Tarting up an Old PC

Back in October 2025 I replaced my PC. After fourteen years of good service my old PC still worked just fine, but in October 2025 Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10, and there was no way to upgrade the motherboard so that it was compatible with Windows 11. The hardware was more than powerful enough to run Windows 11, but the motherboard didn't have a TPM 2.0 security chip, and there was no way to add one, so I had to replace the whole machine.

At the time I was annoyed. Confused. Even a little bit hurt. Microsoft usually has my best interests at heart, but sometimes my faith is tested, and this was one of those times. It was a distressing period in my life. I don't like to think about it. However I now realise that Microsoft was right all along. It wasn't Microsoft that was at fault. It was me. I was the problem.

Why? Because shortly after I upgraded my PC, memory prices skyrocketed. On 10 October 2025 I paid £40.99 for 16gb of memory, which seemed reasonable enough, but within the space of six weeks or so the price went boom. As of 10 July 2026 the exact same memory is £108.99:

 

I like to think that Microsoft knew this in advance. Their decision to end support of Windows 10 was a friendly way of nudging me into a new age. If only I had listened to Microsoft and bought 32gb of memory, or 64gb.  I could have sold half of it a few weeks later and made a profit. So, thank you, Jyoti Mishra. You pushed me to make a decision I was unable to make on my own. I love you, Microsoft. I would like to be your tradwife. Chain me to the kitchen. I don't mind, as long as you love me in return.

 

That is enough of Microsoft. Ordinarily, when I upgrade my PC, I end up with some parts that I put to one side. I promise that I'll assemble the parts into another PC, but I never do. Then I sell the parts on eBay. But not this time. This time my new PC was almost a completely fresh build. The only things I carried over were the mouse, keyboard, speakers, and GPU, because GPU prices have also gone through the roof, albeit that it happened a few years ago, and the culprit was Bitcoin rather than AI.

 

This left me with almost an entire second PC, so I decided to tart it up. It's now entering retirement, but it deserves a fresh lick of paint. Here it is, as it was when it was:

 

I assembled it back in 2011. I used the cheapest case I could find. It was built around an Intel i5-2500K, fitted into an ASRock H67M-GE motherboard - I wasn't interested in overclocking - with 8gb of memory, a hard drive of some description, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7. I wanted to jump from 32-bit Windows XP to the high-def age of 64-bit Windows 7. I wanted to jump from grainy Realmedia files of top 2000s porn legends Vanessa Blue and Aria Giovanni to crisp 1080p MP4 videos of Ana Foxxx and Mistress T, and also Aria Giovanni because she aged well. In fact she was hot in the 1990s. She is still hot. I did other things as well, but that was the main thing.

 

Aria Giovanni will never appear in lists of the most good-looking women of the 1990s or 2000s, because the media is far too embarrassed to write about porn stars. Nonetheless she was in the top tier, but I'm digressing here.

 

At first, back in 2011, I did without a GPU, because I wanted a big empty case with lots of airflow, and I didn't envisage playing many games. That decision lasted about six weeks before I caved in and bought a Geforce 9600. Over the years I added an extra 4gb of memory, for a peculiar total of 12gb. I swapped the hard drive for an SSD, and used the hard drive as a big dumb hunk of storage. I upgraded the GPU again. Faced with the brutal demands of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in 2020 which is the year it came out that's 2020 I replaced the CPU with a Xeon 1275. Along the way I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

 

The end result was a machine that had roughly the same power as a cylindrical 2013 Apple Mac Pro, but with a much more powerful graphics system. Sadly it has reached the end of its upgrade path. There appears to be no way to modify an LGA 1155 system so that it's compatible with Windows 11. There were never any LGA 1155 motherboards with TPM 2.0, and there's no way to add a separate TPM 2.0 card because it needs low-level access to the BIOS. Still, the PC served me well for fourteen years.

 

It seems a shame to leave the machine gathering dust, so I decided to tart it up. Firstly, a new case. The old case is a cheap thing I bought locally. It was so old it had two slots for optical drives, plus a single USB slot on the front. On reflection I may well have bought it for my even-older PC, which was built around an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, and kept it when I upgraded. Still, I emptied it out, this dusty box of dreams that has been my sexual partner for so long:

 

Given the fact that several generations have now grown up and lost their virginity to internet porn, you'd think that people would now associate keyboards and PCs with sexual arousal, and would thus become sexually aroused by PCs. But that hunk of aluminium stirs nothing inside me. 

 

What to do with it? It has too many sharp edges to work as furniture. I briefly thought about stuffing it full of hard drives, plus a power supply, a couple of fans, and using it as some kind of RAID array. My old Mac mini sort of fits into the case, and MacOS has built-in software RAID:

 

I would presumably need a bunch of SATA-USB adapters, plus a USB hub. But why? What for? In the end I took it to the recycling centre and threw it away. Goodbye. But not before buying a new case. It's the same IONZ KZ19 Spin case I bought for my upgraded PC last year, for about £36:

 

As far as I can tell IONZ is one of those made-up=for-Amazon brands. Their website doesn't even list the KZ19 Spin. But it's an interesting design and it feels well-made, so why not. It comes with three free fans, two in the top and one at the back.

 

The next step was to re-arrange the motherboard, power supply, and storage. The old case has a conventional drives-at-the-front, everything-else-at-the-back arrangement. The Spin, as is the modern style, has the power supply in its own compartment in the base, hidden away with the drives, although it also has space on the "back side" of the motherboard mount for a bunch of solid state drives. This is where I put my aging, but still healthy Samsung 850 EVO.

 

Remounting everything involved a lot of fiddly threading of the cables, and in addition I had to raise the hard drive on little metal pegs so that there was space for the SATA power plug, but in the end I managed to get it all to fit.

 

 

The RM750x is overspecified for the rest of the hardware. Why is it there? As mentioned last year my new PC was flaky, and in the process of debugging I ended up swapping all of the components with my old PC to see which one was the weakest link.

 

In the end I determined that it was, to my surprise, the CPU, which is odd because CPUs generally don't break. As a consequence my new PC has my old Corsair RM550x power supply, and my old machine has a brand-new RM750x as a kind of running spare.

 

I have said it before, but I am always nervous when photographing reflective surfaces. What if I accidentally end up photographing a reflection of my own naked body? And so whenever I photograph objects that are made of metal or glass I crouch down in a large cardboard box, and I use a timer, plus a polarising filter. Cardboard is not reflective.

 

While sitting in the box I decided to upgrade the machine lightly. Back in 2011 8gb of memory was plenty. I still have the receipt. It cost me £44.98 back then. I remember thinking that by the time I needed 16gb of memory, DDR3 would be old-fashioned. A few years later I found a pair of 2gb sticks going cheap, so I added 4gb to the total, although I can't say that the machine ran any faster. By far the most impactful non-GPU upgrade was the Samsung 850 EVO SSD.

