different demon placements meant to deliver more difficulty to players looking for more of a challenge, and then finally, they released Horde Mode, which is basically… You go into a level and a bunch of demons come for your ass and the weapons and mods are randomized. That was the last big update to the game – they made a lot of tweaks to the gameplay and HUD, along with some balancing for weapons and the like.

Much like DOOM 2016, the game ran very well on its launch, with the exceptions of a few bugs here and there (and, upon the release of Horde mode, a bug tied to an Nvidia driver update that made the game run like shit and crash for a month or so. I had to roll back my drivers to get things to settle down, it was kind of a pain in the ass). I don’t remember there being any performance issues on console releases either – and I can (embarrassingly) testify that the game ran really well on Stadia.

They even ported it to the Nintendo Switch: a fool’s errand, honestly, but they did manage to find settings on that thing that gives a mostly stable 30 FPS. Don’t play it that way unless you are really, really desperate. I uh… I can testify to that as well, because I got curious at one point. Look, I told you this game has a particular hold on me.

So yeah, the development of the game was not smooth (nor the release of the soundtrack, as I mentioned already), but it was also the fastest turnaround time between DOOM games since DOOM to DOOM II – not necessarily praiseworthy, but interesting to think about. It was as good of a statement from id as you could get that DOOM as a franchise was back and unlikely to lay fallow any time soon.

A New Coat of Paint

One of the main things that dictate the style of DOOM Eternal’s visuals is Saturday Morning Cartoon. DOOM 2016’s visuals were fantastic – don’t get me wrong – but they were primarily Red and a little more… realistic, for lack of a better word. The palette overall trended darker, with a few exceptions (most notably the Baron of Hell which I’ve already heaped praise upon, and the stark white environments of VEGA’s core in particular). DOOM Eternal, however, went back to the designs of DOOM II for inspiration and oh man, oh man, do they deliver the goods.

Consider the simple zombie soldier. He looks essentially one to one with his sprite, complete with green hair. It sets the tone of what the game’s style is going to be, which is to say that it takes the Evil Dead 2 vibes of DOOM 2016 and cranks the dial all the way up to Ash Vs. Evil Dead – it skips right over Army of Darkness, saving that for DOOM: The Dark Ages, presumably. He packs a punch too – all the lower-level enemies do, because they toned down the power of your melee attack and juiced up the power of their melee attacks. The zombie soldiers in 2016 looked good too but I am a sucker for the classic look, so, you know.

The other design that got some new polish was the meatball himself, the Cacodemon. It wasn’t an enormous change – Eternal’s Cacos are a little rounder and, maybe most notably, their eyes have pupils and are generally more expressive. Plus, you can stun them by shooting a grenade into their mouth and then pull their eye out with the sound of a popping cork, which is, again, extremely cartoonish as well as extremely bloody. It’s fine though, they bleed blue, so you can pretend you are slaughtering the aristocracy. Much like the Baron of Hell in 2016, the Cacodemon in Eternal is the perfect redesign to me. I like it so much that I have an LED representation of the little bastard as wall art! One day I might hunt down one of the little figurines too, I think those are neat.

Mancubi also got a new look – building, again, off the DOOM II sprite, and like the zombie soldiers, I like this redesign a lot for them! It makes their tusks stand out more, and also they redid the Cyber Mancubus, again adding a mechanic to get the damn armor off of him easily, which is again, a real neat addition.

Alas, the Baron of Hell takes kind of a downgrade in my opinion, if only because he’s the Fireborne Baron now and lost his bright pink hue. He did get some bitchin’ fire blades though, which are pretty neat. He’s still a big beefy boy and I still like him, I just wish he was still pink. It would have been nicer, I think, if he’d just been a variant in the same way the game has both Dread Knights and Hell Knights, but oh well.

His armored variant in the second part of Ancient Gods is also fun to fight – it fits the mechanics of the game well, which we’ll get to a little later. The main thing to keep in mind when it comes to this particular beast is that the game has way more devious things to throw at you – and, you know, way taller things too.

Which brings us to the Cyberde- er, that is, the Tyrant. They just took him right out of DOOM and stuck him all over DOOM Eternal, except it’s really more like they treated him in DOOM II or DOOM 64, where occasionally there will just be multiple Tyrants wandering around causing trouble. It’s a fantastic look, they managed to give him an almost flawless translation from sprite to 3D model. Big thumbs up from me on this one.

