Short Version

High speed mayhem with a couple of speed bumps.

Long Version

I would divide Doom: Eternal into two sections: before you meet the marauder and after you meet the marauder. Before you meet the marauder, combat rooms play much like 2016’s Doom, keep moving or die. I had a ton of fun during the first half of this game. I played on ultra-violence and I found most of the fights to be challenging, but workable; the slayer gates in particular are a blast. Doom: Eternal incorporates this tricky bit of farming into the combat where all your resources, ammo, health, and armor, have to be harvested from the “fodder” demons. It makes you think about what weapons you’re using and how you’re killing. You get more health from a glory kill than a regular kill so you may want to reconsider popping that gargoyle with the super shotgun. They expanded the exploration aspect from Doom, giving you a bunch of secrets to find, but again, I didn’t feel put upon. If you want to find them, they can be found. The graphics are chunky and have a comic-book feel to them – I didn’t love them at first but they grew on me – and the game has a good sense of humor. If we can’t laugh at the apocalypse, we’re truly lost. Then you meet this asshole.

This is the marauder and he’s the boss of The ARC Complex mission. If you read Part I, he’s a Night Sentinel who sides with the Kahn Maykr in the Argent D’Nur civil war. He’s a dick. The boss fight itself is fine, but for the rest of the game, they mix him into combat fairly regularly and that’s when he truly spoils the party. Success in this game, and the previous Doom, depends on motion. In a room chock full of demons, if you stand still for very long, all of their ranged attacks will hit you and you will die, quickly. What you gotta do is find yourself a good route around the level and keep running, firing off shots where you can, and glory killing and blood punching your way back to health. What the marauder does is make you face up. In order to defeat him, and I WILL ruin this for you because you want to know, you have to wait for the green eye flash, interrupt him with the super shotgun, fast switch to the ballista and hit him with a regular ballista shot. You do this four or five times and you’ll stagger him. The problem is you have to stand there and wait for him to do his flirty little eye thing, and as we’ve just discussed, if you stand still, you die. Every time the marauder appears he ruins the perfect demonic ballet that is modern Doom combat. Oh and he has a dog made out of fire. The dog is also an asshole. I almost quit playing because of this guy. The Doom Hunter is similar because you have to hold the plasma rifle on him for a while to disable his shield but he’s not nearly as bad.

The only other aspect of this game I didn’t care for was the Sentinel Armor. I don’t like help. I want to beat a game on my own merits. I get angry every time I’m playing a game and it reminds me I can change the difficulty at any time. Doom: Eternal’s version of this is to offer you the Sentinel Armor if you die enough times during a boss battle. The Sentinel Armor makes you effectively invincible, and is therefore a huge help. I am not a fan of this, if people find your boss battles too hard, then you should make them easier, give us a way to succeed that doesn’t feel like cheating. The game tells you that using the armor won’t effect progression in the game, but it sure effects progression in my mind, doesn’t it Doom! If I tell someone I beat the game on ultra-violence, I’m going to have to mention this. I got through the Doom Hunter and Marauder without it, but after spending an hour trying and failing on the Gladiator’s second stage, I swallowed my pride and put that shit on. By the time I got to the last two bosses I didn’t even hesitate. Sentinel Armor all the way! I may not like it, but I got other games to play.

This game is almost all good time, some mild frustration. I give it 3.75 out of 5 shotgun shells.

Advice to the Player

Cheat! Use all the help you can get. Look up how to defeat enemies, use the Sentinel Armor, play on an easier difficulty. I know you’re trying to save the world from demonic invasion, but try to remember it’s all about having fun.

The story behind the Doom games has always been pretty straightforward. Some egghead opens a portal to hell, and you have to close it. 2016’s DOOM expanded it a bit. Scientists on Mars were experimenting with a new energy source called Argent, they lost control and boom, portal to hell. In Doom: Eternal, ID‘s latest Doom installment released in March 2020 – you remember March 2020, right – they tell the story through pages of a Codex you find throughout the game, and ohhh boy are there a lot of them. I like backstory and I like finding things so initially I would read these as I went along, but somewhere between hell priests and Urdak, I stopped. Got killin’ to do. Still, I respect the amount of work that went into a project like that so I went back and read the whole thing after I finished. It is a wild story which I will attempt to summarize here. By the way if you don’t care about this at all and just want to know what I thought of the game, skip to part II.