 

DDR3 has not been hit with the same price rises as DDR4, so I decided to upgrade the memory. I was also worried about having mismatched RAM - it feels dirty and wrong - so for the princely sum of £10.80 I bought four matching sticks of Micron 4gb DDR3. Here's the original memory, a mixture of 4gb sticks from Kingston and 2gb sticks from Micron:

 

And here are the replacements, looking very smart:

 

Did it make any difference to the machine's performance? Not at all! But it did work, at the very least:

 

Why 15.7gb? I believe some of the memory is siphoned off for the CPU's built-in graphics chip. Which reminds me. My old machine no longer has a GPU. The Xeon E3-1275 V2 has a built-in Intel P4000, which is apparently just a different name for the Intel HD4000, which is fine for browsing the internet but only really suitable for playing late-2000 / early-2010s games at 1280x720.

 

I can't imagine using the machine for anything particularly demanding - I have an entirely new PC for that - so I bought the cheapest decent entry-level GPU I could find, an AMD Radeon RX550:

 

It takes up two spaces in the backplate, so I had to remove the 4xUSB 3 PCI card you can see in the background. But it doesn't require extra power and it runs quietly:

 

Then I had a go at XCOM: Enemy Within, which ran at 1080 at around 45fps:

 

True story: in the next action I ordered my soldier to fire at point-blank range at the flanked sectoid. Ordinarily this is a guaranteed kill, but in this case her bullets only did two units of damage. On the next turn the Sectoid scurried behind the nearby car and shot my soldier, killing her! I quit in a rage. That's X-Com, baby.

 

The newest game I own is The Talos Principle 2, which uses Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is controversial for its use of AI to upscale low-resolution frames, and its steep system requirements, and also its baffling range of graphical options. In the case of Talos 2 no matter how I played with the settings the end result looked weird, with grainy blurry trails running behind moving objects.

 

Needless to say, with a simple entry-level card it ran poorly:

 

Knocking the resolution down to 1280x720 helped, but not much:

 

Albeit that even at 21fps the game would probably be playable. It's a contemplative puzzle game, not bloody Defender. I had forgotten how good-looking it is:

 

Alexandra Drennan, you magnificent bastard. You're dead! But you flung a light into the future, and the flames caught.

 

EDIT: In the months since I wrote this post I finally saw sense and removed the RX 550. I replaced it with the GTX 1650 it had beforehand, which is roughly four times more powerful:

 

 

For my main PC I bought a second-hand GTX 1080, which is roughly twice as powerful as the GTX 1650 despite being three years older. It requires auxiliary power and takes up a lot more space, but it has twice as much memory. It doesn't have ray-tracing, though, so I still can't play Doom: The Dark Ages.

 

As mentioned up the page I upgraded from the original i5-2500K to a Xeon because I wanted to do justice to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. That game is unusual, in that it taxes the entire machine - the GPU, the CPU, the internet connection, and the storage - and its performance can't be easily improved by just stuffing a new GPU into the case.

 

As a final touch I wasn't keen on having a glass panel - I know what's inside the machine, and I don't like the idea of turning it into a greenhouse - so I painted it with some B&Q Antibes blue paint, with a layer of varnish on top. It probably won't last (the glass is flexible) but it does the job:

 

 

Looking at the photo, I think I need to add another coat. I had some masking tape and orange paint, so around the back I gave it a Designer's Republic-inspired dash of colour, which has some ropey masking but nothing that can't be touched up.

 

 

Power consumption? My elderly quad-core Xeon 1275-powered PC idles at around 54w, when playing some music and with Firefox open, but ramps up to 100-120w when playing XCOM: Enemy Within. My new, also quad-core i3-12100F idles at 45w, going up to 74w when running XCOM: EW, which it launches faster and plays at a higher frame rate. So, it does more stuff while consuming less power. Doom: Eternal on my i3, at modest settings, at 1080p, with a Geforce 1650, hovers around 100w.

 

In contrast my 10-core, Xeon E5-2690-powered 2013 Mac Pro idles at around 65w, and it can't play XCOM: Enemy Within because MacOS dropped support for 32-bit applications a long time ago. I think the lesson is that if you want to save money, using a decade-old server-class Xeon is a bad idea.

 

And that is how I tarted up my old Windows 10 PC. The total cost was £36 for the case, £28 for the GPU, £10.80 for the memory, plus an afternoon slotting everything together. Ordinarily I bill my time at just over £200 an hour, but in this case it was a learning experience, so the total cost was around £75 to turn a worn old PC into a smart-looking PC that performs about as well as a mid-2010s smartphone but with a massively higher power draw. In a world where a brand-new Mac mini is £599, that money would feel like a waste, but sadly we live in a world where a brand-new Mac mini is now £799.

 

It still runs Windows 10. It would almost certainly run Linux just fine, but I have no need for a file server, and I have no plans to learn Python. The machine itself runs slightly warmer than its Intel i3-12100F-powered successor. With my new PC I only need to connect up the rear case fan to keep it cool, whereas the older Xeon benefits from having one of the case-top fans activated as well. As pictured above the stock Intel cooler looks like a joke, but then again it worked without fuss for fourteen years.

 

Does it have a use? Pragmatically it has a bunch of stuff installed that I still use occasionally, and it's not so old that it's just a pointless power hog. With two PCs that have the same case I could of course make a nice coffee table.

Doepfer A-101-8 Photo Phasing: Harmonious Birth of Celestial Phase

 

Let's have a look at the Doepfer A-101-8 Photo Phasing, a Eurorack phaser module. Doepfer's website also calls it the Opto Phaser, which sounds even cooler. Why "opto"? It uses little lights to modulate the phasing effect. They're housed in a black box on the back of the module, although at least on mine the box isn't quite light-tight:

 

But then again it spends most of its time in the darkness of a Eurorack case. I have to admit that I know nothing about electronics. Why does the A-101-8 have little lights? Why not a wire, or a digital circuit? I have no idea.

 

The A-101-8 is a clone of a 1970s effects box by a chap called Gert Schulte called the Compact Phasing A, which used little incandescent lightbulbs to control the intensity of the phaser. Apparently the lightbulbs had a tiny little delay before they lit up, which smoothed out the peaks and troughs of the phasing effect. Fascinating stuff. This video does a very good job of demonstrating the original, which has a sound I would describe as delicate and surprisingly transparent, to an extent that it's tempting to send everything through the effect - synth, drums, guitar, everything:

 

 

 

Phasing was new and exotic at the beginning of the 1970s, and for whatever reason the Compact Phasing A caught on, at least in Germany. It's all over a clutch of classic 1970s kosmische musik albums, presumably because it was a local product, and was thus the first thing Edgar Froese and Ralf Hutter saw when they popped into the local music shop. It makes a memorable appearance towards the beginning of "Birth of Liquid Plejades" on Tangerine Dream's Zeit, where the band use it to phase some cellos. Tangerine Dream went on to plaster it all over Phaedra, where it made their Mellotrons sound like outer space, and later the same year Kraftwerk's Autobahn seemingly had everything fed into the phaser bar the vocals.