Also joining the game from the ranks of DOOM II is the Pain Elemental, and unlike the Cacodemon who had his weird left turn in DOOM³ before getting a better look in 2016 that got refined in Eternal, they just… kinda nailed the Pain Elemental right out of the gate. My man even does the angry little waddle, he’s a grumpy old man! He pulls Lost Souls out of his mouth and chucks them at you, which can turn into a real problem if you aren’t careful. This is the only way you ever encounter Lost Souls in DOOM Eternal, which is great because I fuckin hate Lost Souls.

Then, of course, there’s the Archvile, who comes into DOOM Eternal looking more or less exactly like his DOOM II sprite (or honestly, pretty close to his DOOM³ look – his skin is a little more chitinous in Eternal, I think, and his nasty brain head is nastier and brainier). Because the demons disappear after death in DOOM Eternal, you can’t have the Archvile resurrect demons – so instead he gives a buff to any demons and also summons in everything from imps up through Mancubi, and he’s a right bastard. He will send a wall of flame at you, he will summon flames at his own feet if you get too close, he’ll erect a shield, and he’ll also teleport around like the Summoner in DOOM 2016 like a total jerk. I don’t know about the rest of you but I generally spend a BFG shot on them if I have it.

Revenants and Hell Knights got little visual tweaks – the Hell Knights got eyes, and also an upgraded form (Dread Knights) who gets their fireball back and also rad cybernetic upgrades. They also get an AOE attack which is similar to the one the Cyber Mancubus has, except it isn’t long range. Still a real pain in the ass if you aren’t careful, though! Which goes for all the enemy designs, but, you know.

The new enemies all have designs which fit the tone – they have brightly colored attacks, they’re eye-catching, they have a big red fucking axe, etc. – but really it makes more sense to talk about them in the gameplay section. Especially the Marauder, who is the most difficult enemy in the game until you realize there is One Weird Trick that kinda renders him a joke. I will state for the record, however, that my hate burns hottest for Carcasses and their fucking projection shields. Of all the little bastards in the game, you’re the little bastardiest.

What’s the Plot?

I am going to exercise superhuman restraint here and not go too deep into the plot of DOOM Eternal, because I am fully aware that the frankly bottomless well of delight that is its deeply, deeply stupid lore is not for everyone even if it is absolutely my shit. It’s a little bit Conan the Barbarian, a little bit Evil Dead, a little bit Liner Notes of a Concept Album from a Prog Metal Band or maybe a Symphonic Metal Band. There’s a little bit of Lovecraft in there too by the time you get to the Ancient Gods DLC, but look, we’ll just run through this quickly – you can choose whether or not you want to go read a bunch of pages of lore in the DOOM wiki on your own (or find them in the game and read them there, you do you).

The game does not pick up immediately after the events of DOOM 2016, meaning we will never, in fact, find out where Hayden sent the Doomslayer or indeed how and where the fuck he got his big Space Castle. The Earth basically had a few good years (or “good,” anyway) post-destruction of the Argent Tower, which was only possible because Samuel Hayden took the Crucible back to Earth and used it to keep the Argent Energy train running. He also founded the ARC, because by this point the UAC was pretty into the whole Hell Cult thing and wasn’t particularly trustworthy.

Anyway, eventually the demons get a toehold on earth, courtesy of the whole “the UAC is a cult dedicated to summoning demons to earth” thing, and after a while the Doomslayer finally reappears on the scene in his floating space castle to hunt down the three Hell Priests responsible for all these demons everywhere. Along the way we get more information about just who the Doomslayer is – spoilers, he’s the original Doomguy from DOOM, DOOM II, and DOOM 64. He even says the Thing from the Comic, and it becomes like a whole chant that ends up in the soundtrack – it’s deeply unserious, made funnier by the fact that everyone in the game is Extremely Serious about it.

The sense of humor from the deranged corporate memos is mostly gone – UAC holograms around the levels will still spout bright corporate slogans about how cool it is to be killed by demons – and is replaced by extremely overwrought prose which does things like mention that the shotgun is also known as The Crowd Appeaser, a joke that makes me think of Ryan Davis every time. It’s delightful.