Our story centers on a world called Sentinel Prime. Way back in the day, a cosmic spear gashed the planet and unleashed the Elemental Wraiths. These Wraiths gave the planet life and, as life does, it immediately began fighting. The winner of the humanoid bracket was a race of people that became known as the Argent D’Nur, or Argenta, who worshipped the Elemental Wraiths and formed the priestly order of Deag, because if you’re gonna worship something, you’re gonna need priests. The greatest warriors of the Argent D’Nur were known as the Night Sentinels.

One day, angelic beings, known as the Maykrs, descended from the heavens and granted the people of Sentinel Prime wonderful gifts which led to the advancement and enlightenment of their society. The codex doesn’t lay out exactly what the gifts were but I’m assuming it was like, microwaves and HDTV’s and shit. They also offered an afterlife in their home world, Urdak. The Elemental Wraiths hadn’t thought of that one and were quickly outsold. The Argent D’Nur converted their belief system to worship the Maykrs, the Deag switched the statues outside the temples, and they immediately set about doing some intergalactic missionary work. Under the direction of the head Maykr, the Kahn Maykr, the armies of Sentinel Prime traveled to other planets, Earth included, to “liberate” other people from their “oppressors” and convert them to the ways of the Maykrs. With me so far? Great.

Around this time the Kahn Makyr and the king of the Argenta, I think it was King Roan at the time, got together and the king noticed the Kahn had a far-away look on her face and he asked what was wrong. She told him that the God-mind of the Maykrs, a sort of Macbook Pro containing the consciousnesses of every Maykr who had ever lived, had hinted at the existence of an impure Night Sentinel who would bring about the destruction of the Maykrs. A test would be administered by something called the Divinity Machine to every Night Sentinel going forward. No one ever failed and the search for the unclean one continued.

Around this time the Doom Guy shows up on Sentinel Prime. The Argenta find him wandering around the desert covered in guts and muttering about demons and they bring him to their Coliseum to prove his worth in combat. He does so, obviously, and with such flair the Kahn Maykr gets wind of it and summons him to Urdak for a quick one on one. He tells her all about hell and its minions and her eyes light up. She sees it as another opportunity to “expand the gift of the Maykrs to those in need.”

Up til now, I fully believe that the Maykrs thought of themselves as a benevolent race, selflessly offering knowledge and peace to the people they encountered, and doing some real good in the universe. Sadly, their weakness was a fear of their own mortality. They had also lost the ability to choose a new leader. A new Kahn Maykr is supposed to be chosen every 10,000 years but someone stole the voting machine allowing the current Kahn Maykr to rule indefinitely, and you know when that happens the tendency is to go hog wild.

Shortly after the Doom Guy arrives on Sentinel Prime, demons show up and start causing all kind of trouble. For a long time, the demons basically kick Night Sentinel ass until the Deag priests are able to work out why the demons are so powerful. They call it The Essence, The Elixer, or The Volatile Aura. The priests figure out how to use it to power the weapons of Argenta and put the battle back on even footing. While this is going on, the Doom Guy is trained as a Night Sentinel and joins the fight against the demons. He doesn’t mind, he loves this shit. In fact, he fights so well that a rogue Makyr, without permission from the Kahn, uses the Divinity Machine to imbue the Doom Guy with Godlike powers and gives him The Crucible, the original text to the Arthur Miller cold war allegory. I’m kidding it’s a big sword.

