The Mech and Dragon levels in Doom: The Dark Ages feel like missed opportunities

Doom: The Dark Ages is an excellent first-person shooter, offering a 20-hour campaign filled with demons for you to rip and tear through, with a more medieval arsenal, available as part of Xbox Game Pass. In addition to a shield saw, flail, and mace, new weapons in the Doom Slayers' arsenal are the mech and dragon. Sprinkled throughout the campaign, you will do missions that include sections based on these new gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately for Doom: The Dark Ages, those sections are low points for the campaign, due to limited gameplay mechanics and a misuse of the shield parrying mechanic present in the rest of the campaign. Doom: The Dark Ages has also had some real-life controversies, with fans canceling physical pre-orders due to the disc not actually containing the game.

While there is an argument for the positive aspects of these sections, ultimately, the mech and dragon levels are a misfire.

The mech levels are extremely one-note

Dodging feels worse than parrying

There are fewer mech levels than dragon levels in Doom: The Dark Ages, but even the handful of mech levels quickly became bland, largely due to these sections being one-note. The flow of combat in the mech is simple: you dodge incoming attacks and punch when you see an opening. Once you build enough meters, you can take a powerful attack or finisher. Sometimes you get a gun for a short period, but it's mostly the same flow. It's also important to note that instead of the shield parry you do normally, you instead dodge incoming attacks, which just feels worse than doing a shield parry.

A lack of variety in these sections, in addition to the slower and mechanically chunky combat, makes these sections feel worse to play than the normal levels. The regular FPS combat is fast, reactive with parries, and satisfying, and if the giant mech levels feel worse than the normal levels, what's the point in even having them?

Dragon levels feel on-rails in a boring way

Waiting for an attack you can dodge to actually do damage sucks

The dragon levels show up a bit more frequently than the mech levels, but these also flow between flying on the dragon and regular FPS gameplay. The flow is that you will go around, shoot some type of enemy, and unlock a landing point for you to land at. There, you run through a normal FPS section, before completing an objective and returning to the dragon to rinse and repeat. That flow of moving between the dragon and traditional shooting does work well, but the dragon half of these levels are lacking.

The main issue with the dragon sections is that there is really only one type of combat encounter. When you come across an enemy, they are always stationary, and you go into a first-person view of the dragon's turrets. Most enemies have shields, which can only be destroyed with a charge attack, which can only be done by making a green incoming attack. This means you have to wait until you get an attack you can dodge to actually do damage, resulting in much of the combat involving waiting around. There are some ships you get to chase, but they don't fight back, and they are real bullet sponges, making those moments also tedious.

Neither of these gameplay sections feel good either

Being one-note is bad; that note not being enjoyable is a failure

The entire Doom series is all about great gameplay feel, and Doom: The Dark Ages is no exception. The vast majority of the gameplay feels incredible, making the mech and dragon levels such a let-down. You can get away with smaller sections that don't have a ton of variety if those sections are great, but the bar for great gameplay is high in Doom. When I find myself sighing on the third dragon level because I don't want to play through it, that's an obvious sign of a problem.

The biggest reason both sections feel so bad is how limited your options are. Both the mech and dragon combat encounters play out identically. There isn't a wheel full of weapons to choose from, options to shield bash, use the CBF, or whip out a melee combo. Instead, it's the same exact loop repeated, which just doesn't meet the standard of quality set by the rest of the campaign.

You do need ways to break up a long campaign

The ideas aren't bad, just the execution

Doom: The Dark Ages will take you from 17-20 hours to complete the campaign, which is fairly long for an FPS campaign. For reference, the Black Ops 6 campaign only runs 8 hours (via HowLongToBeat), almost a third of the length. It makes sense that ID Software would want to break up the campaign by having different gameplay sections. While those sections were low points compared to the rest of the campaign, it does create a better sense of pacing. With how fast the normal FPS sections move, having slower sections would help the campaign not feel overwhelmed by its intense length.

The previous Doom games didn't need these sections

The previous two modern Doom games, Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, are similar in length, neither of which felt the need to create entirely different levels to change the pacing. Both games utilize smaller combat arenas, new enemies, and tougher challenges to change the flow of gameplay. Both of those games do it without completely going away from the excellent gunplay that makes these games worth playing in the first place. I had been optimistic ahead of playing Doom: The Dark Ages that these sections would feature gameplay at least as good as the rest of the campaign, but they fall short of even being fun to play.