DOOM Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part One

Stitch every dimension together and DOOM Eternal resolves into a game of unmistakable, unapologetic purpose: it never set out to please everyone, only to do one thing perfectly — turn aggression itself into the highest grade of pleasure the genre can offer.

A precision ceiling for the generation's shooters

An 89 on OpenCritic, an 88 on Metacritic, a Mighty rating planted in the top one percent of everything the aggregator has ever scored — the run of figures nails Eternal into place as the series' definitive synthesis, the entry every later DOOM measures itself against.

The thing no rival has cleanly copied is neither the visuals nor the score but that resource triangle forever shoving you forward. DOOM (2016) was only the prototype, the test bed where the ideas first stirred; Eternal is where the concept got machined into a tight, perfectly meshing engine with no slack left anywhere in it.

Add five Game Awards 2020 nominations, Game of the Year among them, plus two BAFTA nods in 2021 for animation and technical achievement, and its coordinates within that crowded class of 2020 look remarkably secure. While other shooters spent the year competing over who could stage the bigger spectacle and the louder set piece, Eternal quietly competed over something far harder to fake: who could build the deeper fight, the one you could still be learning a hundred hours in. That is the contest it won by a mile, and the win is why it still gets cited as the genre's high mark.

Who it is for, and who it will turn away

This is a game that actively selects its players and makes no secret whatsoever of its temper. If you relish the strung-out tension of doing math at a sprint, hands and eyes and brain all redlined together, and you want combat depth far more than you want comfort, then Eternal is practically bespoke for you — it repays every single ounce of study with some of the finest encounters the medium has ever produced.

Flip it around and the warning is just as blunt. If you only want to switch off and spray, unwilling to be drilled by relentless resource pressure and a high mobility bar, it will very likely frustrate and repel you somewhere inside the opening few hours.

There is almost no middle ground on offer here. It is either the most exhilarating shooter you have touched in years or the one you quietly bounce off and abandon for good, and which camp you land in is usually clear within the first level or two. On versions, players chasing peak image quality and frame rate should default to PC or a current-gen console, while handheld-only players can settle for the Switch port provided they accept its visible compromises going in. In the end, Eternal stands as a bold design manifesto, betting that players will willingly cross a steeper threshold to earn a deeper fight — and the market and the reviews both confirm it won that bet outright, because the "most aggressive shooter ever" loop it perfected still has no full equal anywhere today.