The Maykrs learn they can combine The Essence with Wraith Energy to form Argent energy and use it to stave off their own deaths, and the Argent D’Nur learn they can use Argent to take their society to even greater heights, incredible architecture, artistic masterpieces, smooth jazz, the works. Everyone is getting fat and happy on this hell juice, and no one’s asking too many questions about where its coming from Except the Night Sentinels. They don’t trust it and remain focused on beating back the forces of hell. Under the command of then newly deified Doom Guy, the Night Sentinels begin campaigning into hell itself, taking the demons’ own territory away from them. However, unbeknownst to the Sentinels, as they push the forces of hell back, the Deag priests, at the behest of the Makyrs, have moved in behind them and built factories to harvest that sweet sweet essence. Including one in Nekrovol, a city built on a foundation of “uncounted corpses,” which feeds The Essence directly to the Maykr home world Urdak. They were allowed to do this because the Kahn Maykr cut a deal with the lord of hell wherein the Maykrs would be allowed a portion of the Volatile Aura in exchange for giving hell access to all the lands where the Maykrs held sway.

The Night Sentinels finally encounter one of these soul fulfillment centers and learn the true source of The Essence: their fallen comrades. Everyone slain by the demon horde has their soul extracted to form The Essence while the physical body mutates, eventually becoming a soldier in hell’s army. The Argenta had been sowing the seeds of their own destruction! The Night Sentinels return to Argent D’Nur and try to sound the alarm, but no one is listening. The King and the Kahn Maykr are all addicted to that soul sauce. A civil war breaks out with the Sentinels on one side and the Maykrs on the other. The Night Sentinels decide to make a big push into hell to destroy the factory at Nekrovol and cut off the Maykrs cold-turkey. The Deag priests open a portal to hell and the Night Sentinels blithely walk into it – they’re soldiers, not geniuses. The Deag betray the Sentinels and scatter them inside hell. Almost all of them are killed, but not the Doom Guy. You kind of lose him at this point. My guess is he got fed up with the Argent D’Nur, grabbed one of their mobile fortresses and hightailed it back to Earth. How he got out of hell is anyone’s guess, but he’s been there a few times, he probably knows his way around. The Argent D’Nur, now without the Night Sentinels to defend them, are quickly overrun by the forces of hell. The Maykrs are fine with it, more grapes for their immortality wine.

OK let’s go back to Earth –

What? Yes this is a summary. The actual codex is much longer – I don’t really know why you’re reading it, but I’m impressed you’ve gotten this far – Yes, it’s almost over.

So at some point the Deag priests show up on Earth and start working with Earth scientists to hook them up with Argent energy. I’m not sure how they were able to convince humans they were trustworthy – they look like desiccated corpses in bath robes and helmets – but maybe if they put on regular clothes they look like Clark Kent. They helped open the Argent well on Mars the Doom Guy closed in the last game. A lot of this timeline depends on a mulitverse, multitime theory. There are a lot of references to the Maykrs being able to bend spacetime so let’s go with that. When Doom Guy stopped the flow of Argent, it plunged Earth into chaos. So quickly you become dependent on that hell honey. Ripe for harvest, the Deag open a portal and let the minions of hell spill forth onto the citizens of Earth, consuming over 60% of the planet in no time. Shit is looking pretty grim for Earth until you-know-who shows up to join the fight.

There you go! Done. See what I’m talking about? It’s insane. I had zero patience for it when I was playing through the game the first time, but now that I know all the characters and locations, I kind of want to do it again. When I was in Nekrovol, I was like, yeah cool, corpse factory, but now that I know the significance of the place, it probably takes on a whole new meaning. This novel is just to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, and even my summary is long, but, now that I think about it, I could have done it in once sentence.

Some egghead opens a portal to hell, and you have to close it.

Short Version

Bit repetitive, but excellent stressful fun for a low price!

Long Version

I’m not sure why Wing Commander Biggins put me in charge of the crew of a Lancaster bomber – I’d never flown one before, had no military experience, and displayed zero aptitude for it – but put me in charge he did, by jove. Nothing for it but to crack on and learn in the sky, wot? My sincerest apologies to my first five crews – fine men and women all – for whatever role my lack of experience may have played in their untimely deaths. But, stiff upper lip and all that. We must soldier on. Their digital lives were given in service to a greater cause: stopping the Blitz and ending the war. Besides, if anyone’s to blame, it’s Wing Commander Biggins.

I came across this game in the PS Store Spring Sale, and when I saw the cutaway of the bomber with all the little people inside I about lost it. Is this FTL in a WWII plane?? Could there be a more perfect union of time period and gameplay? Plus the sale brought the already low price of $14.99 down to like, $5.40.