 

It's an addictive effect, a lot like a flanger but less metallic, more ooshy-sounding. In particular the Compact Phasing A has a wide phasing range, so it tends to sound normal normal normal PHASING! normal normal normal PHASING! rather than non-stop phasing. Even when it's unsubtle, it's subtle.

 

Doepfer already sells a phaser, the A-101-3, but it's huge, taking up 30hp, whereas the A-101-8 is only 4hp. It was announced back in 2023. It's a Eurorack module, but it can process external inputs just fine, so you can use it as a general phaser effect, although you'll need a way to power the module and some way to provide modulation.

 

In this image I've installed it in a smaller case, as part of a one-oscillator mini-synthesiser:

 

They say that modular synthesisers are addictive. Just look at the little modules. They aren't expensive individually, but the cost mounts up. And before you know it, you need a bigger case. Or a second case. And there's a gap in the second case, so you need to fill it with more modules. Then you're homeless.

 

But look at the blanking plate. Look at the blanking plate. The 8hp blanking plate, and the 1hp blanking strip next to it. Those two plates are the sign of reason. That was the point where my sensible brain held up its hand and said "no more". Let it be known that I amassed 207hp of Eurorack modules and STOPPED. Why? Because I, ASHLEY POMEROY, OUTRANK TRANK.

 

I stopped. I stopped buying Eurorack modules before I plunged myself into financial oblivion. Admittedly I did buy the Doepfer A-101-8, which is the subject of this post, but that was a one-off. I haven't bought any other modules since then, which was eight days ago. I have an iron will. I can stop. I have stopped. I outrank trank.

 

Most phasers, including the original Compact Phasing A, use a sinewave LFO to make the effect gradually pulse in intensity, but the A-101-8 will accept any modulation input. In the following video I also use gates run through a sample and hold module to trigger the effect. If you use a square wave LFO the end result sounds like someone tapping on a wah-wah pedal.

 

 

The controls are self-explanatory. The MANUAL knob manually controls the sweep, and applies a baseline level of modulation. The CV knob controls the power of the control voltage input on the modulation. The FEEDBACK knob controls the amount of output signal that feeds back back into the module. The effect is subtle until around the 3 O'Clock position. Any higher than that and the A-101-8 outputs an unpleasantly loud shrieking noise.

 

 

Why are there three red LEDs on the middle PCB, just underneath the MAN and CV knobs? Again, I have no idea. If I had been transmitted back to the Middle Ages I would have been unable to jump-start Britain's electronics industry.

 

Doepfer sells a dedicated pre-amp, the A-119 External Input, but for all the demos on this page I connected my audio interface directly to the module with a 3.5mm patch cable and a mono 3.5mm / 1/4" jack adapter, tweaking the input level knob to suit.

 

There are two outputs. Output 1 is the original signal plus phasing. Output 2 is the original signal plus feedback. If you plug both outputs into two channels of your mixer or audio interface the end result is a sweepy stereo effect, and so I tend to use the A-101-8 as the final module in the signal chain.

 

Here's a tune that uses the A-101-8 extensively, on the bassline and G-Force's M-Tron. It's a pastiche of Tangerine Dream's style at the very end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, as they were switching from analogue to digital, albeit with simpler sequencing. Think of it as the theme tune to an imaginary action TV show starring a cop who has a souped-up fax machine:

 

 

I mean, Streethawk had a motorcycle, Knight Rider had a car, Airwolf had a helicopter. And The Highwayman had a truck. Nobody had a fax machine. Fax machines were huge in the 1980s, but I don't recall a single television crimefighter who had a souped-up fax machine. Imagine the scene. The criminals burst into the secret lair of our hero. They raise their guns... and then the fax machine shoots out paper at supersonic speed, cutting the guns in half. The criminals raise their hands and surrender. I think the idea has potential.

 

Still, that is the A-101-8 Photo Phasing. It has a distinctive sound, subtle and delicate. It's surprisingly versatile, and of course if you want to sound like Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream circa 1974, it will do that. Bad stuff? Mine picks up electrical interference from my wi-fi hub. So I moved the case slightly further aware from the wi-fi hub. Problem solved.

 

You know, a phaser is like a little roller coaster ride. One moment you're trundling down the track, and then you do a loop, and then you're trundling down the track again. The anticipation is exciting.

Doom Eternal: Cure His Heart

Let's have a look at Doom Eternal. I've written a poem about it. I'm going to share it with you. Here is my poem about Doom Eternal. I call it "Doom Eternal".

Doom Eternal
-
When it works,
it's Dieter Diercks!
But when it fails,
it's Tony Sales (bassist with Tin Machine)

I could stop writing, but the night is still young. What is Doom Eternal? It's a first-person action game released in March 2020, just as the world was undergoing its first COVID lockdown. It was a big hit, partially because there was a lot of pent-up demand from fans of its predecessor, Doom (2016), and also because a lot of people were stuck indoors, and what better way to let off some steam than by stabbing demons in the head with a serrated blade.

But success is relative. Doom Eternal was multi-platform, but it was at heart a PC game, or at the very least it came into its own with mouse and keyboard control. It was released for the Xbox and PlayStation as well, and a few months later there was a surprisingly slick Nintendo Switch port, but they were all controller-only. I have no idea why developers don't allow console gamers to use mouse and keyboard. Games consoles have USB ports. Do console owners not have tables? Can't they balance a plank of wood on their laps?

To that end I ventured out into the streets of south London. I asked a selection of random passers-by if they could balance a plank of wood on their laps. They all ignored me. Doom Eternal was released on the very same day as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was the latest in Nintendo's super-cute life simulator franchise. The press laughed heartily at the contrast between the two games. Doom Eternal's gameplay involves ripping demons limb from limb and also stabbing them in the head with a serrated blade, whereas New Horizons involves planting seeds. Doom Eternal ends with the player discovering that heaven is a lie, built on the suffering of the innocent, and that his god is a false god. New Horizons does not have that, and yet despite an almost total lack of gore and blasphemy it was the more popular of the two games by a huge margin.

See, New Horizons is a console game, released exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. It's a different world. Despite the fact that COVID caused a shortage of Switches, New Horizons went on to sell almost fifty million copies, grossing over two billion dollars. It's one of the most popular games of all. It has almost certainly outsold the entire Doom franchise single-handedly. Doom Eternal apparently shifted around eight million copies over the same period, which was excellent for such a niche title, but the relative sales figures do highlight the fact that PCs and consoles live in different worlds.

It must have been tempting for the developers to soften up Doom Eternal and make it console-friendly. But if there is one thing the developers learned from the fate of Valen, the Betrayer, whose treason brought down the Night Sentinels of Argent D'Nur, it's that temptation is a path that only leads to ruin. Instead they held firm. They made Doom Eternal for us. PC gamers. You and I. We. Us.