By the end of the DLC, the Doomslayer has unleashed the Dark Lord (aka actual Satan) from his soul prison specifically so that he can kill him. Which you do, and then – due to some plot stuff I could go into but this essay has already broken the 3000 word mark and I haven’t even gotten to the gameplay yet – the Slayer ends up back in a coffin, although this time he’s not in hell he is given a place of honor on like… the plateau of the gods. Which is, I guess, technically in hell. Kind of. It’s a whole thing.** The last lines of the game are the lines that appear at the beginning of DOOM 2016, which is a fun full-circle thing.

I do think, personally, that this was a great excuse to end this version of the series and do something different (like make a new Quake game maybe) but instead we are getting DOOM: The Dark Ages which I mean sure, I’ll play it, I’m not mad about it. I am in fact extremely excited about it to an unhealthy degree, probably. But I think it would be cool to just let the Doomslayer take a nap for a while at the end of Eternal. Honestly, don’t know how you’d ratchet up the gameplay at the end of Eternal for a direct sequel anyway. Dark Ages will work because you’ll be the Slayer just starting out at the whole Being of Godlike Power thing, you know?

Time for the DOOM Dance

Speaking of gameplay, let’s finally get into it: DOOM Eternal is one of the most demanding games you will have to play. It caught a lot of people off-guard at launch, in fact, who assumed that as people who had gotten extremely good at DOOM 2016, they would naturally walk through DOOM Eternal. After all, surely they wouldn’t mess with the formula that much, would they?

This was not true, even a little. DOOM Eternal gives you a shitload of tools compared to 2016, and more than that – it demands you use them. If you don’t, you’ll die a lot. You may in fact not manage to get through the first level – you sure as shit won’t get through the third one, which is the one where you finally get all the tools you need. There is a particular encounter in the first level which is the first one in which the game shows its hand for the first time – you climb up an elevator shaft into what looks like a mall, and (on ultraviolence, at least) the game gives you the gift of an Arachnotron supported by three Cacodemons and a heaping helping of imps and zombie soldiers as a garnish. It’s a lot, and they come from all over. Like in DOOM 2016, it’s vital that you never stop moving. Unlike DOOM 2016, you can skate through this pretty easily if you take advantage of the sticky grenade mod for the shotgun – bust the Arachnotron turret so he can only launch grenades and take swipes at you, then drop a grenade into the Cacodemons’ mouths to instantly stagger them into a glory kill state. The game tells you how to do all of this, of course. Do that and you just have to worry about fodder and, you know, the fact that Arachnotrons are still fairly dangerous even without turrets – but they’re way more manageable without three Cacodemons trying to eat you at the same time.

Bear in mind that this is only the first level of the game – things really don’t get cooking until the third level, when you have all the tools ready to go. By then you’ll have a blood punch, two charges of dash, both a frag and ice grenade, and (crucially, at least to me) the super shotgun. The super shotgun is a critical piece of the puzzle – not just because it’s a super shotgun and super shotguns are uniformly delightful. This one doesn’t pack quite as big of a punch as its 2016 counterpart – it’ll dust any fodder demon, and it will still take down heavier demons pretty quickly, especially if you get close enough to them – but it adds something more valuable to the mix: the meathook.

This takes the initial message of “you should be getting up in the faces of the demons” and gives you a tool specifically to do just that. As a bonus, this gives you great options to traverse the arenas and get out of trouble – I’ve pulled myself out of a bad situation by hooking a distant fodder demon just to get some space multiple times, and in Ancient Gods 2 they just add grapple points for additional traversal options in and out of combat. Oh, and you can master it and then it sets demons on fire when you hook them, thus generating more armor for you. It rules!

You’ll get real familiar with all the weapons in the arsenal too – both because the game will recommend particular weapons for particular demons in the codex entries and because you will be constantly starved for resources. Ammo pickups are not plentiful, and even with upgraded ammo capacity, the Slayer doesn’t have a ton of ammo in his pockets. This is most notable with the shotgun – at most, you can hold 24 shells, which will give you a frankly laughable 12 shots with the super shotgun before you’re out of ammo. This would be an unacceptable state of affairs in the game were it not for the changes made to the chainsaw.