There is definitely a bit of a learning curve – Bomber Crew throws you in landing gear first – and my first several missions went pear shaped in a hurry. When it gets hairy, there are usually at least 3 things that need to be done at the same time and only enough crew for one. The good news is the replacement bombers and airmen they give you are leveled up so you don’t lose that much progress when you inevitably get shot down. The crew are all fully customizable and you’re responsible for outfitting them, balancing things like armor with movement speed and warmth – it gets cold at high altitude! Similarly, decisions must be made about the Lanc in terms of weight, firepower, and armor value. I loved obsessing over whether the tail gun needed to be a .303×4 mk. 3 or a .50×2 mk. 2. The bomber also has systems that can and will spontaneously break down which your engineer, usually your quickest and least armoured airperson, will have to repair. Extra fun when you have to send them out onto the wing to patch up a busted prop.

You can’t pause the game, but you can slow time. There’s a dedicated slow time button and the game automatically slows it down when you’re selecting a crew member or assigning them a task. You’re awarded a small monetary and experience bonus for using as little slow time as possible, but don’t let that deter you. You’re going to need it.

Bomber Crew is no FTL, a bomber’s just not as complex as a spaceship, but there’s lots to love here. The graphics are basic but Runner Duck made the most of them. There are plenty of cool details, like the propellers and the look of the clouds/smoke, that I really enjoyed. I like the progression system on both the plane and crew, good amount of choices to be made. The missions get a little stale – fly out, tangle with the Luftwaffe, drop a bomb on something, leg it for home – but they mix in a couple of variations, and the game isn’t really the mission, it’s managing your crew during the mission. I loved my own personal development as I went from dropping my controller in futility as Flak Magnet went down in flames, to snapping off commands to restock ammunition, apply bandages, and put out fires like a proper captain.

At the end, you don’t get much, but we don’t need much, do we? Just a celebratory pint and a pat on the back from Wing Commander Biggins. Good show, boys and girls. Jolly good show.

Advice to the Player

How to play – There are instructions in the menu which are helpful, as you might expect.

Med kits over parachutes and fire extinguishers – Especially in the beginning

When all else fails, crash the plane – If most of your crew is bleeding out and you’ve still got your pilot, execute an emergency landing. If your pilot is knocked down, have whoever’s left bail out. As long as the plane gets to the ground in one piece, everyone who was still alive will get to roll their survival check. And to that end…

Get yourself a life raft and a homing pigeon – They’re expensive but worth it.

Beware the schräge musik

Short Version

Play this game! But I won’t judge you if you don’t finish it.

Long Version

Subnautica is a first-person, sci-fi, shipwreck survival game published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment for Windows and Mac OS in January 2018, and XBOX One and PS4 in December 2018. I played it on PS4. This review will have some light spoilers. I won’t touch on the story much, but I will discuss gameplay so if you want to go in not knowing anything about it, stop right here.

I became fully addicted to this game right away. It is fantastic. You are the only survivor of the long-range capital ship “Aurora” when it crash lands on unexplored ocean planet 4546B. Your objective: find a way to survive. I love the idea of exploring the ocean, especially an alien ocean. I think the sea is more terrifying than space. Space is scary, don’t get me wrong but in the blackness of space you still have stars, and the relative certainty it’s uninhabited. Deep in the water, there’s nothing but millions of tons of pressure and the absolute certainty you are not alone. Every time I was exploring the sea floor of planet 4546B and the bottom dropped off into nothingness it chilled me to my core.

This game does a good job of guiding you through the learning process but not holding your hand. I died of thirst four or five times before figuring it out. You regularly get cool new things to craft and there’s so much to explore and do, I wanted to spend all day down there, and I did, frequently. Sometimes I would hear unknown creatures roar off in the distance and I would freeze. Then later, after I had met the thing that roared, I would run. Swim. Whatever.