The Doom franchise has always been aimed at us. Now, Id Software has never been prejudiced against games consoles. The original Doom (1993) was ported to all of the popular consoles of its time, and speaking as a PC person, the PlayStation port of Doom was surprisingly clever. It had a spooky tone that gave the game an identity of its own. In the thirty years or so that have passed since the release of the first game in the series, Doom has been made to run on all manner of stuff, including fridges, fitness watches, pocket calculators, even Doom itself. But at heart it's a PC game, for PC gamers. You and I. We. Us.

Doom and Doom II also run inside Doom Eternal, as an easter egg. The game uses a later version of the .WAD files that replaces the Red Cross icon with pills. It also strips out all the Nazi textures and models from the Wolfenstein levels.

If you run the .WAD file in a source port the Wolfenstein levels look very bare, as at the top here.

The PC as a games platform has waxed and waned over the years. It costs just as much to develop a PC game as it does to develop a console game, but sales are lower, because PCs are expensive pieces of equipment that target an older market. PC owners have to pay for their car, and childcare, and Nike Air Monarchs and so forth. PC developers can ameliorate the cost of development by porting their game to consoles, but this risks diluting all the things that make PC games special.

Furthermore some games are more multi-platformy than others. Undertale? That's an easy port. But fast-paced first-person shooters don't translate well to games consoles, because it's a lot harder to move and aim effectively with a hand controller than it is with a mouse and keyboard. As a result the first-person shooter has evolved into two distinct forms. Old-school, PC-style first person shooters tend to be fast-paced, skill-heavy, and also very rare nowadays, because the PC market is relatively small.

In contrast console shooters are slower, and tend to emphasise scripted action setpieces and cutscenes rather than twitch-style gameplay. They sell in the tens of millions. It's like the difference between Carcass and Def Leppard. In theory they play the same genre of music, and they both have their strengths, but one is greasier and nastier than the other. It's ironic, in a way. Historically it was PC games that were slow and console games that were fast. The first-person shooter is a peculiar inversion.

There was a time when it seemed that our kind might triumph. That we would win. But it was not to last. The light faded. I like to imagine the light finally dimmed towards the end of 2007, when Unreal Tournament 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were released within a few days of each other in November of that year. One of those games was the future, the other was Unreal Tournament 3. One of those games sold millions, and was remade a decade later into a title that sold tens of millions, while the other isn't available any more and can't be played online because the servers were shut down.

But sometimes the pendulum swings the other way. In the 1980s the PC games market was dominated by role-playing games and flight simulators. Meanwhile kids wanted to play Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. Then Doom came along, at which point the PC abruptly and unexpectedly became the hippest gaming platform around. Kids wanted 3D action, and the PC had the best 3D action game around. Even after the launch of the original PlayStation and its contemporaries the PC was the only platform that could play multiplayer games over the internet.

Consoles caught up around the middle of the 2000s and went on to dominate the market, but every so often a new PC game comes out that reminds people of why they spent £1,000 on an ugly metal box that breaks every time the drivers are updated.

For example 2004 had Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, and Doom 3, all of which were popular, critically-acclaimed, extremely influential PC titles. They were eventually ported to consoles, and although the OG Xbox version of the first and last were impressive technical feats they weren't the same. In 2007 STALKER and Crysis showcased the PC's raw graphical power, and a few years after that Minecraft began its swift march to global domination on the PC, before being ported to consoles a few years later. PC-only hits are few and far between, but they haven't completely gone away. Also, you can't bittorrent the entire Ice Road Truckers franchise with a PlayStation 4. You can download or at least view pornography on a PlayStation 4, but it feels weird. So the PC still has a niche.

Let's fast-forward to 2016. Id Software's new Doom title didn't promise much. It had a troubled development and good-but-not-great reviews. However word of mouth had it that the single-player campaign was something special. At a time when the market was getting sick of story-driven military shooters Doom 2016 was non-stop action. Sales were modest, but the Doom franchise was back.

There had been revivals of the meat-and-potatoes first person shooter before. As early as 2001 Croteam's Serious Sam was built around large-scale slaughter arenas. The incredibly long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever (2011) was at least initially intended as a return to 90s-style action, although the end result was a peculiar mish-mash of essentially every gaming trend that had appeared in the 2000s. Doom 2016 on the other hand was a polished, A-list title from a major publisher, with a slick engine and great gameplay focused entirely on running around and shooting things. There were no physics puzzles and no driving sequences. Furthermore it was made by Id Software, the very company that had invented the genre, although by 2016 most of the team that worked on its 1990s classics had left the company.

As a PC person I am fond of Doom (2016). How can I put it? Imagine that you're British, and you've resigned yourself to the fact that Britain will never win Wimbledon again. And then suddenly there is a flash of light, and Andy Murray appears, crouched over, naked, transported from the future, covered in blood, as in The Terminator. He pulls himself up to his full height and surveys the lights of London in the distance. After ripping the hearts out of some punks and stealing their clothes he goes on to win the US Open, and then Wimbledon.

And then he wins Wimbledon again, thus proving that it wasn't a fluke. All of a sudden Britain is back, and all the nations of the world want us to manage their affairs. India gives ownership of its mineral resources to Britain in exchange for protection from Belgium. The government of the United States realises that monarchy is the way to go, and the United States becomes part of the British Empire once again. We allow all of the States of the United States to retain their names, but they are now counties.

Simultaneously Egypt apologises for nationalising the Suez Canal. France admits that it is broken and wrong. Gemma Arterton becomes Queen, and an amendment to the Magna Carta compels her to wear red leather thigh-high boots at all times, as in the video for Kylie Minogue's "Padam Padam". Argentina admits it was joking about the Falklands. Germany dissolves and freely gives its territory to Poland and the Netherlands. Denmark finally sorts out the Schleswig-Holstein question.

Imagine how you would feel, if you were British, and all of those things happened. You would be overjoyed. That is why we must all vote Reform in the next general election. Only they can make those things happen.

This is how PC gamers felt about Doom (2016). The game was a breath of fresh air. There was something uncompromising about it, because the developers were on our side. It was an old-school PC-style first-person shooter, a genuinely difficult game that rewarded skill, and it was made for us. What would Id do next? What was the sequel going to be like? Could Andy Murray win Wimbledon forever?

If you're reading this, Gemma Arterton, it took Rosamund Pike another twenty years to find her groove after Die Another Day. You still have time.

Still have time. I'm old enough to remember the original, original Doom, which came out in 1993. It was technically mindblowing in a way that's impossible to recapture nowadays, and for a few years afterwards Id Software was the world leader in 3D action games. The sequel, Doom II, was more of the same, but better, and the company's next project, Quake (1996), continued their technical dominance over the competition.

But it didn't last. Id was staffed with passionate assholes who quickly got sick of having to spend fifteen hours a day in each other's company. By the end of the 1990s almost all of the people who worked on Doom had left. As I write these words most of them are still alive - morituri te salutant, Bobby Prince - and they remain in contact with each other on Twitter, but the chances of them going back into business with each other are nil. Id's technical leadership continued until roughly 2004, with Doom 3, which had a clever engine but controversial gameplay. From that point onwards the company's output slowed down.

