YMMV / Doom Eternal

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The presence of a cage with two bags of rabbit food next to it in the Fortress of Doom brings up a couple of questions regarding the ultimate fate of Daisy in this continuity, but this comes into effect when the player runs into Daisy several times hidden in each level as an Easter Egg. Some theorize that Doomguy is hallucinating her in the levels, given how some of those locations include destroyed cities, an inaccessible city of the dead in the centre of Mars, and the vacuum of space, while others believe the cage and food might simply be for a new rabbit. The fact that this the game later reveals itself and Doom (2016) to exist in the same continuity as Doom classic muddles the waters slightly, especially considering the Khan Maykr's offer of "bringing back that which the demons took" from Doomguy; as well as insane ramblings about ripping and tearing demons with huge guts showing that decades of fighting demons in Hell did a number on his mental stability.
  • In the "Remaining Human Populations – Part One" Codex entry, there are a number of countries that were untouched by demonic forces (most notably Australia, New Zealand, and several other Oceanic nations). Is Awesome Aussie in presumed effect, or does Hell regard the region as being so unimportant that they don't warrant an invasion?
  • In The Ancient Gods: Part Two, the Dark Lord is shown to be as much as a Determinator as the Doom Slayer himself, but chooses to Face Death with Dignity at the final battle's conclusion. Is this just a display of honor and respect for the Slayer on his end, or would this be an implication that he is so full of pain and grief that he was planning to let himself, and Hell overall, die by the Slayer's hand just so he can find peace in death?
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Khan Maykr ends up having possibly the easiest boss in the game, especially compared to fight against the The Icon of Sin in the next level. She’s a Puzzle Boss where you need to wear down her health, meathook her, and Blood Punch her chest 5 times. Her attacks hit hard but are easy to avoid and each enemy in the arena is a fairly slow-moving Piñata Enemy who drops generous amounts of health and ammo. Each health bar is also fairly small and absolutely shredded with the Lock-On mod for the rocket launcher.
  • While it is intended to be a climactic, "Battle between Titans", The Icon of Sin is less climactic than it should be due to the fact that it's a Flunky Boss and most of the real threats are from demons filling what little space you occupy. Though perhaps this is meant to be an intentional Call-Back to its fight in Doom II.
  • The Ancient Gods Part 2's Dark Lord feels like a slog to fight. Similar to the Marauders, he has to be stunned just prior to a specific attack in order to inflict damage, but is inconsistent as to when he leaves himself vulnerable. While you wait for an opening, he throws out rather predictable attacks, and the backup spirits he summons are very easily dealt with by the Sentinel Hammer. The worst part is that he heals himself if you damage him outside his vulnerable state or if he damages you with his sword, while the zombies spaced around the edge of the arena make it very easy for you to heal and restock, as well. The entire fight is a long rotation of waiting, smashing his summons with the Sentinel Hammer, and a quick burst of damage when he finally presents an opening, all while hopefully avoiding his sword attacks so it doesn't drag on even longer.
• Ass Pull: The twist at the end of The Ancient Gods - Part Two that the Dark Lord was the actual creator of the universe and the Father took his place after betraying him has been felt by many players to be a lazy, last-minute plot twist to create a shock value revelation of God being the ultimate bad guy that goes against what’s been established and raises unnecessary questions.
• Award Snub: Eternal lost all five of the awards it was nominated for at The Game Awards 2020, drawing outcry from fans, especially since the recipient of many of them (including Game of the Year) was extremely controversial amongst the gaming community. Perhaps most notable was Best Score and Music, which it lost to a remake of an older game despite most people expecting Eternal to win the award without a second thought.
• Awesome Music: See here.
• Breather Level:
  • After a long slog of a level in "ARC Complex" with several challenging arenas, culminating in the first battle against the Marauder, the first half of "Mars Core" is relatively relaxed, with a fairly simple level structure, basic platforming, and relatively chill battles with only a couple heavy demons each. The BFG-9000 being acquired here smooths things out even more. It's only when Barons of Hell start appearing in the second half of the level that the challenge picks up again.
  • "Sentinel Prime" is dedicated almost entirely to Scenery Porn and the lore of the world, with numerous Codex entries about the history of Argent D'Nur and Flashbacks of how the Doom Slayer arrived there, leading players through one long, winding passage. There aren't any enemies until the last room, a dedicated combat arena.
  • The first third of Urdak, coming right after the continuous onslaught of a two-part "Nekravol" level, is likewise dedicated to Scenery Porn and acquainting players with the new platforming mechanic (namely, the green jump pads and the red boosting rings).
  • "The Fortress of Doom": rather than Eternal throwing the Doom Slayer into the next level as Doom (2016) did, players instead get the time to walk around, take in the Fortress' surroundings and unlock some collectibles, only tackling the next mission when players choose to. This being said the Fortress isn't always accessible after every level.
  • Just before the Final Boss of The Ancient Gods - Part One in "The Holt", after having to fight through multiple brutal battle encounters including one with a Spirit-buffed Tyrant, the last two are nice, simple and fun little encounters by comparison: one being an encounter with Shield Soldiers, whose plasma shields can be easily overcharged with the Plasma Rifle (including a convenient Overdrive nearby), the other full of Pinkies and Cyber-Mancubi with Blood Punch refills all over to give players the advantage.
• Broken Base:
  • Eternal takes a new direction for the series combat that hasn't been entirely well-received. To explain, Eternal places a lot of emphasis on creating depth within the combat system that was invented in 2016, mainly by increasing the complexity of each enemy, weapon and mechanic. Enemies now have weakpoints to target that can only be taken out by certain weapon mods, making each weapon much more focused in their use than the previous game. Eternal also lowers the overall ammo count from 2016 and introduces dedicated ways to refresh your ammo and armor supply in the infinitely replenishing chainsaw and flame belch. This is balanced out by making enemies more aggressive and allowing them to hit very hard regardless of difficulty. All of this adds up to a combat system that demands quite a lot from the player in terms of physical skill, which has caused a rift in the fanbase. On one hand, many fans are irritated with the combat, feeling that these added complexities detract from the gameplay by limiting player expression and adding needless complexity to the streamlined combat system of 2016. They argue that since each enemy type often has one specific weakpoint, the player is forced into picking whatever weapons are "right" for the current situation instead of allowing them to come to their own conclusions about how best to proceed. On the other hand, many fans praise Eternal for evolving the combat meaningfully, arguing that these complexities increase the amount of engagement the player has in combat. The player is forced to pick the best approach to a situation from a series of options rather than falling back on their default strategies and be-all-end-all weapons, which both encourages players to familiarize themselves with their loadouts and prevents a single dominant strategy from emerging^note A great deal of 2016 can be easily beaten by simply using the fully-upgraded Super Shotgun and Siege Mode mod for the Gauss Cannon - using almost anything else in the game's final third is only done if you get bored of those.
  • The shift in aesthetic has been divisive as well. 2016 didn't take itself too seriously, but it did attempt to incorporate many old DOOM staples into a more realistic context, much the same as DOOM 3- the series' famous Chaingun, for instance, is reimagined as the chassis of a deployable turret (with the Slayer literally ripping it off the bipod just so he can lug it around), while the BFG is an experimental weapon of mass destruction with a realistic design and effect. Enemies were also quite frightening and looked much less cartoony than they did in the older games thanks to taking design inspiration from the DOOM 3 interpretation of demons. This gave the game a more "grounded" look that gave the experience real weight and added to the grungy and gritty atmosphere. Eternal takes itself far less seriously, with glowing health and ammo pickups, enemies exploding into rainbows of different ammo colors, more cartoonish sound effects, enemies redesigned into closer approximations of their original designs from the first two games, glowing question mark models to designate secrets, and an honest-to-god Video-Game Lives system depicted as literal "1-Ups". Some note these more aggressive "video gamey" aesthetics to be distracting and immersion-breaking, while others state that Eternal returning to a more retro look is simply the game not trying to hide that it's a video game.
  • Is the Marauder an example of Fake Difficulty? In a game largely about aggression and using the correct weapons against the correct enemies, the Marauder instead forces the player to fight very defensively within an extremely narrow range band while waiting for his limited windows of vulnerability. Supporters argue that this creates a strong challenge that, unlike the other super heavy enemies, is also a fast and nimble threat and foil to the player that rewards knowledge of the game's high-level mechanics and forces them to play differently to deal with them. Detractors argue that in addition to all-but requiring full attention in a game that generally makes paying full attention to any one threat difficult and inadvisable, the Marauder's demanding skill floor and restrictive set of weaknesses play against the combat system's strengths - and that no method of beating them is more effective than cheesing them with explosives and high-stagger weapons anyway, so it's not as if they feel rewarding to deal with either unless you're forgoing them.
  • Some players weren't too happy about the reveal that the Slayer is a Primeval like the Dark Lord himself, as they feel it takes away what was special about him (a mere mortal human waging war against the forces of Hell itself and becoming a symbol of fear and terror among them). Some were willing to accept him being empowered by the Divinity Machine, but felt that directly connecting him to the Dark Lord was too much.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Cheat Codes are collectibles in this game, and nearly all of them give players an advantage in glorious ways. This turns the most hardcore bosses into pushovers.
  • After suffering through The Ancient Gods - Part 1 without the Crucible or any new weapons, obtaining the Sentinel Hammer and turning the tide against the demons is a huge relief in The Ancient Gods - Part 2.