See, DOOM Eternal is different from DOOM 2016 in that it wants you to make your own resources. The chainsaw in 2016 was a nice panic button, and a good way to get ammunition if you found yourself unexpectedly short on ammo, but it wasn’t essential to the game. DOOM Eternal is going to be a miserable experience for anyone who isn’t using the chainsaw. You will simply run out of ammo and die. That’s why your chainsaw will automatically refill at least one pip of fuel over time. You can collect gas cans to get up to three pips of fuel, which can be spent to kill bigger demons (although super-heavy demons just can’t be killed with it). The same goes for health and armor pickups – those are a little more plentiful, but it wants you to be glory killing and flame belching constantly on your way to victory. It also wants you to be switching between your weapons a lot more – you have to, if you want to take advantage of destroying weak points and taking down the bigger demons quickly.

Of course, while doing all that, you also are going to need to be airdashing and dropping grenades to either freeze or falter your enemies and give yourself breathing room. There’s a rhythm and a flow state to things that you’ll hit eventually – Hugo Martin constantly refers to it as “the DOOM Dance” and he’s not wrong – where it all comes together and becomes almost second nature. The faster you can get into that state – and the game wants you in that state fast, is in fact mechanically built to get you into that state as fast as possible – the more you will realize what I realized about halfway through the second level: DOOM Eternal’s combat absolutely blows DOOM 2016 away.

This is not, of course, a universally-shared opinion. There was a sizeable backlash to DOOM Eternal’s mechanics, especially concerning the Marauder, otherwise known as the guy who is there to make sure you have been paying attention. He’s basically you, except shittier. Also, he has horns. The main thing about the Marauder is that you have to watch your spacing on him – too close, and he’ll unload a shotgun in your face. Too far and he’ll summon a dog. The trick is to exist at the distance at which he chucks axes at you, because every time he chucks an axe or two, he runs up on you to do a melee attack as a follow-up, and that’s the thing where his eyes flash and he becomes vulnerable. It was hard for some to tell, apparently, that he stays in the stunned state for long enough that you can get multiple shots off on him, which is why now you get not only a unique sound effect, but also he gets cartoon stars orbiting his head which is frankly fucking hilarious from a visual standpoint. Stun, shoot, repeat until he’s ripe for glory killing.

Now, you can beat him without doing this next bit, but here’s a Hot Tip: swapping between weapons lets you fire faster because it skips the cocking/reloading/cooldown animation. So pull out your super shotgun, swap to the ballista, and then master the art of shooting, hitting swap, shooting, and hitting swap.*** You can dump enormous amounts of damage into a Marauder for a single stun (for an added bonus, drop a frag grenade behind them –it’ll put a little extra damage on them even after they come out of stun). If you get good enough at it, you can take a Marauder down after stunning him twice. The Marauder shows up as a boss encounter first, and then he just becomes a Dude You Have to Kill Sometimes (and occasionally, there are two of him). Frankly, he is very rarely a concern once you get to a certain level of comfort with the controls – I have way more trouble dealing with Archviles, frankly, because they can summon in Mancubi.

It is also possible to nuke him with a BFG shot (which he’s immune to normally) but I have only seen that happen twice and both times I am pretty sure it was blind luck. I don’t recommend it – although if you wanna quick swap between the shotgun and, say, the Unmayker, it probably takes him down pretty quick. Kind of a waste of Unmayker ammo if you ask me, though.

The final boss is – unsurprisingly, his theme is playing over the main menu of the game – the Icon of Sin, and if you thought the Marauder was there to make sure you’re paying attention, the Icon of Sin is the final exam. You need to pull out all the stops to do enough damage (and maintain your ammo, health, and armor reserves) to bring the big bastard down. He looks fucking cool, going from cybernetic-looking armor to just a fleshy goat boy with a grudge. The first time I took him down I think it took like an hour for the adrenaline to leave my system. It was also something like three in the morning. Every subsequent time (especially when I headed in on Nightmare) has left me a twitching, shaking mess at the end. It’s intense. The sort of intense I apparently enjoy, at least when DOOM is involved.