Amongst other things Id pioneered the idea of licencing out their game engine to other companies, instead of keeping it all in-house, but after some initial success the Id Tech engine fell by the wayside. It had strong competition from Valve Software's Source, and latterly Epic's Unreal Engine, which as of this writing is more or less the default non-mobile video game engine. Universities run courses on Unreal 5, while Id Tech is only used by Id and a handful of Id's friends.

Id's next big thing after Doom 3 was Rage, which was released in 2011 to a tepid reception. I've written about it before. Technically it was very clever, and visually it has aged well, but it had an anonymous blandness to it and the story felt unfinished. A year later John Carmack left the company. He was the chief technical guru behind Doom and Quake and the Id Tech engine. From that point onwards Id became the Sugababes of software development. The same name, a similar style, but all the people were different.

And yet there was a lot of residual affection for Id's games. In 2014 MachineGames had a big hit with a surprisingly good reboot of Id's prototypical first-person-shooter Wolfenstein, which spawned a long-running franchise of its own. Circa 2022 the updated re-releases of Quake and Quake II had a strong reception on consoles. I remember hating Quake when it came out, but I grew it like it. Quake II was sort-of mid when it was new, and it remains sort-of mid.

After Rage I have the impression that most PC gaming fans wrote off Id. Without John Carmack, what was the point? Was it even Id any more? Id's next project was a reboot of Doom, but development didn't go smoothly. The original plan was for a military-style shooter set on Earth, but after a couple of years' work the team realised that the game was boring, so they decided to go back to basics and throw in demons and hellspawn and serrated blades and so forth.

One good thing that came from the cancelled Doom 4 was the glory kill. When some of the baddies were mortally wounded but not killed they became stunned, at which point the player could close in and perform a close-quarters execution. This involved ripping open their chests or stomping on their heads or crushing their skulls. The basic idea of a glory kill is old as the hills, but it's an unusual mechanic for a first-person shooter, not least because it doesn't work well in a multiplayer game. The team designed the glory kill so that it would reward the player with health and ammo, which encouraged an aggressive, in-your-face playstyle. It was a simple idea but it worked incredibly well.

Doom (2016) was released to a positive-but-not-rapturous reception. On a personal level I don't remember seeing any publicity for it at the time. I assumed it was a b-list title. The multiplayer game was an afterthought, but the single-player campaign attracted praise, and although I don't have access to official sales numbers I have the impression that it sold and kept selling. Ultimately it was nowhere near as popular as contemporary hits such as Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3, but for a niche first-person shooter aimed at elderly PC owners and heavy metal fans it was a substantial success.

I picked it up on budget in 2020 and enjoyed it. I couldn't quite put my finger on what made it so much fun. It was slick, but it didn't seem to do anything new. I realise now that the glory kill mechanic was the key. Glory kills were optional, but they encouraged the player to get stuck into the fighting instead of staying away. They encouraged a dynamic style of gameplay whereby the player had to close with the demons, deal massive damage, then dance away before the bigger demons got too close. Speedruns of the ultra-nightmare difficulty mode - where the game throws the player back to the menu screen if they die - have the same bewildering, hypnotic quality as the old Quake Done Quick videos.

There was another clever idea. Some of the baddies - shielded soldiers, most obviously - were vulnerable to certain weapons and not others, which led to a gameplay style that encouraged weapon switching. It was a little bit of extra work that made the gameplay feel more complicated. It wasn't oppressive, and the player could complete the entire game with the shotgun and super machinegun, but it added a bit of depth.

The storyline and characterisation were simple, but memorable, and there was a complicated backstory that didn't get in the way of the shooting. In advance of this blog post I replayed it, and it holds up. The platforming is still annoying, but there isn't much of it. The story doesn't slow down the action. What is the story, by the way? In the future the morally flexible United Aerospace Corporation finds a way to drain energy from hell, so they set up a refinery on Mars, just in case something goes wrong.

Inevitably the hell energy corrupts the staff of the Mars base and things go to pot. Luckily the UAC had done a bit of archaeological work beforehand. They had found a mysterious stone coffin containing the body of a man. A man who was both dead and alive, human and not human. A man possessed of a steel-barrelled sword of vengeance. Shortly after the forces of hell began pouring into our dimension the man burst out of his stone sarcophagus, on a single-minded mission to defeat the forces of hell. He is THE DOOMSLAYER, e.g. the player character. An immortal, trans-dimensional warrior who hunts down and kills demons. There's a backstory involving an order of holy warriors and giant monsters, but the player doesn't have to pay any attention to it.

It's good to be The DOOMSLAYER. He's tough, but he isn't an asshole. He's disappointed with humanity, but he's on our side. He was one of us, once. He just wants to have a nap.

The story treads a fine balance between serious and stupid. The opening narration asks the player to rip and tear "until it is done", which sounds portentous, but it's also a tongue-in-cheek reference to a notoriously awful promotional comic for the original, original Doom. The sequel has overt references to Repercussions of Evil, a poor-quality amateur short story based on the original game. The rest of the Doom mythos combines serious mythology with the occasional reference to tie-in novels and fan-fiction. It's basically a heavy metal concept album, but as a video game. Some of the skyboxes are basically gatefold heavy metal album covers.

Still, Doom Eternal. Is it any good? Dieter Diercks, or Tony Sales? Four stars out of five, goodbye.

 

Ye Gods, it's frustrating. The original game had a simple structure. It was essentially a series of combat arenas linked together with corridors. The corridors had a little bit of fighting and some exploration, but the meat of the game was a series of battles, one after the other, and then there was pudding, and then there was meat again, which sounds horrible - you can't go back to savoury - but let's imagine that The DOOMSLAYER is ravenous, on account of the fact that he has been in suspended animation since the end of the Second Age.

Doom Eternal has a similar structure. It has combat arenas, punctuated by transitional bits. I have the impression that the developers split themselves into three teams. One team worked on the combat arenas. A second team worked on the transitional, linking sections, and a third polished up the story. All three teams excelled themselves, and yet the end result is like a mixture of meat and pudding, all on the same plate. Ice cream and mashed potato and gravy, coexisting awkwardly.

The combat is fantastic. It's absolutely superb. Full marks. If the developers had stopped there I would love Doom Eternal. The combat combines the hard-and-heavy up-close fighting of Doom (2016) with the more fluid, acrobatic jumping and shooting of Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament. Do you remember how you could turn the gravity down in Unreal Tournament? It's like that. I would have been perfectly happy if the game had been just a series of combat arenas one after the other. A single, enormous, unending battle punctuated by the occasional loading pause. It would be like biting into an electrical cable. Numbing, and then transcendent.