  • The look of pure fear on an Archvile's face (And just about any other demon) when you glory kill him can be this for players who have trouble dealing with them.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The generally approved method for fighting the Marauder is to just wait for his eyes to flash green, then falter him with a high-damage attack (Arbalest works best in this instance, though a Super Shotgun or standard Ballista shot also works) before firing and quickswapping between the Super Shotgun and Ballista for the duration of the Marauder's stun period. As both weapons afford high burst damage and their reload/cooldown animations can be skipped by quickswapping, the DPS delivered by this combo can sufficiently erase Marauders in as little as 2-3 stun cycles. Its effectiveness is pervasive enough that most players tend to leverage this combo against most high-HP enemies, including Mancubi, Hell Nobles and other Super-Heavies.
  • While one recommended way to kill a Doom Hunter is to break its shield with the Plasma Rifle and hammer it before the shield regenerates, most experienced players will opt to save time by aiming directly for its sled instead since it lacks shielding and will force the boss into its second, shieldless phase once destroyed.
  • For most players, the Combat Shotgun's Stickybomb Launcher is the weapon for staggering Cacodemons. While a Frag Grenade to the mouth achieves the same effect, its slow charge time combined with its low travel velocity and the myriad of other utilities (particularly in faltering demons) make it an unwise application of the equipment. Additionally, while an Arbalest bolt from the Ballista is a guaranteed Cacodemon instakill, some consider this method a waste of precious plasma cells that are better off committed to the aforementioned Ballista-SSG combo. The only time this method is likely to be used to any great extent is to grind out the Arbalest's Mastery Challenge.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Khan Maykr made a Faustian pact with Hell to allow other worlds to suffer for her own power. Designing facilities to refine the powerful Argent Energy from suffering souls, the Khan Maykr gave countless worlds for the demons to take and reap the souls of. Setting the demons to Earth to wipe it out, upon the Doom Slayer killing the Hell Priests, the Khan Maykr decides to revive the Icon of Sin and set it loose upon the Earth to kill every human and send their souls to be tortured for more Argent Energy, all to keep her twisted rule and selfishness sated.
  • The Hell Priests, Deag Ranak and Deag Grav, assisted in the corruption of Argent D'Nur along with the quickly-killed Hell Priest Deag Nilox. When the Night Sentinels split and half followed the Doom Slayer, Deag Grav arranged their downfall by taking the son of Commander Valen, eventually trapping his soul to fuel the monstrous Icon of Sin and see the Sentinels slaughtered. After having taken many worlds, Deag Ranak is the one who contracts with Olivia Pierce to see the demons invade Earth, the invasion costing billions of lives under the supervision of the Hell Priests. In his spare time, Deag Grav also runs the corrupted lands of Argent D'Nur, gleefully subjecting innocents to the arenas to see them butchered by demons for his own amusement.
• Demonic Spiders: Given how much the difficulty is ramped up, expect a lot of enemies to ruin your day completely.
  • For players who aren't careful, the Whiplash can be a dangerous, frustrating enemy to deal with, as their long-ranged whips can shave away chunks of the Slayer's Hit Points on Nightmare difficulty while slithering around combat arenas very quickly, alongside laying low to the ground like snakes, making them hard to target. They also have a long-ranged shockwave attack that has pushback attributes on top of its damage, making it harder to approach it or knocking players into other demons.
    • Making matters worse in The Ancient Gods - Part One, some Whiplashes in certain combat segments are now invisible much like Spectres. This isn't simply a cosmetic change, either; "Spectre Whiplashes" can't be targeted by the Rocket Launcher's Lock-On Burst mod, immunizing them from one of the most reliable and efficient methods of taking a standard Whiplash out.
  • The Baron of Hell was already a piece of work in 2016, but they're even stronger in Eternal as Fireborne Barons. There isn't much to say about them except they're faster, deadlier and far more durable, to the point that they're immune to the chainsaw and able to tank a BFG-9000 shot. When one shows up, expect to spend a lot of effort dealing with it alongside its flunkies, and a lot of ammo bringing it down.
  • After their absence in 2016, Archviles are back and in full force. Not only do they retain their ability to summon demons (which includes other Super Heavies if players are unlucky or slow)^note Yes, this includes Marauders, leading to some of the few instances of more than one Marauder being active at once if you can't kill him fast enough, but they can also put up a large firewall in the midst of a summon, protecting them from all frontal damage until it's destroyed (up to and including a BFG-9000 blast). They can also apply a Status Buff to all enemies around it like a mobile Buff Totem, increasing Hit Points, damage dealt, movement and attack speed, as well as making them more resistant to the Chainsaw. Additionally, Archviles are capable of teleporting across the battlefield like Prowlers, making them very difficult to hit even if players manage to track them down. Since they're part of the Super Heavy class, they pack high Hit Points of their own, can activate an area-of-denial fire ring at short-range, can launch waves of flame at long-range, and even retain their infamous "flaming-aura-around-the-player" attack (though this time it can be avoided by simply moving fast enough). If it isn't the supercharged Mooks that it spawns that hound on players, the Archvile will instead be the one who barbecues the Doom Slayer. "One of the worst of a bad lot," indeed.
  • Marauders, holy crap. While the other four Super Heavies tend to be rather slow to compensate for their massive strength and health, the Marauder has no such problems. They are probably the closest thing to fighting another player, packing mobility easily capable of matching yours while still retaining a massive amount of health. Their offensive capacity and damage are extremely strong, as well - all Marauders are equipped with a Super Shotgun of their own to drive you off from close-range, as well as an axe that they can use to throw energy slashes at longer ranges and swing at you with it at mid-range. To make matters worse, they also have an unbreakable energy shield that blocks all damage (even shots from the BFG and the Unmaykr or swings from the Crucible)^note it is possible to hit and kill one with any of these, but they require the Marauder's guard to be down - more often than not, setting them up for a kill with any of these takes way more effort than it's worth, and using them on a staggered Marauder is just insult to injury and reflects projectiles, with the only form of damage capable of bypassing it being splash damage from well-timed explosives. The shield only goes down the moment one swings their axe; even then, only strong hits like a Super Shotgun blast will stagger a Marauder. The real icing on the cake is that they can summon spirit wolves and sic them at you to serve as a distraction - the wolves are annoyingly hard to hit and threaten with bite attacks that not only obstruct your screen but also slow you down, leaving you open for another attack to the face^note Thankfully, Marauders only summon a wolf when actively blocking projectiles (player or otherwise) with their shields. Marauders can and will easily kill off the unprepared on any difficulty level, and demands one's full attention when one spawns lest you want to die quickly, which wouldn't be too hard if not for the constant harassment from nearby mooks almost every time a Marauder rocks up to the scene. To deal with them, you have to be in a very specific mid-range to them; too close and they shoot you away with their Super Shotgun and too far away, they'll use energy slashes. They also have a habit of dashing around you, making it hard to get a bead on them and often putting them closer or farther away from you.
  • At higher difficulties, Arachnotrons (fittingly enough): these demons are fast for their size, have a meaty amount of Hit Points, fire surprisingly accurate and highly damaging streams of plasma rounds, and can side-step to dodge bullets, making getting a clean hit on their plasma turret troublesome. They can also rush up for a melee attack if players aren't careful and unless their turret is destroyed, Arachnotrons can still shoot accurately at long distances. Finally, thanks to their design, they can climb onto walls and cling to ceilings for a vantage point. It doesn't help that Arachnotrons are introduced in the first level, "Hell on Earth".
  • While a lesser example, Cyber-Mancubi are these compared to the regular ones. Regular Mancubi have weak spots on their gun arms, which can be blown or sniped off to weaken their fireballs and completely remove their flamethrower attack. Cyber-Mancubi have them bolted on and are unable to be removed. That said, they are highly vulnerable to a Blood Punch so if you can close the gap and have one stocked, it'll shatter their armour instantly and without it, they take less punishment than a standard Mancubus. The downside is that Cyber-Mancubi are usually summoned either in pairs or backed up by a standard Mancubus, and getting close to them for a Blood Punch is a good way to fall in their acid trap or get bombarded by the one you aren't focusing on.
  • The Ancient Gods - Part One introduces the Spirit, ghosts of the Summoners from 2016 that possess their fellow demons and supercharge them as a Buff Totem would. It boosts enemy damage resistance and speed, all while nullifying any weaknesses they possess and granting them immunity to both the Ice Bomb and faltering. This results in the Spirit turning otherwise manageable foes into one-demon freight trains on par with a Mini-Boss. Players do get a window to attack it if they kill the demon it's possessing, but the only thing it's vulnerable to is the Microwave Beam mode for the Plasma Rifle. Naturally, trying to kill it in the middle of a firefight is borderline suicide on higher difficulties due to the Microwave Beam's speed penalty, but leaving it alone and the Spirit will simply possess the next strongest demon in the combat arena. It also tends to favour the toughest enemy it can find, so players can expect to start facing 'roided-up, bullet-spongy demons such as Mancubi, Hell Nobles ^note Knights, Dread-Knights and Barons and anything belonging to the Super-Heavy class, in general. Unless players can find a way to cordon off the Spirit into a safe position to be popped, the only recourse is to put up with evading the supercharged demon until all particularly nasty future vessel candidates are eliminated, forcing it to possess something weaker like a fodder demon.
