Doom Eternal first impressions: Ultrafun ultraviolence

Doom Eternal is explosively chaotic, hellishly fun, and insanely optimized on PC. It's one of the best first-person shooters I've ever played and my early first impressions glow as bright as the fires of hell itself.

Man oh man is Doom Eternal wicked. id has created something that's one part FPS, one part platformer, and one part RPG, all wrapped up in an intriguing--if not absurdly over-the-top--mythology. This is the purest manifestation of the Doom Slayer I've ever seen. At every turn you feel like a powerful force of nature that just rips and tears through hordes of demons, and even when it gets overwhelming, things are still immensely fun.

Every firefight is electric, every battle is supercharged with adrenaline, and there's this constant flow of brutality that runs like an undercurrent through everything you do. Every dash, every double jump, every glory kill represents a whirling dance of death. This game is mostly built around a unique sequence that sees you constantly managing resources as you slaughter demons, creating a kind of urgency to not only slay but to do so strategically and quickly.

There's a kind of nerve-wracking anxiety to every battle as you try your hardest to pull of insane combos, movesets, and just overall unleash total carnage. The flow is so immaculately well designed that a skilled player can just stay alive even during the most insane battles--and trust me, they get pretty crazy.

And those environments. Holy hell...id Software's environment and level designs are just absolutely incredible. I've never been so immersed in a nightmare demonscape before.

Right now I'm utterly enthralled with Doom Eternal. We'll have a lot more to talk about in our feature-length review, so keep an eye out for that in the next couple of days.

Doom Eternal is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Definitely check it out--you won't be sorry you did.

2