The combat is tricky at first. The game throws a lot of new mechanics at the player. Some of them were controversial when the game came out. The game encourages the player to use specific weapons against specific baddies, but this is presented in a hamfisted way, as if it was mandatory. If the game merely pointed out that some baddies had destructible weapons, it wouldn't be so bad, but the game implies that the player will have to keep switching from one weapon to the next, targeting weak points until they go dizzy. In reality it's optional. Even on the hardest difficulty level it's just an optional bonus way of doing some extra damage, or knobbling a monster quicker than usual.

It left a bad taste in my mouth. At the beginning of the game I remember wondering if the gameplay was going to be a big memory test, whereby I would have to keep switching between two dozen different combinations of weapon and weapons mods. The rock-paper-scissors aspect also has the effect of making certain weapons redundant. I never bothered with the heavy cannon's micro missiles, for example, because the sniper scope was far more useful. The scope disables the weapons of three different baddies and also has added headshot damage against the smaller demons, whereas the micro missiles have no special use.

Ditto the shotgun's full-auto mod, which was far less versatile than the sticky bombs. Also ditto the plasma gun's microwave beam, which appears to have no special use at all in the base game. To make things worse the rock-paper-scissors aspect feels half-baked. The game emphasises it at the beginning, but gives up on it later on. The weapons that appear later in the game can't specifically target weak spots, and the more powerful baddies don't have any. By the time the player is confronted with Dread Knights and Tyrants the rock-paper-scissors aspect is a distant memory.

Furthermore the one gun mechanic I found myself using the most - the super shotgun's meathook - is introduced almost in passing. It is by far the most memorable of all the new ideas in Doom Eternal. It transforms the arenas into kinetic aerial ballet, but the game treats it as just one of many extra weapon modifications. I was expecting it to be used in the platform sections, for example, but no. Someone should have noticed during playtesting that the meathook was awesome, and encouraged the designers to exploit it more, but they didn't.

Mid-way through the game I settled on the super shotgun for virtually everything. A combination of flaming meathook, jump, aim down slightly, point-blank shotgun blast, blood punch, grenade, followed by jumping away carried me through most of the later levels. It's like Bionic Commando, but on speed.

The other new mechanic is a Predator-style shoulder-mounted projectile launcher. The concept sounds great, but in practice it feels tacked-on. It has three functions. It can fire a grenade, plus a frost grenade that freezes the baddies, plus a flame belch that sets the demons on fire. Each has a use, but the more I played the game the less I liked the projectile launcher. The plasma gun in Doom 2016 had a useful secondary mode that fired stun bombs. The new plasma gun replaces that with a microwave beam that I never used.

I put it to you, developers of Doom, that it would have been simpler to just keep the stun bomb, and omit the frost grenade entirely. Then the player wouldn't have to remember to use the G key now and again. 

The grenade itself overlaps with the shotgun's sticky bomb, so why not be bold and get rid of that, too? It isn't used for any puzzles. In practice it just increases the player's damage output by a small amount every twenty seconds or so. As for the flame belch, why not give the shotgun a weapons mod that fires incendiary shells? By implementing these three changes the projectile launcher could be removed, and thus I have saved the player from having to remember the G, R, and CTRL keys, you can thank me later. There's a fine line between a gameplay mechanic that makes the game more entertaining, and a mechanic that just gives the player more keys to press. The projectile launcher is firmly in the latter category.

The other big new thing is an expanded emphasis on glory kills. In the first game the maps had plenty of ammo, and the extra health and armour from a glory kill was a bonus. Doom Eternal largely strips the maps of ammo bonuses and gives the player a much smaller ammo load. The game expects the player to keep The DOOMSLAYER in business by farming the demons. Thus the aforementioned flame belch, which makes the demons drop armour, but has basically no other use at all.

On the one hand the flame belch feels like a missed opportunity. Who doesn't like the idea of fighting demons with a flamethrower? Albeit that it raises the question of whether demons from hell would be vulnerable to fire. Some of them are already on fire. Some of then are literally made of fire. Wouldn't a flamethrower heal them? Hmm, Id Software? Wouldn't a flamethrower heal them? Why is Arkansas pronounced like that? Why don't you answer me, Id Software? Why?

Why don't you answer. Because you've mostly been laid off and you'd rather not talk about Doom right now. I understand. I apologise. You did a good job. You deserved better.

The DOOMSLAYER has a chainsaw. It spontaneously refills with petrol. Let's assume that the petrol tank is too small to cure humanity's energy crisis. In Doom 2016 it was mostly useful as a get-out-of-jail-free card that could kill the larger demons in one hit. In contrast Doom Eternal's chainsaw is mostly used to farm the lesser demons for ammo. It doesn't work against the tougher demons, so there's a new one-hit-kill weapon, the crucible, which is a giant sword. The crucible is disappointing. The developers didn't program thrusts and parries. There's no swordplay. It's just click-to-swipe, and although the weapon makes sense from a storyline point of view, I have the impression the developers didn't know what to do with it.

A plain glory kill restocks health, so the player has to work out what they need most, and either flamethrow the demons for armour, or chainsaw them for ammo, or hit them enough to stagger them for health, and also flamethrow them as a bonus, with the complication that the flamethrower and chainsaw take time to recharge. In addition the player has the aforementioned grenades, that also take time to recharge, plus a dash ability that recharges. The weapons have secondary fire modes that take time to recharge as well.

All of this extra stuff - this button-pressing and waiting for things to recharge - often feels like busywork. I found myself wondering what it actually added to the gameplay. In practice I gave up on trying to remember which thing had recharged and just periodically tapped the grenade key, the flamethrower key, or the chainsaw key, and I did manage to finish the game, once on hurt me plenty difficulty and a second time on ultraviolence. The game is apparently optimised for the nightmare difficulty level. Could I finish the game in nightmare mode? Perhaps, but it would be a slog.

I mean, I've been playing first-person shooters for nigh-on thirty years, and I really enjoyed Unreal: Tournament, which is faster-paced and more difficult than Doom Eternal, but I'm not as young as I was. On ultraviolence most of my deaths came about when I was trying to do something clever, or when I was trying to win a weapons mastery bonus. If I had knuckled down and actually used the BFG and crucible instead of perpetually keeping them in reserve I would have made much faster progress.

I have a theory. Doom 2016 didn't have any mission packs or season passes. I have the impression that the publishers didn't expect it to sell enough to justify any extra content. As a consequence the developers ended up with a tonne of ideas that all went into Doom Eternal, without a chance to playtest them all. If there had been DLC for the original Doom, the developers might have had time to work out which new mechanics were fun, and which were just busywork, but alas that didn't happen. Instead they shoved all of it into Doom Eternal. All of it. Everything. All at once.