  • Also introduced in The Ancient Gods - Part One is the Blood Maykr, which has relatively strong ranged attacks and an invincible shield that only goes down when it's launching some of its stronger attacks. On its own, it's not particularly threatening with how it can be instantly killed with a headshot, but in groups, it becomes a nightmare. Particularly devastating is its spear throw attack, which leaves behind an electric field that deals damage over time and slows down the player momentarily. As noted below, the Blood Maykr becomes particularly dangerous in the Final Boss fight, where they'll take advantage of the hectic and chaotic nature of the fight to rain hell on players while the chaos stops players from targeting its weak point.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The nameless ARC Intern from The Ancient Gods - Part One. In the base game, he's only in one scene before the climax of the ARC Complex level, generally there to explain some minor aspects and doesn't make much of a narrative impact. In Part One, the Intern has an expanded role, becoming the Doom Slayer's Mission Control around the time he goes to the Blood Swamps, which really brings out his absolute trust that the Slayer knows what's best to fight off the demons, and shows that while he has his doubts, he's going to follow the Slayer nonetheless. Given that it involves resurrecting The Dark Lord to kill him and, by extension, all demons outside of Hell itself, it really shows how much the Intern's willing to go along and give a helping hand when he needs to. His nerdy and fanboyish tendencies certainly helps with endearing him to the fanbase.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: "By His hand, all things were made... Even you..." This implies that "you" doesn't refer to Doomguy but also humanity in general, and despite how the demons around the Earth are suddenly vaporized, the fact that the true Father (or at least His metaphysical form) is killed means that the Maykrs, humanity and even reality as a whole will wither away unchecked. There is also a question of what the afterlife will be with a spiteful Father in it if one exists beyond Urdak/Jekkad.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Snek from heck" for the Whiplash enemy, due to its snakelike appearance.
  • Tyrants are often called "Cyberdemons", due to their blatant similarities and looking closer to the original Cyberdemons.
    • Likewise, the Riot Soldiers are often called "Chaingunners" due to being blatantly similar to the original Chaingunners.
  • "Bob" for Maligog, as explained below.
  • "Traffic light man" for the Marauder, because you can only attack him when he flashes green. Coined by the YouTuber decino.
  • "Dogs" for the Marauder and the Dark Lord's conjured wolves.
  • "Simps" for the Stone Imps.
  • Wintherins are almost exclusively known as "dragons" due to their proper name not being revealed in-game.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • After being delayed to March 20, 2020, the Doom fandom formed an unexpected Odd Friendship with the Animal Crossing: New Horizons fandom (which had already been delayed to the same day). Players from both fandoms immediately started making jokes about having to decide which one to play at launch. It's made all the more amusing because both games are about as different from each other as they could be. Even the Doom Twitter page got in on the action. Fanart depicting the Doom Slayer and Isabelle together took off (see: Memetic Mutation). So far, this has culminated with the inclusion of the Doom Slayer as a Mii Gunner skin in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, allowing him to fight side-by-side(of sorts) with Isabelle.
  • There also seems to be some crossover between Doom Eternal and Devil May Cry 5 fans. Eternal has been favourable likened to a first-person shooter version of DMC with fans enjoying the action and spectacle of both games. With the introduction of the Marauder, fans like to joke that he's the Vergil to Doomguy's Dante. There is quite a bit of fanart portraying Dante and Doom Slayer as friends.
• Fountain of Memes: Samuel Hayden's lines are pretty quotable, and several have become memes.
  • "That's a weapon, not a teleporter."
  • "You can't just shoot a hole into the surface of Mars!"
  • "The longer the Icon of Sin is on Earth, the more powerful it will become!"
• Game-Breaker
  • As it was in Doom 64, the Unmaykr is a beast of a weapon, capable of tearing through hordes of enemies and melting even the toughest of Super Heavies without breaking a sweat. It's reasonably locked behind completing the six Slayer Gates throughout the game and shares the BFG-9000's ammo (which is scarce) but will likely carry players until the end of the game if it's acquired. Playing the game with the Infinite Ammo cheat on? Congratulations! You'll officially be tearing through any poor, unfortunate demon unlucky enough to find itself on the other end of the gun.
  • For weapon mods, the Chaingun's Energy Shield no doubt qualifies. On its own, it's an absolute beast of a mod, as the shield is effectively an infinite-use, on-demand godmode that completely nullifies attacks while active. Purchasing the Dash Smash upgrade means that ramming into demons with the shield up can cause a lot of damage, to the point where you can stagger a Pinky with only two dashes.
  • The Sentinel Hammer, a.k.a. the Hellbreaker, in the The Ancient Gods - Part Two is quite honestly ridiculous. While it doesn't automatically kill demons in one hit like the Crucible, the tradeoffs make it arguably superior. Simply using it causes enemies to drop ammo, deals decent damage, and releases a concussive wave on the impact that stuns enemies it doesn't kill. On top of that, if used on frozen/burning enemies, it dramatically increases the amount of respective health/armor pickups they drop. What makes it even better than the Crucible, however, is that it can be recharged through methods besides on-map pickups. Destroying a weak point or performing a glory kill refills half a charge, a condition that the hammer itself can help fulfil by stunning nearby fodder demons. In practice, the hammer is a second Blood Punch that trades raw damage for extra pickups and a lengthy stun, with debatably less stringent conditions for charging it. Against super-heavy enemies, it grants even more benefits: hitting a stunned Marauder with it causes it to remain stunned for far longer than normal, allowing you to wail on it with wild abandon; it can drop the Doom Hunter's shield in a single hit, and Armored Barons are rendered vulnerable much longer. Whether you simply need some breathing room, some extra supplies, or you want to end an encounter quickly, using the Hellbreaker is never a bad option. This doesn't even cover the upgrades the Hammer receives from completing escalation encounters, which increases the resources dropped by enemies and the stun period incurred by the attack.
• Genius Bonus: The computerized realm of Urdak heavily features Voronoi noise patterns, a common type of computer-generated procedural texture, in its environment.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Like its predecessor, the game is surprisingly well-liked in Japan, owing to the precision, skill and reflex-based gameplay with tight movement, along with the Hot-Blooded Demon Slaying protagonist.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Mecha-Zombies: though a Fodder-type, they are much more annoying than the rest because they can shoot plasma bolts at long-range, smoke players with a flamethrower at close-range and are slightly more durable than normal zombies. While they're easy to deal with individually, having to deal with groups of them, especially at higher difficulties, make them an absolute nuisance to deal with when players also have to juggle between them and other stronger demons.
  • Carcasses can spawn barriers from extremely far away, even through the floor, and often far outside their own attack range. In the midst of fighting demons, a random force field will show up right in front of players without warning. Since the Carcass is usually too far to attack, the barrier ends up being a colossal pain in the ass to deal with, since it obstructs forward movement and blocks shots, potentially causing a rocket headed for a demon across a combat arena to explode in the player's face instead, or denying a much-needed Glory Kill. On the bright side, with the Plasma Rifle on hand, a Carcass barrier can be detonated just like the Shield Soldier's and blow up any unfortunate demons nearby.
  • Tentacles: for a static, Ambient-type, these enemies are a nuisance to the core. They pop up and, depending on the difficulty, will shave quite a bit of Hit Points off if players aren't expecting it or aren't fast enough to react. The ones hiding in purple goo are even worse because their hiding spots aren't immediately apparent until after players take a good look. The Blood Swamps level of The Ancient Gods - Part One even introduces skyscraper-tall Tentacles that take considerably more punishment than their regular brethren, too.
  • The Turrets in The Ancient Gods. They only take two Precision Shots or one Ballista blast to kill, but the problem is that they hole up in their pillars if you aim at them too long. It can be a hassle to kill them while dealing with their mobile comrades.
  • The Ancient Gods - Part Two introduces multiple Underground Monkeys to provide variety. Among them is the Screecher Zombie, a purple-hued variant of the standard Zombie. They go down just as easily as the others, which may leave you wondering why they're in this entry. The answer: if you take one out, it will let out a scream that gives all other demons a huge buff, not unlike a Buff Totem. The problem here is that they like to appear amidst chaotic fights and wander around aimlessly, meaning that unless you have really good aim and reflexes and/or stick to non-Area of Effect weaponry, a Screecher suddenly dying while you're hammering an enemy just so happened to walk in front of will happen a lot. On lower difficulties, it can make combat noticeably more hectic, but on Ultra-Violence and above, they can make an otherwise okay battle into a nightmarish dance of death where you have to try to avoid them while also paying attention to all the other enemies swarming you. The only saving grace is that, while multiple Screecher Zombies can appear in a fight, their death buffs don't stack, plus they're immune to chainsaws so you don't accidentally see one while trying to get ammo back.
  • Also in The Ancient Gods - Part Two, the Cursed Prowler, green-hued variants of the Prowler. The source of its major annoyance is that they will punch the Doom Slayer to activate a curse which prevents the Doom Slayer from dashing and using your weapons' lock-on capabilities, such as the Super Shotgun's meathook or the Rocket Launcher's Lock-on burst, and it also damages the Doom Slayer over time. Furthermore, while a Blood Punch kills them and thus frees the Doom Slayer from their curse, good luck trying to reach them while the Doom Slayer is left behind in a group of demons and possibly out of Blood Punches. Fortunately, there are only three of them in the entire game.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The Trial of Maligog from The Ancient Gods - Part One. The first issue is that the brief tutorial video that shows how to beat it has Doomguy wielding the Chain Gun against it. This is not actually the best weapon to use against Maligog — the Ballista does more damage. Shooting the vulnerable core can be tough because it's such a small target that only sporadically pops out of its metal casing, and the boss also quickly darts around the arena so much that it can be hard to keep track of it. And its attack slows down the player considerably, leaving you vulnerable to the other demons attacking you.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the "Exultia" level, there is a Cacodemon that doesn't spawn correctly. As a result, it immediately dies and just rolls pitifully along the ground before the corpse is de-spawned.
  • Messing with the Super Shotgun's Meat Hook and object collision can create some very amusing results.