The DLC ratchets everything up a little (although the fact you start fully kitted out means that there’s actually an argument to be made it’s a little easier) and adds some enemies that require specific guns – most notably the Spirit, who you have to kick out of whatever demon it’s possessing and then use the plasma cannon’s microwave ray to take it down, Ghostbusters-style. It also adds armored Barons of Hell, who are kind of a neat little challenge, with a similar “wait for this attack animation and stagger them” mechanic to the Marauder, although it is not mandatory (unlike the Marauder, who simply will not take direct damage from you unless he’s stunned, you can just shoot the armor until it breaks).

The final boss of the DLC – the Dark Lord himself – is basically a juiced up Marauder who can also… summon demons like an Archvile and heals himself whenever he hits you. He’s a pain in the ass! I’m not sure I like him that much! The first time I went through I had him down to like a sliver of health on his final bar and the fucker got a couple hits in and healed all the way back up and I feel like I nearly lost my mind. Pretty satisfying to kill him though!

Basically, the gameplay of DOOM Eternal kicks ass – assuming, of course, you are willing to dance to its tune. This is fine for me – I happen to like the dance – but it’s definitely not for everyone! Lots of people will tell you DOOM 2016 is better because the gameplay has more flexibility (lots of people just beat 2016 with the super shotgun and basically nothing else, and were pissed you could not do that here). I’m not here to say they’re wrong, because I think that’s dumb. If you don’t want to dance to DOOM Eternal’s tune, you’re not going to have a fun time.

I don’t want to make a Sekiro comparison here, but part of why I bounced off Sekiro is that I can’t parry for shit and generally do not fuck with it as a mechanic. I wanted to be able to do my usual Dark Souls bullshit, and you absolutely cannot. Sekiro wants you playing in a very specific way, and if you don’t, you’re not going to enjoy playing Sekiro because you’re too busy fighting the mechanics. DOOM Eternal is the same type of thing! The only difference is that I am way more into what DOOM Eternal’s asking me to do, whereas I’m never going to sit down and beat Sekiro. I am 100% positive that there is someone who feels the exact opposite: they will play Sekiro at the drop of a hat, but they hate DOOM Eternal’s mechanics. Basically – I get it if you don’t like the dance DOOM Eternal is offering, but I don’t think that makes it a bad game.

The Updated Underexplained DOOM Rankings

If you’ve read this far, well, congratulations. This shit is long, longer than I feared it would get, but in my defense there was a lot to cover! I didn’t even go into the runes and weapon upgrades and whatnot. Those are mostly unchanged from DOOM 2016, but there’s a few tweaks which I probably could’ve discussed.

In all honestly, I could probably go on for like another thousand words of just saying nice things about the game and chewing over its mechanics more! I love it! It is, like I said waaaay back at the introduction, a top five game of All Fucking Time for me, and because of that, well, it gets the number one slot.

1. DOOM Eternal
2. DOOM (2016)
3. DOOM 64
4. DOOM³

Next on the docket is DOOM II, and that one is gonna require me to sit and think about like… what DOOM II is. Are we talking just Hell on Earth? Final DOOM? Do I in fact need to play through TNT Evilution and the Plutonia Experiment in order to properly appreciate DOOM II?

Terrifying existential questions, here. The problem with DOOM II and also DOOM is that, well, the lines are blurred here. I’m not about to fall down a rabbit hole and play all the versions of DOOM II that exist, but also I’m off on vacation at the end of next week so this time there will, in fact, be more than a week between these. Placing DOOM and DOOM II on the list is going to be the hard part anyway. Join me next time and we’ll see if uh… well, we’ll see if we can keep things from breaking the 6000 word mark. The way these are all steadily getting longer is really causing me concern, but hopefully I’ll be able to reign it in for DOOM II.

*These jokes about brevity really bit me in the ass

**Do not come into the comments and correct this extremely half-assed explanation, I promise you I am aware of the fact that this is not a 100% accurate description. You and I, dear reader, are the only ones who give a shit about this and the essay is too long as it is.

***If you don’t want to do that, people will switch between super shotgun, ballista, and heavy rifle (with the precision bolt attachment). You can, I am told, get a super shotgun hit, ballista shot, and precision bolt headshot off before he wakes up, which kills him even faster. I don’t bother, I just stick to the ssg and ballista and it’s fine.