What about the baddies? The array of demons is much the same as it was in Doom 2016. Perhaps the developers didn't have time to do a lot of new animation. There's an upgraded Mancubus, an upgraded Baron of Hell, Doom II-style Pain Elementals and Arch-Viles, and some weaker Cyberdemons, called Tyrants, who are surprisingly boring to fight. There's a new demon called the Doom Hunter, who is introduced with great fanfare but feels like a reject from Quake II. Plus a gladiator, who might have been a fun challenge, but he only appears once, in a boss encounter. Doom 2016 had some memorable boss encounters, but Doom Eternal is surprisingly low-key in that respect. One boss fight involves shooting some eyeballs and then punching a brain, which was so trivial I remember wondering if it was a boss encounter or a puzzle.

One baddie who does stand out, however, is the Marauder. He's introduced as a boss, and then he reappears as a regular heavy later in the game. He was and remains controversial. He's a bit like the shield soldiers, with the difference that the player can't force him to drop his shield with gunfire. Instead the player has to wait for the Marauder to charge, at which point he is briefly vulnerable. If the player shoots his shield too early he spawns a golden dog who tries to flank the player.

There are two problems. Firstly the game encourages the player to use weapon-switching to kill him, but every time I tried it he just raised his shield. I couldn't tell if my timing was terrible, or there was a bug, or if he was just naturally resistant to the ballista. Secondly, for all the hype surrounding him, including a dedicated cutscene, fighting him is surprisingly dull. The player just has to back off, wait for him to charge, shoot him, shoot him again, then back off. In fact the super shotgun plus meathook almost makes him trivial. The first shotgun blast staggers him, then the meathook brings the player into range for a point-blank shotgun hit, and after three or four repeats of this process the Marauder is no more. It can get tricky when the Marauder is part of a larger wave of baddies, but even then his high mobility means that he tends to leave the regular baddies behind.

That's enough about the combat. The game has some Master Levels, which are essentially regular maps but with different enemy spawns. My hunch is that the altered demon spawns were originally intended for the higher difficult levels, but the developers didn't have time, so they ended up using them as bonus maps instead. Here's a video of me playing one of the easier Master Levels, in Ultraviolence difficulty, with "classic" weapons (e.g. new weapons are scattered throughout the map, which is why I only use the shotgun and heavy cannon). Notice how the balance of fighting, jump, and farming the baddies is such that the battle attains a kind of hyponotic equilibrium. Of note the video is set to 18+ so you might need to pop off to YouTube to see it.

So, the combat is fantastic. Full marks. For the combat.

As mentioned up the page I like to imagine that the developers split themselves into three teams. They all did a good job. The combat is fantastic. The third team worked on the storyline. They also did a good job, but the game doesn't present the story very well. There's a big emphasis on hitting the TAB key to read text boxes, which may or may not be a deliberate throwback to the 1990s. There's a lot of backstory, but it slows the gameplay down, and conversely none of it is really worth the read.

Early in the game there's a short sequence where The DOOMSLAYER meets Valen, The Betrayer. There's a whole cutscene, although in practice he just gives the player a big battery. I remember thinking "who is that man", and "should I care about that man", and "will he re-appear", and "should I exercise restraint when using explosives", to which the answers are (a) that's explained in a text box (b) not really (c) no, he doesn't (d) no.

One level involves retrieving The DOOMSLAYER's special sword, but it's a shaggy dog story - it breaks, so he has to forge a new one - and as mentioned earlier it doesn't play much role in the gameplay. Yes, technically he uses it to kill a particularly significant demon, but it's just a McGuffin.

The story is told with text boxes, and the plot is mostly go-here, collect-this, then-go-there, which was true of Doom 2016, but I suspect the developers had higher hopes. It picks up towards the end. When it finally gets going, the story of how The DOOMSLAYER came to be, and the story of how the gods of his universe turned out to be just as evil as the demons, comma, was actually quite affecting. The heavenly expanse of Urdak has an air of tragic grandeur, and it's a shame the story doesn't get into the groove until the second-to-last level.

Which brings us to the third element. The in-between sections. Doom 2016 was basically a series of combat arenas linked with some corridors and a little bit of platforming. Doom Eternal amps this up by removing the corridors and turning the platforming sequences into full-on platform hell. The mixture of double-jumping and dashing reminded me of Ori and the Blind Forest, as indeed did the difficulty level. Has there ever been a game that looked so cute, but was so maddeningly hard, as Ori and the Blind Forest? On the surface it's beautiful, but underneath it's evil. Just like communism or any political system devised by misanthropic, middle-class hipsters with beards. I don't want to be reminded of Ori and the Blind Forest. I loved that game, and also hated it. I don't want to feel anything. I just want to be numb.

Do you remember Mirror's Edge? I wrote about it a few years ago. First-person platforming is very hard to pull off, because the player can't see their feet. Mirror's Edge was built from the ground up as a first-person platform game and it mostly worked. The engine made the player feel like an actual physical body, with hands and feet, clambering onto things and bashing into walls, whereas most first-person games until that point made the player feel like a remote camera hovering in a vacuum.

I don't know if the developers of Doom Eternal ever played Mirror's Edge, although the game was very influential so I have to assume they were aware of it. Whatever the case, the in-between-sections of Doom Eternal feel a lot like Mirror's Edge, but harder, because they're less grounded in reality and there's lava. In isolation Doom Eternal's platforming sections are well-executed, but they don't mix with the rest of the game.

They don't mix well at all. I bought Doom Eternal when it came out on budget in 2022, but I didn't warm to it, and after five hours I gave up and went to Greenland instead. Part of the problem is that the early levels aren't much fun. They feel like glorified tutorials. But most of the problem is that - as with the rock-paper-scissors element - the game throws platforming at the player right from the start. The second level has a sequence (pictured above) where the player must drop down from a height, then dash through a gap, then double-jump-and-dash up the other side onto a wall, then jump from the wall and double-dash to a second wall. The same map has sequence where the player has to jump between collapsing platforms onto a swing-bar, then into a mid-air power-up that refills the player's dash ability, all above a sea of lava. I remember seeing this and thinking "what went wrong".

Later in the game I remember one particular jump that involved leaping from a wall, onto a jump pad,  then pulling a 180 and dashing and jumping so as to avoid a huge piece of spinning debris. The problem with the platforming sections is that they're off-puttingly difficult until the player gets the knack, at which point they become a boring triviality. I'm reminded of The Last Guardian on the PlayStation 4, which has a similar problem. Once you know what to do, there isn't any challenge. Furthermore the combat and platforming are completely separate. Doom 2016's exploration sequences had a bit of action and a bit of exploration, but Doom Eternal separates the two flavours entirely. When there is platforming, there are no monsters, and vice-versa.

To be fair, if the player falls into oblivion they're returned to the start of the platforming section with a little bit of health taken off, but I still hated the platforming sections, and then I was bored with them. I never enjoyed them. They brought the game to a standstill when they appeared. The developers would probably argue that they exist to hone the player's mobility, but in the combat arenas I never had to drop down from a wall, then dash, then jump up, then dash, then grab a wall etc. In fact most of my mobility came from the super shotgun's meathook, which is never used in the platforming sections.