  • As it turns out, the movement system in Eternal is just as wonky and exploitable as that of 2016. Less than a week after the game was released, players were quick to discover the "slope boost" glitch, where opening the weapon wheel while going off a ledge and jumping causes the Slayer to rocket himself upwards, allowing the player to escape the boundaries of the map, similar to the Gauss Cannon exploit of 2016. To make it even more hilarious, some enterprising players figured that binding Jump to the mouse wheel pretty much guarantees a maximum boost, since the jump height is dictated by the number of inputs made. Such was its extreme usefulness for speedrunning that the developers had to create an Obvious Rule Patch, where Jump can be bound to any key except the mouse wheel. That managed to inconvenience speedrunners for a few days, until someone found out you can rebind it via the console command.
  • With the IDKFA and Onslaught cheats enabled, some weapons can be glitched to have both mods active at once, such as the Heavy Cannon's "Precision Micro Missiles."
  • Master Collection podium animations (idle, intro and victory) are usually locked to only being available for the corresponding Master Collection skin, but by exploiting a glitch these animations can be used with any skin.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The memetic "Why does Doomguy not have PTSD? Because he is the traumatic event" exchange loses a bit of its humour, now that we find out that he did have it, and suffered pretty severely at that, back when he was Doomguy. On the other hand, it does add a level of badassery that he went through suffering from trauma to embody it for the demons.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During Doom II's modding heyday, Team TNT — the creators of the official fanmade expansion Final Doom — released a mod. It just so happened that this mod made in late 1997 was titled "Eternal Doom".
  • The previous game spawned jokes about newsreels declaring the Doom Slayer "MAN LITERALLY TOO ANGRY TO DIE◊." Eternal uses a 1-Up mechanic as an alternative to respawning via checkpoint, which can lead to the Doom Slayer getting right back up on the spot, making him even more literally too angry to die. Additionally, during the development of the first Doom game, John Romero took out the extra lives system as he felt that it wouldn't have meshed with the flow of the game. With a substantial Sequel Difficulty Spike for Eternal, this system comes full circle.
  • The game's central conflict becomes a lot funnier when the Khan Maykr and Dr Elena Richardson, probably the Slayer's biggest Fangirl In-Universe, are voiced by the same person.
  • Second Prize goes to the bespectacled ARC Intern who goes full Squee at the sight of the Slayer near the end of ARC Complex and is promoted to mission control for the better part of The Ancient Gods - Part One. He's voiced by Edward Bosco, who doubles as the freaking Marauder and the Icon of Sin.
  • When 2016 was released, many fans drew comparisons between the Doom Slayer to the titular Goblin Slayer. In Eternal, several codex entries show drawings of the Slayer during his time with the Night Sentinels, where he's wearing a helmet that looks near-identical to the Goblin Slayer’s◊.
  • Hazbin Hotel has a song titled "Inside of Every Demon is a Rainbow". When players use the chainsaw against demons in Eternal, they are rewarded with a rainbow of different types of ammunition. For bonus points, the aforementioned Edward Bosco has a starring role in the show as Alastor, who sings a reprise of the song (though someone else provides the singing voice).
  • This isn't the first game franchise where angels are just as nasty as demons when left unchecked, whose divine-looking armour conceals eldritch beings.
  • When promoting Eternal before launch, director Hugo Martin stated the game was inspired by Evil Dead 2. At the end of The Ancient Gods - Part One, The Dark Lord's identity being an Alternate Universe Evil Counterpart of the Doom Slayer brings a whole different meaning when "Evil Ash" made its first appearance in Evil Dead 2.
  • One of Doomguy's Dummied Out lines in Quake III: Arena has him say "The only one who can really beat me... is me!" Come The Ancient Gods - Part One, it's revealed that the Dark Lord is an Evil Counterpart of Doomguy himself, and the only person who can beat the Dark Lord is him.
  • Brutal Doom has a boss that's basically the Icon of Sin becoming a Kaiju, and fighting you on Earth. Here, the Final Boss of the main game is the Icon of Sin becoming a Kaiju, and fighting you on Earth.
  • All the drama from the Moral Guardians regarding the satanic imagery from the original Doom game becomes a little more poignant in The Ancient Gods - Part Two where the Dark Lord is the creator of the universe, meaning that God and Lucifer were one and the same.
  • JT Music's Filk Song for Eternal contained the line "They say God rested on the seventh day. You know what he really did? ...He created Hell." With the revelation that the Dark Lord was the Doom universe's equivalent of God and caused his home realm to turn into Hell, this line becomes eerily prophetic.
• I Knew It!:
  • With the game being a loose remake of Doom II, it was widely expected that the Final Boss would once again be the Icon of Sin.
  • When 2016 came out, there was significant debate among players whether the Slayer was in fact the original Doomguy. Eternal would vindicate those who guessed "yes".
  • Pretty much almost everyone who played the base game saw the twists with Samuel being the hooded figure and VEGA being The Father of Urdak coming.
• Iron Woobie: The Doom Slayer himself. If his backstory is to be believed, he’s been through a lot. He used to be the Doomguy from the classic games, and he willingly sealed himself away in hell in order to fight the demonic horde so that he could kill them all and they wouldn’t invade Earth ever again…except that not only did it not work because the demons found a way to invade other worlds once more, but his one-man war against Hell had left him so mentally broken and enraged that by the time the Sentinels and the Khan Maykr found him, he was barely capable of coherent speech. He was then treated like a dog and forced to fight gladiator matches in the arenas of the Sentinel homeworld until he garnered enough respect to be treated with dignity. After all that, he was eventually allowed to become a member of the order himself, and through the fires of battle, Doomguy eventually befriended the sentinels and wasn’t alone in his war against demonkind anymore. Just as it seemed like things were going better for Doomguy, the Order of the Night Sentinels was betrayed and devastated in a schism, leaving all of Doomguy’s new friends dead or missing at the hands of the traitors and demonkind. Doomguy was transformed into the Doom Slayer and spends his days hunting down the Maykr and their servants to avenge his fallen brothers-in-arms, alone, angry and friendless once more (well, friendless until he met VEGA, that is). Despite all the pain and misery he’s gone through, the Slayer stands firm, is determined to not let the deaths of his comrades be in vain and will fight against the forces of Hell until his last breath. And that’s not even getting into the fact that he’s still sad and angry about Daisy’s death too. His cause is just, his will is strong, and his gun is very, very large.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Some fans were bummed by the Sequel Difficulty Drop that The Ancient Gods Part Two had, and were further annoyed when the notorious Part One had nerfs as well for the sake of balancing the game.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: A holdover from the previous game, some fans dislike how Eternal still has jumping and exploration-based puzzles in between combat encounters, feeling that they slow down the pacing of the game too much.
• Jerkass Woobie: Valen the Betrayer may have, well, betrayed the Sentinels, but it was only because he wanted his son back The demons did give him back, but as the Icon Of Sin. As such, he spends the rest of his days in Exulta out of guilt. He shows up again in Ancient Gods: Part Two to give Doom Slayer the Sentinel Hammer, and, evidently, the Sentinels forgive him as he shows up to help during the attack on Immora.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ancient Gods DLC: Davoth, the "Dark Lord" and the true Father, was once a benevolent deity who sought the best for all his people by giving them immortality. Creating the Maykrs before being betrayed by them, Davoth sought destruction for all life in retribution. Davoth was reduced to a voice, and even then engineers Hell invasions across multiple dimensions, making numerous bargains before turning on his "partners". Notably, Davoth uses the Kahn Maykr's greed and the Doom Slayer's war on Hell to play all sides against each other, resulting in the Slayer wiping out the Maykrs as revenge for their betrayal and tricking Samur Maykr into empowering the Slayer with his essence, creating Hell's greatest threat and knowing they would face each other one day. Resurrected by the Slayer, Davoth intends to lead the final battle for the fate of creation and forces the Father to reveal the truth of his betrayal. When beaten, Davoth accepts his death and asks the Slayer if he has anything to say to his creator.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Mortally challenged"^ExplanationIn-Universe, the Union Aerospace Corporation and cultist sects deem the term demons as "offensive", thus giving them this new label. A section of the fandom immediately embraced this due to the inherent Political Correctness.
    • "Remember: x can be an offensive term. Refer to them as y challenged."^ExplanationA snowclone of the full line of dialogue of the above, heard during the "Super Gore Nest" level.
  • DOOM Souls^ExplanationThe game's asynchronous multiplayer invasion mechanic in the Eternal single-player campaign has earned this moniker from more than a few people due to its inspiration.
  • "Eternal Wood"^ExplanationBy flipping the game's logo upside down◊, it becomes an apt description of many fans' reactions to the trailers and gameplay footage pre-release.
  • With the reveal of the BFG-10,000 during QuakeCon 2018, some fans joked about this being the first game to give a Doom protagonist a love interest.
  • Due to the game's delay to March 20, 2020 (the same day as Animal Crossing: New Horizons), Crossover Fan Art between the Doom Slayer and Isabelle from Animal Crossing: New Leaf began popping up everywhere, alongside jokes from players about having to make the hard decision of which game to play first.
    • Doom Slayer teaches other characters how to use firearms.^ExplanationAlthough it precedes Doom Slayer/Isabelle (but is partially responsible for popularizing this), the Doom Slayer shows a character from an unrelated franchise (the cuter and more innocent, the better) how to use his weapons have taken off. Naturally, Isabelle is the go-to character for these types of work..
      Izra◊: "Dear Diary: today i got payed to draw Doomguy teaching Rapunzel, from Disney's Tangled, how to shoot the Heavy Assault Rifle. today was a good day."