There are a lot of well thought out sequences. Exploring the Aurora is thrilling. Each new depth is unique and challenging. The writing is sharp and funny. The voice talent is superb. Every vehicle has its own personality, and your constant companion, the voice of your PDA, recalls the genius of Portal 2. But I think the highlight for me was building the submersible, The Cyclops. You learn pretty early on that you’re going to be able to build a submersible, and I was already excited, but when I saw it actually take shape I was positively giddy. Looking at it, sitting in the water, unearthed some long buried childhood fantasy. This is mine? I get to drive this? My own submersible? I couldn’t believe it. I went to sleep thinking about how I was going to stock it with extra power cells, water, and salted Peeper and go exploring!

Building the Cyclops and descending to the deepest depths of Subnautica is where the game crests, because once the exploration ends and you’ve seen most of what there is to see, your 9-to-5 as an undersea drill operator truly begins. There is a lot of resource grinding in this game. A lot. I would need several sheets of notebook paper to list all the times I went to craft something and I was 1 titanium short. Then you gotta go back to the scanner, set it to titanium, go out, get it, bring it back. At first it’s cool, you’re excited about making a new thing, but eventually, it sucks. Like when you build the PRAWN suit and you finally have access to large mineral deposits, you rejoice, look at all these resources! Two days later when you’re sitting on the bottom drilling a block of lithium it dawns on you – I’m at work.

I think this game could have benefitted from a fast travel function, running 4000 km trips to and from one location to another is a drag, and heaven help you if you forget something. I get that sometimes you discover new areas on these runs, but for the most part your routes are pretty well traveled. Also an auto-save. The most frightening thing lurking beneath the waves may be the lack of an auto-save.

Getting to the end of this game was a comedy of errors, some my fault some not. The first time I saw a missing section of sea floor, I thought it was a cool, possibly man made cave and made a note to come back and explore it later. Then it started to happen more and more frequently. Walls and floor not rendering quickly enough, having to wait for them to fill in because they’re not just invisible, they’re not there. You can easily drive inside of a mountain, which is disorienting, or, if you happen to be on foot, fall into the planet, which is fatal. Into the code? Into the matrix? Helpfully, this game includes a depth meter so I can tell you that I fell 8,192 km into nothingness before I hit some kind of barrier and continued to fall, but much more slowly. Maybe I hit the mantle, I don’t know. I turned the game off and took a break for the day. Every time I loaded a save game, doors that I had previously unlocked were locked again. Which meant I had to make MORE keys. I loaded up my Seamoth, Seamoth IV, with rare ingredients for one of the final builds only to have it carried off by my least favorite animal as I impotently fired shot after shot with my stasis rifle and screamed at my television. The Cyclops hit a wall and got stuck.

There’s a recurring theme in Subnautica. You discover a new area, or creature and you’re blown away by how cool or terrifying it is, but by the 15th time you encounter it, you’d just like it to fuck right off. In many ways, I imagine this game accurately recreates the experience of being marooned on a strange alien world. At first you’re excited and scared – there are a lot of things out there trying to kill you – but you’ve got resources and know-how and you hop to it with enthusiasm. But the days, they wear on. Progress is hard earned and time consuming, and by the time you claw your fish-eaten body across the finish line, you’re just glad it’s over.

In the end, I got there, and I’m glad I did. It’s a satisfying end, and, all complaining aside, I will ABSOLUTELY play the sequel, Below Zero. I left some unfinished business which I normally wouldn’t do, but the invisible walls were closing in, I had to get out. One interesting feature of this game is the time capsule. Throughout the game you find time capsules left behind by other players with notes and supplies inside. Thank you TC-1005092885, TC-1131852121, TC1888254593, TC-296168882, TC-892519525, KB1056886088 for your kind words and photos! They’re always fun to find, and I prepared mine with care. I took my time writing the note, trying to capture the wonder and awe I felt standing on top of this magical world. The gratitude and appreciation I had for the creators of this complicated, imperfect place. Inside it I lovingly placed an advanced wiring kit. Because they’re a pain in the fucking ass.

Advice to the Player

Write down the recipes – scrolling through the PDA menu is arduous.

Keep the Seamoth hull at 100% at all times – trust me on this one

Some of the little cargo containers are open in back – I lost a lot of time because the first one I came across was closed so I assumed they all were. My bad!

Drive the Cyclops with the cameras – way easier once you get the hang of it.