Also, do you know what else honed my mobility? The combat arenas. I didn't need a separate set of tutorials to learn how to navigate the combat arenas. The combat arenas themselves taught me that.

The platforming would have been inoffensive if it was optional. The game has bonus elements in each of the levels. Generally one or two extra combat encounters, plus a separate, optional mini-arena that rewards the player with part of the key to a special weapon. If the platforming had been a kind of bonus "show us your skills" element, I wouldn't have minded. But it's mandatory. There are no short-cuts. The player has to knuckle down and learn how to jump and shoot a switch then dash and wall-grab then double-dash and double-jump and so forth.

So, on the whole, Doom Eternal has great combat, and the rock-paper-scissors element is much less annoying than it could have been. Only one of the new enemies requires a completely different gameplay style, and he only appears a few times. However after every arena the game grinds to a halt, because there's some unavoidable, unskippable platforming. The platforming is unenjoyable the first time and boring thereafter. The story doesn't get going until the very end.

The game has considerably more replayability than Doom 2016, with a bunch of Master Levels that add new monster spawns, plus some optional cheat codes that allow the player to indulge their power fantasies. One cheat code even dubs applause over the gameplay, with the occasional incongruous "yeah" during quiet moments and a dog bark. But I can't bring myself to max out all the secrets because the pacing is bitty and the levels are slightly too long to play casually.

Performance-wise Doom Eternal looks a lot like a predecessor, which is to say that it's a very attractive game. I would use the word chunky to describe the scenery. With my bog-standard Intel i3 / Geforce GTX 1650 combination it hit a steady 60fps at 1080 resolution. The game doesn't require ray-tracing or anything fancy. It has some occasionally quite epic scenery, but it never slows down. There is some odd pop-in, whereby objects at the edge of the screen appear from thin air when the player turns around - presumably they were being loaded from disc - but it was unnoticeable during the action gameplay. EDIT: Since writing that paragraph I bought a second-hand Geforce GTX 1080, which is ancient - it was released in 2016 - but still pretty slick today at 1080. It easily runs Doom Eternal at max settings at 60fps albeit that it can't do raytracing

What about the music? Doom 2016 had a fantastic electronic metal soundtrack by Mick Gordon, who produced oodles of music for the game and then edited it all down for the accompanying soundtrack LP, which was released on double and quadruple vinyl. Gordon outdid himself. A joke going around at the time was that Doom was a fantastic industrial metal album with a pretty good free game.

Sadly Doom Eternal isn't in the same league. There's one absolutely superb action theme, "The Only Thing They Fear is You", and the ending credits music is brooding and atmospheric. Unfortunately the rest of the soundtrack is a kind of aural wallpaper. It works well in context, but I don't remember any of it.

But therein lies a tale. Shortly after Doom Eternal's soundtrack was released there were complaints on the internet that the mastering was poor, and that some songs appeared to be stitched together from parts of other songs. Furthermore the soundtrack was only available digitally, and at over four hours it felt as if the producers had simply thrown together every scrap of music from the game, whether it was meant to be enjoyed in isolation or not.

Mick Gordon pointed out online that he had only tangentially been involved in the final mixing, at which point one of Id's executives seemed to take personal offence, posting a lengthy message on Reddit to complain that Gordon had missed deadlines, and that most of his music was atmospheric noodling rather than hard action themes, and that Gordon should not have badmouthed the end product.

Gordon responded with a lengthy essay on Medium.com. He pointed out that the soundtrack album was sold as Mick Gordon's Doom Eternal, and that the had every right to criticise something that had his name on it. Secondly he revealed that Id had given him a deadline of two weeks to produce a suite of music for each of the game's levels, with no time to bounce ideas off the team, in part because he had to compose the music blind, because the levels and indeed general shape of the game hadn't been designed yet. Ultimately he was contracted to produce just over two hours of music, but ended up submitting double that, because Id continually rejected his contributions.

Towards the end of the process he was given an extra fortnight to create the soundtrack album, only to find that Id had already asked one of their audio designers to assemble it from Gordon's outtakes. The soundtrack album was therefore a mixture of a dozen tracks that Gordon had managed to master for release, plus an hour or so of Gordon's unmixed musical score, plus two hours of outtakes that Id technically hadn't paid for.

As a consequence relations between Gordon and Id broke down, and Doom Eternal's mission packs were scored by other composers. It seems unlikely Gordon will ever return to the series. The Doom Eternal soundtrack itself never had a wide release. It was only ever available as a bonus for people who pre-ordered the game, although the individual tracks are widely available on Youtube. As a happy postscript Mick Gordon is apparently going to headline RADAR 2027, a Sheffield-based music festival, where he will perform his music for the Doom games with a full band and orchestra. Let's all cross our fingers and hope that Id Software doesn't set their lawyers on him, or something.

Still, in summary, Doom Eternal is basically one step forward and two steps back from Doom 2016. The combat is more fluid, more jumpy, harder but just as fair. It has a steep learning curve and the early maps aren't much fun, but once the player amasses an arsenal and learns how to get stuck in it's one one the best first-person shooters I've ever played, on a par with the original Unreal: Tournament. The expanded storyline is at least mostly transparent, although it doesn't really get going until the end, but the game as a whole is tainted by the platform sequences, which kill the pacing and simply aren't fun to play. The end result is a real curate's egg of a game.

What happened next? The game was a big hit. Enough to justify a pair of expansion packs, The Ancient Gods 1 and 2, released in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The first is apparently more of the same, but harder. The second apparently dials things down a little bit, but has a convoluted plot. I have no special desire to play either DLC.

A third game in the revival series followed in 2025. Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel that tells the story of how The DOOMSLAYER came to be. It tones down the jumpy, weapon-swappy gameplay of Doom Eternal in favour of straightforward blasting. The DOOMSLAYER now has a multi-purpose shield. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have sold very well. The publishers haven't released official numbers, but it was released essentially for free on the Xbox, as part of that platform's Game Pass subscription service, and it had one-third Doom Eternal's Steam player count at launch.

My hunch is that fans of Doom 2016 who were alienated by Doom Eternal stayed away. A launch price of $70 / £70 / €80 didn't help. And the game requires a graphics card that supports raytracing, so even if I wanted to buy it, I wouldn't be able to run it. I would need to spend an extra £200 on a suitable second-hand GPU.

To date The Dark Ages has had one expansion pack, Revelations, which was released in July 2026, just a couple of months ago. Unfortunately this coincided with a massive wave of lay-offs at Microsoft's gaming studios, including Id Software. It remains to be seen how this will affect the Doom series.

Nonetheless Id has a long history of shedding talent, but bouncing back. It lost Tom Hall during the development of Doom, John Romero and Sandy Petersen during the development of Quake, Adrian Carmack around the time of Doom 3, John Carmack post-Rage, and admittedly whilst this happened the company went from being the world leader in 3D action games to being an irrelevant has-been, but the point still stands, whatever it was. Id will probably rise again, and so will Doom, unless it doesn't, the end.