    • "One copy of Doom Eternal / Animal Crossing: New Horizons, please."^ExplanationThe shared launch date of both games led to an emerging trend where cute characters from wholesome, kid-friendly franchises are juxtaposed into a video game retailer asking for copies of Eternal, while masculine and/or muscular characters from mature-oriented series will ask for New Horizons.
    • Doom Slayer becoming close friends with Isabelle, often bringing out his softer side, what with him drinking tea and teaching her to use his Super Shotgun. Conversely, Isabelle is shown to be perfectly comfortable wielding firearms bigger than her and slaughtering demons from Hell.
    • Doom Crossing: Eternal Horizons^ExplanationIt became common to merge or swap the two title's styles◊.
  • KAREN TOOK (THE KIDS)^ExplanationA common chant heard in the Eternal soundtrack is "Kar En Tuk". According to Mick Gordon, it is the Sentinel/Argentan language for "Rip and tear". Viewers on YouTube were quick to comment on "Karen" jokes based on the chant, as "Karen" is the memetic term for an entitled, obnoxious middle-aged woman who voices petty complaints or makes shallow demands of people.
  • Dean Takahashi's infamously bad gameplay review.^ExplanationHistory Repeats itself just like Polygon's infamous footage of 2016, where a game journalist made a clown of themselves playing a Doom game. In this case, Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat was one of several who was given early access to an Eternal release build for reviewing purposes. Takahashi decried the game for being "unfair" and "too difficult", all while demonstrating comically-bad skill, where he can't maintain a bead on enemies, misses easy jumps, gets confused by simple puzzles, and frequently stands in one place to get shot at instead of dynamically moving around the area, all while playing on the easiest difficulty setting. The gaming community was quick to ridicule Takahashi over this, not helped by his already well-known moment for being stuck on the tutorial level of Cuphead. VentureBeat had since removed Takahashi's original footage and replaced it with a marginally-improved version.
  • No offence but this ain't music its noise.^ExplanationA YouTube user by the name of Michael P. Shipley posted this comment about one of the game's tracks, typos and all, and the channel's owner pinned the comment at the top, causing everyone and their mother to have a field day with it, with most of the comments on that track involving Michael somehow.
  • The Doom Slayer punching things to make them work.^ExplanationSince the button to interact with objects and the punching button is the same, it's very common for players to accidentally punch things like levers, buttons, control panels and Non Player Characters trying to give them stuff. Since the Slayer applying violence to every problem like that is entirely in character, this was quickly memed.
    • In particular, this is also applied to the Sentinel spectres that award the Praetor Points and people ran with the idea that the Doom Slayer punching them before taking their offering is akin to a schoolyard bully slugging someone to take their lunch.
  • "ARGENT ENERGY IS PEOPLE!"^ExplanationIn Eternal, the narrative reveals that Argent Energy is made of tortured human souls. Naturally, since the game takes place in an apocalyptic future where people are forced to rely on a resource that is literally made from the dead to survive, some fans couldn’t help but make a joke or two about comparing this game to The Reveal from Soylent Green.
  • "The longer the Icon of Sin is on Earth, the stronger he will become!"^ExplanationSamuel Hayden repeatedly pointing this out in Urdak has become a source of jokes. To make it even odder, he never actually explains why this happens. It takes the only lore entry found in the following level, "Final Sin", to back this statement.
    • In a similar vein, the automated voice heard throughout the first part of the Mars Core level that announces "WARNING: BFG-10000 is firing" - note that the gun fires very, very frequently.
    • This still occurs in The Ancient Gods Part Two, which has both the Intern and The Father repeatedly saying "If you defeat the Dark Lord, all demons outside Hell will be destroyed". While this was established in Part One, this can be heard all across the DLC as opposed to one segment.
  • "You can't just shoot a hole into the surface of Mars..."^ExplanationHayden's reaction to what the Doom Slayer intends to do in the Mars Core level, saying it can't be done. Naturally, he's proven wrong and it became infamous rather quickly.
    • Likewise, "That is a weapon, not a teleporter."^ExplanationAgain, Hayden's statement of using a Railgun to travel quickly is proven to work for the Slayer, who launches himself as a Human Cannonball without any difficulty.
  • "x is temporary: Doom is Eternal."^ExplanationBased on the Tag Line "Times change. Doom is Eternal" from the "25 Years of Doom" Milestone Celebration video, this became an exploitable meme where one comically tries to convince another out of their (usually-weird) interests and play Eternal instead.
  • This is getting out of hand! Now, there are two of them!^ExplanationAt the end of the official trailer for The Ancient Gods - Part One, fans were shocked to discover they would have to fight two Marauders at the same time! Cue jokes about how it still wouldn't be much of a challenge for the Doom Slayer and how Part One will receive low scores due to it being too difficult for game journalists. Ironically, after the DLC's release, people started to talk about how the double Marauder was the least of their worries...
  • "This makes me want to/feel like x"^ExplanationA recurring comment on YouTube rips of the soundtrack, with x being some outlandish boast such as battling the sun, disagreeing with terms of service, etc.
  • Due to Samur being the boss of the Ancient Gods Part 1 DLC, people have often depicted them as not fighting the Slayer due to their canon motivation (trying to stop him from summoning the Dark Lord), but for all the (comparatively) minor grievances he suffered at the Slayer's hands as Samuel Hayden, including and not limited to his destruction of the Argent facilities and shooting a hole into the surface of Mars.
  • SENTINELS... Assemble.^ExplanationThe scene in Immora where the armies arrive through portals is so similar to the portals' scene in Avengers: Endgame that having Valen say this line fits right in.
  • "The cows send their regards."^Explanation Due to two billboards being next to each other.
  • Doomguy: NO.^ExplanationIn The Ancient Gods: Part Two, this is what the Slayer says as he kills Davoth, in response to him asking if he had anything to say before he gets it over with.
  • "When the DOOM music hits": Videos of characters in some other franchise going berserk or on a rampage to the tune of Doom Eternal's "The Only One They Fear Is You".
  • The longer the Doom Slayer is on Earth, the hornier Dr. Elena Richardson becomes.^ExplanationCombines a rather infamous line regarding the Icon of Sin with what fans believe is going on with Elena. During Elena's four voice logs that the player can come across, she starts off sounding like a normal everyday scientist only to slowly lose her sanity. Many are convinced that by the final voice log, Elena's become such a religious fangirl of the Doom Slayer that she now really wants to have his babies.
• Memetic Loser:
  • In a shocking twist of fate, the Doom Slayer has been subjected to this in almost a reversal of the reputation he had in 2016, owing largely to the game's Sequel Difficulty Spike. It's not uncommon to see Fan Art of him being treated as a punching bag by certain demons, especially the Marauder, and how unbalanced the multiplayer Battlemode is to the demons' side further contributes to this.
  • The Demonic Troopers, the very last enemy introduced in The Ancient Gods Part 2, have been hit with this for being so absurdly weak that one would argue that their listing under the "Ambient" demon class is too generous a classification. How weak are they? A single punch kills them. Not a Blood Punch. A regular punch. Even the pathetic zombie can take dozens of punches before getting into a Glory Kill state. And all the while they were being hyped up as the Dark Lord's elite guard.
• Minimalist Run: The Can't Perfect Perfection milestone demands that you complete the entire game having purchased only one Praetor Suit upgrade and acquired a single Sentinel Crystal (meaning you can upgrade either your health, armor or ammo once, but can’t get any crystal perks since each one requires 2 crystals). Weapon mods are still fair game.
• Misaimed Marketing: A television advertisement released to promote Eternal features Hip-Hop mixed with clean, non-gory visuals that barely show game-play, using cut-scenes lifted from the single-player campaign, instead. Doom veterans have called out Bethesda for this marketing by ignoring the very elements that define the franchise - First-Person Shooter action, violence against demons and Heavy Metal; in particular, it's an egregious error when Mick Gordon, who has contributed to the Eternal soundtrack, should have been the obvious choice for the ad's music.
• Misblamed: When Battlemode was revealed to use Denuvo Anti-Cheat after the first major patch, many fans were quick to accuse Bethesda of forcing it into the game, until id Software confirmed that they decided to integrate it, but apologized and ultimately said that they will remove it by the next update due to the unanimously negative reception.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Khan Maykr trying to get humanity wiped out by the demons is already a line that put her on the Doom Slayer's list of foes, but then we find out that she was doing it so her world would survive, if only so she could continue to rule over it and the numerous other worlds the Maykrs were in control of. And even that's outclassed by the fact that Argent Energy is derived from tortured and tormented souls, and she and the Maykrs worked with Hell itself to essentially turn the suffering of the deceased into a production line for the sake of power. Even Samuel Hayden is downright disgusted.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The little plink of a demon's weak point getting shot off.
  • The reverberating sound your shots make when using a Haste or Quad Damage power-up.
  • The Doom Hunter screaming "CRITICAL DAMAGE" when its rocket sled gets blown off.
  • The BFG firing. Nothing says "this entire room is completely screwed" by the most badass of weapons firing and vaporizing every last enemy in the room.
  • The sound of a bunch of armour shards getting picked up at once after burning up a horde of fodder.
  • The Arch-Vile's death scream.
  • The rush of ammo after a chainsaw kill. The emptier your reserves, the better.
• Narm:
  • The aforementioned ad contains the words "Power. Defiance. Courage. Be Eternal." as a Tagline. However, within the context of the Doom Slayer, this is seen by fans not only as generic and redundant but as a gross mischaracterization, especially when a Narmy comic book once succinctly summarized the character, of which the 2016 game used as its Central Theme - "rip and tear.
  • Dr. Elena Richardson's Audio Logs: at first, they start pretty normal and she doesn’t seem to believe much in the Doom Slayer’s legend. However, as they go on, Dr Richardson starts to believe in the Slayer’s legend and understands the truth about him. That’s all well and good...except that in the later logs, she sounds less and less professional and more and more like a very enamoured Fangirl. First, it gets weird, then creepy, then downright funny; if the idea was to make her a believer in the Slayer’s legend, then it may have worked a little too well.
  • The Marauder is one of the most threatening enemies in the game... until you stun it, which causes Circling Birdies with a comedic and cartoonish sound effect. Although it acts as a clear indicator of when and for how long the Marauder is stunned, it can make the fight hard to take seriously. A similar visual effect occurs when enemies are stunned with the Sentinel Hammer in The Ancient Gods - Part 2, including when it's used against the Dark Lord during the climactic Final Boss fight.
  • Doom Guy being literally called "Doomguy" in-game comes across as silly, and while the game is home to some funny moments, this play in a serious one where we hear the character talks for the first time nonetheless. It takes a lot of the edge off.
  • After awakening the Icon of Sin, the Doom Slayer is sent teetering off a platform and rather very dramatically landing on a lower floor, bouncing onto it a few times. He then incredibly quickly pushes himself back up as nothing happened.
  • At one point the Icon Of Sin walks away, and you can see his bare ass, which means he's Mooning the entire city whenever he's facing you.
  • After finishing the final boss fight of "The Ancient Gods: Part 2", the Doom Slayer removes his helmet as he approaches the Dark Lord for the final blow, with sound effects included. On most skins, this isn't an issue... except for skins where the helmet is either fixed to the Slayer's head (i.e. the Cultist Slayer skin) or where the Slayer isn't wearing a helmet at all (i.e. the Barbarian skin, which came in the very same DLC), it becomes unintentionally funny since he's grabbing an invisible helmet that still makes a sound as it thunks on the floor. This was later fixed in the Version 6.66 Update.
  • The Classic Doom Marine skin is a cool throwback to Doom's roots, giving Doomguy an appearance that matches that of the original games. It also kind of just looks a bit off, thanks to the fact that it's designed to match the proportions of modern Doomguy's bulkier armour and doesn't add any detail to the spaces that were usually covered by guns or other accessories in the classic games. As a result, it kind of looks like he's wearing ill-fitted armour over equally ill-fitted green pyjamas.
• Narm Charm: In some ways, the more "video gamey" aspects of the game (multi-coloured loot, 1UPs played straight, the demons resembling their classic looks, etc) are seen as positives instead of negatives, since DOOM, at its core, is a game all about killing demons by the truckload and never stopping until they're all gone or you're dead. In a sense, Eternal isn't trying to hide that it's a game first and foremost, and instead embraces those aspects as part of the Rule of Fun. It helps that these aspects are actually Older Than They Think, as described below.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The game was very much designed to challenge those who got too complacent playing 2016, as even "Hurt Me Plenty" can be daunting for more casual players, who are very likely to die quite a bit on their first playthrough. Demons will quickly gang up on the Slayer and even the weakest zombie can do a ton of damage if given the chance. In addition, the far lower ammo cap and scarcer resource pickups compared to 2016 means that your resource management needs to be on point lest you run out of ammo against a particularly nasty demon, especially since the main methods of replenishing ammo/health/armor require you to remain up-close and personal with demonic hordes. That being said, the main source of difficulty in the game is the fact the core gameplay loop is significantly different from the vast majority of other First Person Shooters; once you understand how the game is intended to be played, it's actually reasonably manageable, especially once you start getting some decent upgrades.
  • The Ancient Gods takes this to the point where even high-level players have compared it to the infamously difficult IWAD The Plutonia Experiment; enemy combinations deemed too difficult for the main campaign are very much present here, traps and environmental hazards are far more prevalent, combat encounters are often designed to minimize any sort of breathing room (such as making you fight a Tyrant in a small and narrow hallway), and the Spirits, in particular, can turn a normal heavy demon into effectively a mini-boss.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Some fans who got into the series with 2016 were surprised that certain skins have the Doom Slayer take off his helmet, or that his face can be seen through his helmet visor at points after the previous game had him solely depicted as The Faceless... except it's long been a feature in the franchise that the protagonists have established faces. In fact, the classic Doom games are one of the best-known examples of an Expressive Health Bar, with the Doomguy's face staring right at you for the entirety of the game.
  • Some fans were put off by all of the arcade aesthetics introduced in Eternal as opposed to the more grounded aesthetics of 2016. However, many of these aspects in Eternal are Call Backs to Doom II, which it takes heavy inspiration from. That and Doom 2016 itself features an Arcade mode.
  • Starting the player off with the shotgun as their default weapon rather than the traditional pistol was seen as a positive change, but this wasn't the first time this had happened in an id FPS. Quake had featured a shotgun as the starting gun all the way back in 1996^note Although to be honest, the Quake shotgun was basically a pistol by another name anyway, being a weak, rapid-firing weapon only really suited to starter enemies.
• Polished Port: Like with Doom (2016), the Switch port of Eternal works surprisingly well despite the graphical and frame rate compromises in addition to having gyro aiming at launch. The only downside is its digital-only availability. There was supposed to be a physical edition of the game for Switch to be released, but that ended up getting cancelled, restricting it to download-only.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • In 2016, the Heavy Assault Rifle Tactical Scope mod was considered to be vastly inferior to the Micro Missiles, offering slightly higher-than-normal damage output at the cost of a much slower rate of fire and tunnel vision. Its successor for Eternal, the Heavy Cannon Precision Bolt mod, is almost a requirement, allowing players to neutralize some of the most dangerous abilities of Heavy-class demons they'll be facing while making the most out of the game's limited ammunition pool. Not only that, but the new Ice Bombs make sniper weapons much more viable despite the game's close-range, fast-paced gameplay. Attacking the weak points of even the most agile enemies is trivially easy when players have just turned them into helpless statues.
  • Similarly, the 2016 Chaingun's Gatling Rotator mod is replaced with the Energy Shield, since the Chaingun shoots at its maximum rate of fire without having to wind up. Given the relentless aggression of enemies, the game's general Sequel Difficulty Spike and how much of a Game-Breaker the aforementioned mod is, the ever-popular Mobile Turret mod now faces fierce competition.
  • When it was initially introduced, very few players would admit the Plasma Rifle's Microwave Beam mod was good. It was mostly derided as an excessive ammo hog that dealt less damage than standard fire, while its movement speed penalty frequently caused players to end up being reduced to chunky kibbles. It wasn't until a balance patch increased the damage it dealt over time that players bothered to explore its applications:
    • The mod is a lot more efficient at melting energy shields than standard fire, making quick work of Shield Soldiers and briefly stripping Doom Hunters of their primary defensive measure. Even Carcass barriers become a non-issue since any that are thrown in front of the player will quickly (and explosively) dissipate without breaking the beam's lock.
    • Enemies struck by the beam will have their attacks cancelled and be locked in place, remaining so even for a brief moment after the beam is disengaged. This has given rise to a high-level tactic of stun-locking: lock onto an enemy and briefly strike them with the beam to immobilize them, quick-switch to a high-burst-damage weapon (Rocket Launcher, Super Shotgun or Ballista), shoot the enemy in the face, switch back to the Plasma Rifle, rinse and repeat.
    • The explosive blast released with Microwave Beam kills essentially turns any enemy on the battlefield into a walking bomb, wiping out clusters of weak or near-death demons and taking chunks out of anything that survives. When mastered, the explosion releases a concussive shockwave that briefly falters nearby demons, allowing players to make a quick escape from a disadvantageous position or trip up heavy demons by popping fodder standing close by.
    • The charge bar that appears when locking onto an enemy is the closest thing in the game that constitutes an enemy health bar, allowing players to check an enemy's remaining Hit Points and plan how to eliminate it without wasting ammo.
    • With The Ancient Gods - Part One, the Microwave Beam went from underused to borderline mandatory, as it's the only thing that can kill Spirits.
  • Initially, the Combat Shotgun's Full Auto mod was widely considered to be useless compared to the Stickybomb Launcher. This was largely due to a combination of the Stickybomb Launcher's wide applications (weak point-busting, neutralizing Cacodemons in a single shot and mopping up entire swathes of fodder) and low skill floor needed to use the mod, alongside a general unfamiliarity with Full-Auto's exact role in the sandbox. Further experimentation and incorporation of Full-Auto into playthroughs, however, allowed the mod to truly come into its own:
    • Full Auto possesses the highest raw DPS of the Combat Shotgun's fire modes, making it (alongside the Heavy Cannon's Micro Missiles) a crucial tool in whittling down Heavy Demons in the early game, especially before the player unlocks the more reliable "combo" weapons like the Super Shotgun and Ballista.
    • Full Auto's Mastery, Salvo Extender, returns a fixed number of shotgun shells for each demon killed with the mod; 3 shells per Fodder or Ambient demon, 6 per Heavy demon and 9 per Super-Heavy demon. As one of the only other reliable methods of ammo replenishment besides the Chainsaw (and in The Ancient Gods - Part Two, the Sentinel Hammer), the player can use Full Auto as a combo finisher that tops up their shell ammo for extended Super Shotgun use or mow down entire hordes of fodder practically for free.
    • The Ancient Gods - Part Two further encourages Full Auto use with the introduction of the Stone Imps, with the mod being the only other weapon besides the Sentinel Hammer and Unmaykr to bypass their ammo-soaking damage resistance. You're even rewarded with 5 shotgun shells per Stone Imp kill instead of the 3 from other fodder variants.
  • The Icon of Sin rose like a fucking phoenix. Originally considered an Anti-Climax Boss that most Doom players refuse to deal with no matter how creative the .wad featuring it is, he is now equipped with a full-body encased in Powered Armor, and presents the most intense boss fight in the entire game, entire onslaughts of enemies and the Icon's own attacks bringing a sense of extreme adrenaline-rushing action that was absent in its Doom II debut.
• Sacred Cow: There's a reason criticisms against the Marauder were so controversial. Complain about this game's difficulty at your peril.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Purple goo: though relatively rare, floors covered in the goo will both impede the Slayer's movement and takes away his ability to dash or jump until he can find dry land. Although these sections don't typically feature heavy combat, there are a few segments on Exultia where enemies will spawn in to harass the player. To make things worse, certain goo sections even have Tentacles hiding in them and their burrows are also concealed under the surface, making it hard not to take a surprise hit while wading through the slime.
  • The fact that every boss in the game is a Flunky Boss hasn't sat well with a portion of the player base. Besides the fact that they often distract the player from the boss's onslaught of vicious attacks, several of the enemies that end up getting summoned are Demonic Spiders that require the player to take their attention away from the boss entirely to focus on getting them out of the battle as quickly as possible.
  • The design choice where players failing Secret Encounters and Slayer Gates will not be refunded with whatever ammunition, health, and lives lost attempting them turned many away from trying to beat them all together. Keep in mind, both of these cases can be very hard to clear even with a reasonably-upgraded Slayer and weapons, and the game's emphasis on Drought Level of Doom combined with this lack of a "refund" mechanic (unless the player considers the pair of separate Praetor Suit upgrades to make explosive barrels regenerate and drop ammo after being destroyed a "refund" mechanic) means Continuing is Painful since one will be coming back in with even fewer resources that probably wouldn't have helped had they just decided to soldier on with the campaign instead.
  • The limited ammunition: at the beginning of the game, players can only hold 16 shotgun shells compared to 20 or 50 in the earlier games in the series. On one hand, it encourages smarter play by aiming at the enemy's weak points and switching up weapons more frequently, but on the other hand, Doom has never been a game about very restrictive Resources Management Gameplay. Having to utilize the chainsaw mechanic so frequently means players are forced to spend more time looking at a preset animation and less time gunning down demons. Thankfully, this becomes less of an issue as the game goes on and more ammunition upgrades and weapons are unlocked, allowing players to exploit more weaknesses and strategies that reduce overall ammo expenditure in any given fight.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • 2016 was far from easy, but Eternal really ramps things up in the difficulty department. Enemies hit much harder and move much faster, and even the bulkier demons can be surprisingly mobile and persistent. Your ammo capacity has been cut by more than half, with the maximum amount of shotgun ammo going from 60 in 2016 to a paltry 24 in Eternal. There are more complex mechanics to manage too, like the Blood Punch, the Flame Belch, your grenades, and your Chainsaw. The tradeoff is that the Slayer has been upgraded with more mobility and many of his weapons have seen substantial buffs, so mastering the combat system makes you a serious force to be reckoned with. It's telling that this game introduces a Video-Game Lives mechanic into the mix where 2016 had none, and on the higher difficulties, you'll be chewing through them fast if you don't play smart.
  • The Ancient Gods - Part One cranked up the already Nintendo Hard game's difficulty up to eleven, to the point where many describe it as making the entire base game feel like a tutorial level. Enemy waves are more numerous and feature tougher demon combos; it's common for the Slayer to fight more than 2 Super Heavies backed up with numerous Heavies and mountains of Fodder in any given fight. The arenas are more cramped and typically filled with hazards. One Ups and BFG Cell pickups are much rarer, making it impossible to brute force levels with extra lives and superweapons, the new enemies are specifically designed to move you out of Complacent Gaming Syndrome strategies such as the Super Shotgun/Ballista combo. Lastly, the bosses in Part One are definite step-ups from the Final Boss of the base game itself.
• Signature Scene:
  • Doom Slayer meeting the spirit of King Novik was played up a lot in the marketing leading up to the release of the game. It's quite memorable, particularly because of how grandiose Novik's speech sounds, and because of how surprising it is to see the Doom Slayer kneel out of respect to someone. It helps that the cutscene ends with a noteworthy shot of Doom Slayer looking back at the camera.
  • The Doom Slayer using the BFG-10000 to blow a massive hole into the surface of Mars tends to be the most memorable moment of the game that will get people talking. It helps that Samuel Hayden claiming that it can't be done has become a bit of a meme of its own.
  • For fans of lore, Sentinel Prime: while the level itself isn't as filled with enemies as others, as a story-focused mission, it's a Wham Episode that, through a series of Flashbacks, reveals the true nature of the Slayer's background and his relationship with the Night Sentinels. He's Doomguy, the player character of the original games. Broken from holding off the forces of Hell at the end of Doom 64 for God knows how long, Doomguy is reduced to an insane, gibbering mess who talks about guts. Huge guts. Having been found by the Night Sentinels and the Maykrs, they decide to test his mettle by placing him into an arena with other warriors for the Maykrs' amusement. Doomguy handily kicks the crap out of every warrior in his path, chanting "Rip and tear!" throughout, showing players how, despite initially being an ordinary space marine, Doomguy took several levels in badass and became the Doom Slayer, the greatest warrior in the Night Sentinels.
  • The final cutscene of The Ancient Gods - Part One with The Reveal that the Dark Lord of the demons...is an alternate you will definitely get you hyped up for Part Two.
  • The Ancient Gods - Part Two continues this with three specific scenes. One being Doom Slayer riding a dragon, and the other being the arrival of the Sentinels to support the fight against the Dark Lord. The latter of which was so obviously inspired by the portal scene of Avengers: Endgame. The third of which is the Slayer's execution of Davoth the Dark Lord, with him uttering his first (and last) words ever since 2016.
• Signature Song: "The Only Thing They Fear Is You", the song that plays during combat in the ARC Complex level - after first being featured in the second official trailer and further shown off in a stream from Mick Gordon, it got tens of millions of views from various uploads before the game released. It's often compared to how "BFG Division" became iconic for the 2016 soundtrack.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The only thing that isn't awesome about the Crucible is the attack animations; with the exception of the ones where it takes multiple swipes to kill an enemy, they lack the same sort of weight and impact that many of the Chainsaw or Glory Kills have, and thus the animations look like the Slayer waves his sword at his enemies before they sort of just fall apart at the seams.
    • That being said, it is, bizarrely enough, a good way to display the sheer power of the Crucible. See that Tyrant who can soak up rockets like rubber duckies and shrug off bullets like a goddamn Terminator? The Slayer takes just three swings and it's dead.
  • Skins for the Doom Slayer can be used in the single-player mode, and all of them work properly in the cutscenes... well, almost all of them. The helmet of the Cultist Slayer skin's model is part of its head instead of it being separate, leading to Slayer miming the action of putting on his helmet in the opening cutscene. To add insult to injury, the lights from inside his helmet still light up despite not wearing a helmet of that sort.
    • Fortunately, as of Update 4, this has been changed so that the Slayer as the Cultist Slayer does not mime putting on his helmet, and instead places down his original helmet. And of course, the helmet lights were fixed.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • More so than even the previous game, Doom Eternal is definitely the best Warhammer 40,000 First-Person Shooter ever made. To summarize:
    • The revelations of how Argent Energy and the demons came to be make the version of Hell in Doom very close to the Warp and its daemons (it helps that, like the Warp, Hell can also be used for FTL travel), Hell has plenty of human agents/worshippers in this dimension supporting their efforts and the Icon of Sin resembles a greater daemon prince (including only being killable with a special artifact and otherwise reconstituting elsewhere when he's killed conventionally).
    • The Night Sentinels may as well be a Space Marine chapter, down to referring to their military expeditions as "Crusades" and the Marauders - their defected, corrupted, horn-sporting brethren - being the deadliest soldiers of the demons.
    • The Maykrs are a pretty good match for the Dark Eldar, a Sufficiently Advanced Alien species living in a world outside of normal time and space which, while once-dominant over the galaxy, has been reduced to a depraved Dying Race that profits and perpetuates their world off of the suffering of others in Hell.
    • The Ancient Gods further deepens the similarities with the revelation that Hell was originally a peaceful place that was ruined by a cosmic war between precursor deities, much like the ancient war between the C'tan and the Old Ones being the cause for much of the crapsack state of the 40k universe, which was then reflected into the Warp. The Dark Lord himself also makes a personal appearance here, wearing an enormous suit of power armor that wouldn't look out of place on Horus himself. And to further cement the parallels, he's more or less what the God-Emperor would be if he turned to Chaos.
  • Despite being a Doom sequel, large chunks of the game are about wandering around abandoned medieval citadels populated by monsters while apparitions of evil wizards pop up and taunt you, bringing to mind the other major idTech 1 franchise, Heretic/Hexen.
  • The emphasis on fast movement, quick reflexes and ammo management combined with the Quad Damage and Haste powerup stand-ins, the usage of jump pads, large arenas, and the behaviour of the BFG makes the game akin to a mix of Doom and Quake, in particular Quake III: Arena. The portal system that the Doom Slayer uses is even outright called a "Slipgate".
• Take That, Scrappy!: The developers at id Software knew how useless the pistol was in the previous game; it doesn't even appear in this one! Instead, the Doom Slayer starts with the standard Combat Shotgun and never moves back on the weapon progression. There are ways to obtain this Dummied Out weapon, but what rational person would? Later patches would later completely dump the pistol, to cement this trope.
• That One Boss: The Final Boss of The Ancient Gods - Part One, as per the DLC's Sequel Difficulty Spike, is significantly more brutal than any of the boss battles in the base game. The first phase isn't too bad despite Samur's attacks and Teleport Spam, and even when he first spawns Spirits that must be killed to damage him, they're on relatively inconsequential demons (a Hell Knight and Mancubus) that let you kill them easily. All of this goes out the window in the second phase, where the arena transforms to become a maze of elevated platforms while laser grids periodically sweep across the map and force you to dodge through them, all while demons swamp the lower levels of the map. The player then has to hunt down Samur, whose Teleport Spam goes from mildly annoying to highly infuriating due to the map being much harder to navigate. While he evades you and forces you to give chase, he'll gleefully rain hell on you from afar, and chances are even when you track him down, he'll either warp away or reward you with an attack to the face for your troubles. Alongside him spawning deceptively tanky eyeball monsters that patrol the area and electrocute the Slayer if he's within a generous radius, the demon reinforcements are now too tough to just ignore - particularly since the level will start spawning Blood Maykrs, which have punishing attacks and can't be hit unless they drop their barrier to attack. But the difficulty comes to its absolute head when he puts up his spirit shield for the second time, this time with the Spirits on a Pain Elemental and Dread Knight, who are more than powerful enough to abuse their inflated stats and tear you a new one - and this is still while you're stuck in a constraining, hazard-laced map and trying to fend off the legions of demons and Blood Maykrs assailing you. On lower difficulties, the fight is already hard, but on higher ones, it's borderline sadistic.
• That One Level: The Blood Swamp in The Ancient Gods - Part One is where the Downloadable Content massively ramps up its difficulty. There are several dangerous environmental hazards exclusive to this level such as exploding poisonous spore pods, poison fog, building-sized Tentacles, etc. This also happens to be the level where the Spirit makes its debut, and the game will make players hate it by having them fight a Fireborne Baron possessed by one such Spirit as its first encounter^note That is if players choose the right path at the central altar first. If the left path is chosen, the first Spirit-possessed enemy will be a Hell Knight... right after a fight with a totem-buffed Marauder. Yikes, and depending on which area players tackle first, it'll be in a short arena with little room to move about and other Barons boxing players in. On top of that, the level constantly forces fights within gimmicky and disadvantageous battle arenas, which includes the powerful, melee-focused demons in closed-off zones, fighting inside a thick fog with almost zero visibility, forcing a fight against a totem-buffed Marauder with no way to get rid of the Buff Totem, etc.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Some of the Secret Encounters can be really tricky:
    • Most Secret Encounters that spawn an Imp or a Gargoyle could cost you the entire attempt if they're not killed immediately since they always attempt to keep their distance or even hide from you.
    • One Secret Encounter in the Cultist Base drops two Whiplashes and a Mancubus on you and requires you to kill them in under 30 seconds. This is much easier said than done, and the mission itself requires a lot of luck to work in your favour. The intended solution is to Ice Bomb the two Whiplashes and blows them up with rockets, grenades and/or the two explosive mines present in the room before they unfreeze, and then turn your attention to the Mancubus, but a player entering the mission for the first time will likely not understand this and get killed several times working out how the encounter works.
    • Similarly, a Secret Encounter in Taras Nabad forces you to deal with a couple of Zombies - and a Marauder, in 30 seconds. Keep in mind the durability and AI of a Marauder are Mini-Boss tier, meaning the entire chance of success with this fight boils down to either hitting him consistently on counter-attacks or abusing your explosives/power weapons. If he doesn't attack you directly enough because of the Random Number God, you fail and don't get the likely-immense damage you took or any ammo back ^note which is likely the reason for the inclusion of those two Zombies., making successive attempts foolish. It's so contentious an optional fight that it's easier to just replay the mission with Cheat Codes enabled to cheese it.
    • As if the one in Taras Nabad wasn't bad enough, a Secret Encounter in The Holt for The Ancient Gods - Part One has the same setup, except there's a Blood Maykr providing backup. Like Maykr Drones, Blood Maykrs can be instantly killed via Boom, Headshot!, but only if they drop their defences by using a strong attack. If the Maykr isn't willing to cooperate, players may have already lost considering that, unlike the Blood Maykr, the Marauder won't go down with a single hit. Mercifully, this Encounter lasts for 40 seconds.
  • Three of the bonus challenges the player has to complete across both parts of Nekravol involve performing a specific glory kill against a specific enemy; "The Doom Hunt"^DescriptionPerform a "left-side" glory kill on a Doom Hunter in Part 1 alongside "Cut down to size"^DescriptionPerform a "back" glory kill on a Tyrant and "Resurrect no more" ^DescriptionPerform a "left-side" glory kill on the Archvile in Part 2. Aside from the game not specifying whether "left-side" refers to the player's or the demon's left (Hint: It's the latter), all of these enemies appear in a single encounter in their respective missions^ExplanationTwo Doom Hunters spawn in Part 1's final arena battle, while Part 2 only includes a single Archvile in its midway arena and a single Tyrant in the final arena., giving them only one opportunity to complete each challenge. Since all three are Super-Heavy demons that require a lot of damage to put down, the player runs the risk of killing them while staggered if they use weapons like the Super Shotgun, Ballista, Chaingun, BFG or Unmaykr to weaken them. And to top it all off, the player has to stand on the ground at just the right angle for the game to register the desired Glory Kill, all while under the pressure of other demons attacking them. All in all, unless you plan on revisiting this challenge with the instant-stagger cheat on, prepare to restart the checkpoint/level regularly.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: When Update 5 rolled around, a lot of changes were made to The Ancient Gods - Part 1 to make certain sections easier, such as removing certain enemies and replacing others (such as the infamous possessed Baron of Hell in the Blood Swamps with a possessed Hell Knight). These changes received a lot of negative feedback from fans, feeling that the changes were unwarranted due to being made 5 months after Part 1, by which time most players had gotten used to the enemy placements by then. These criticisms died down when it was stated that most of the changes (barring those that made an egregiously negative impact on the pacing and/or were unfairly difficult) were to be reverted in future updates, as per Hugo Martin's personal mandate of "once you make something, you leave it the way it is".
  • When The Ancient Gods, Part 2 came out, the title screen remix of Opening To Hell was replaced with a new track by David Levy, to the disappointment of many fans who loved the old song. Eventually this decision was also reverted, with Opening To Hell returning as the main theme... This then led to other fans complaining about switching it back, preferring the newer theme to the original one. The Horde Mode update fixes this issue by letting players choose which song to play in the options.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Marauder: while many agree that, difficulty aside, the Marauder had a very awesome design, voice and his unique moveset allowed for a very challenging yet fun enemy to fight, and the fact that he and other Marauders are former Sentinels provided some form of tension and adds more to the lore. The disappointment comes to some fans that wished the Marauder was instead a boss of his own with more character rather than just an Elite Mook, as his abilities and weaponry mirroring the Slayer would have provided him with an equally badass rival and perhaps an interesting Recurring Boss.
  • The Betrayer appears in the second level to hand over an item to the Doom Slayer and never shows up again. This is even though he's the main reason why Argent D'Nur fell from grace and that his son ended up as the Icon of Sin, thus is incredibly important to the lore. He would return with a greater role in The Ancient Gods Part Two.
  • The Humongous Mecha Atlan found in the Fortress of Doom feels like it's Foreshadowing some sort of Mecha battle late into the game, but it's never actually used as anything more than a cool set piece in the Fortress of Doom. The Icon of Sin, a skyscraper-sized demon, would have made sense to battle with the machine, but is instead fought on foot to make it a fittingly intense Final Boss. Likewise, it's basically fighting a Titan in the background at the end of The Ancient Gods Part Two, souring some fans further.
  • The Archvile doesn't get his grand entrance promised in the trailer - instead, he just appears in a regular encounter, and you fight him along with other monsters with no fanfare.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The standard Zombies◊' vacant expressions, the way they gawk at oncoming objects and having a lot of the most comedic Glory Kills almost override the inherent horror of what they are. The one featured in the post-credits scene that starts messing with the Slayer's toy collection in the Fortress of Doom is a particular example, making noises like a child with action figures would.
  • The Cacodemon's mischievous grin and cat-like eye make it surprisingly endearing. There's also the cartoonish way you can Feed It a Bomb.
  • The Pinkies' design◊ is somewhat chubby and as annoying as it can be, their habit of charging directly ahead to the point of faceplanting into walls is always worth a chuckle.
  • The Pain Elementals are essentially angry meatballs with stubby little arms, which they shuffle to the side as if jogging. Just look at 'em go!◊
  • Despite being giant brains in cybernetic weapons, the Arachnotrons◊ have goofy faces, and their death animations make them sympathetic.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • At one point in the campaign, the Doom Slayer establishes a psychic link with a Revenant and takes control of it to retrieve his Super Shotgun. This is the only time controllable enemies appear in the campaign. The multiplayer is built around this concept, however.
  • Outside of unlockable cheat codes, the berserker powerup has a total of one appearance within the entire campaign.
  • At certain points Slayer takes control of huge turrets and uses them to blast some obstacles. This only happens in cutscenes, and the player never gets the chance to actually kill something with them, like those humongous demons we saw trodding around in the background.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Doom (2016) was already technically impressive, but Eternal takes this up to eleven. Running on the latest version of the id Tech Game Engine, the game boasts not only improved visuals over its predecessor but also improved performance, while running on the same generation of hardware. The PC version is so optimized due to the Vulkan API that it can reach hundreds of frames per second on powerful hardware.
  • The best part? Despite more diverse environments and varieties of enemies and non-player characters, the game storage size requirements at launch are approximately half of Doom 2016. Sure the game lacks Snapmap, but it wasn't why because Snapmap reuses content from the campaign and multiplayer.

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