Doom Enters Its Halo Era with The Dark Ages

The last thing I expected Doom: The Dark Ages to remind me of was Halo 3. Yet, during a recent hands-on demo with id Software's gothic prequel, I found myself mounted on the back of a cyborg dragon, unleashing a salvo of machine gun fire across the side of a demonic battle barge. After destroying the vessel's defensive turrets, I landed atop the ship and charged through its lower decks, turning the entire crew into a few gallons of red slop. Seconds later, the warmachine was toast, and I burst through its hull, leaping back onto my dragon to continue my crusade against the machines of Hell.

Those familiar with Bungie's landmark Xbox 360 shooter will instantly recognize the shape of Master Chief's assault on the Covenant's scarab tanks. While the helicopter-like Hornet may have been swapped for a holographic-winged dragon and the giant laser-firing mech for an occult flying boat, the core of the experience remains: an aerial assault transitioning into a devastating boarding action. Surprisingly, this wasn't the only moment in the demo that echoed Halo. Although the combat core of The Dark Ages is unmistakably Doom, the campaign's design seems to carry a "late-2000s shooter" spin, characterized by elaborate cutscenes and a push for gameplay novelty.

Over the course of two and a half hours, I played through four levels of Doom: The Dark Ages. Only the first, the campaign's opener, resembled the tightly paced, meticulously mapped design of Doom (2016) and its sequel. The others had me piloting a colossal mech, flying the aforementioned dragon, and exploring a wide-open battlefield dotted with secrets and powerful minibosses. This represents a significant departure from Doom's traditional pursuit of mechanical purity, feeling more akin to Halo, Call of Duty, and even old James Bond games like Nightfire, which thrive on scripted setpieces and novelty mechanics that appear briefly.

This direction for Doom is fascinating, especially considering the series once veered away from it. The cancelled Doom 4 was set to resemble Call of Duty, not only in its modern military aesthetic but also with an increased emphasis on characters, cinematic storytelling, and scripted events. After years of development, id Software concluded these ideas didn't fit the series, opting instead for the focused approach seen in Doom (2016). Now, in 2025, these elements are back in The Dark Ages.

The campaign's rapid pace is punctuated with new gameplay ideas reminiscent of Call of Duty's biggest novelties. My demo began with a long, elaborate cutscene, reintroducing the realm of Argent D'Nur, the opulent Maykrs, and the Night Sentinels – the knightly brothers-in-arms of the Doom Slayer. The Doom Slayer is depicted as a terrifying legend; a nuclear-level threat on two legs. While this lore will be familiar to Doom obsessives who pored over the prior games' codex entries, the deeply cinematic approach feels new and different, much like Halo. This extends into the levels themselves, with NPC Night Sentinels scattered about the environment, akin to UNSC Marines. While they don't fight alongside you in the levels I demoed, there's a greater sense that you're part of an army – like Master Chief, you're the invincible spearhead of a large force.

There's considerable character work in the introductory cutscene, and it remains to be seen if this is something Doom really needs. As a fan of the prior games' subtle storytelling, I'd prefer The Dark Ages to continue telling the Slayer's tale through environment design and codex entries, reserving cinematics for big reveals, as seen in Eternal. However, the cutscenes in The Dark Ages know their place: they tee up a mission and do not interrupt Doom's signature intense flow.

There are other interruptions, though. After the opening mission, which starts with pure shotgun slaughter and ends with parrying Hell Knights using the Slayer's new shield, I was thrust into the cockpit of a Pacific Rim-like Atlan mech to wrestle demonic kaiju. Following that, I soared through the skies on a cybernetic dragon, taking down battle barges and gun emplacements. These tightly scripted levels create a significant gear shift, punctuating the campaign's rapid pace with new gameplay ideas reminiscent of Call of Duty's novelties, like Modern Warfare's AC-130 gunship sequence or Infinite Warfare's dogfighting missions. The Atlan is slow and heavy, making Hell's armies look like Warhammer miniatures, while the dragon is fast and agile, offering a different experience that feels a dimension away from classic Doom.

Many of the best FPS campaigns thrive on this kind of variety. Half-Life 2 and Titanfall 2 are gold standards for it, and Halo has endured partly because of its mix of vehicular and on-foot sequences. However, I'm unsure if this will work for Doom. As with Eternal, The Dark Ages is a wonderfully complex shooter – every second demands complete attention as you weave together shots, shield tosses, parries, and brutal melee combos. In contrast, the mech and dragon sequences feel anemic and practically on-rails, with combat engagements so tightly controlled they almost resemble QTEs.

In Call of Duty, the switch to driving a tank or firing from a circling gunship works because the mechanical complexity of such scripted sequences isn't far removed from on-foot missions. In The Dark Ages, however, there's a clear gulf between gameplay styles, akin to a middle school guitar student playing alongside Eddie Van Halen. While I know Doom's core combat will always be the star, when I'm beating a giant demon with a rocket-powered mech punch, I shouldn't be wishing I was back on the ground using a "mere" double-barreled shotgun.

My final hour of play saw The Dark Ages shift into another unusual guise, but one built on a much sturdier foundation. "Siege" is a level that refocuses on id's best-in-class gunplay, yet opens up Doom's typically claustrophobic level design into a huge open battlefield, with geography shifting between narrow and wide to provide myriad pathways and combat arenas. The goal, to destroy five Gore Portals, mirrors Call of Duty's multi-objective, complete-in-any-order missions, yet it reminded me of Halo – the grand scale of this map versus the tighter routes of the opening level evokes the contrast between Halo's interior and exterior environments. And, like Halo, the novelty here is that the excellent core shooter systems are given new context in much larger spaces. You must rethink the effective range of every weapon in your arsenal, use your charge attack to close football field-length distances, and use the shield to deflect artillery fired from oversized tank cannons.

The downside of expanding Doom's playspace is that things can become a little unfocused – I found myself backtracking and looping through empty pathways, which really does kill the pace. Here, I'd like to see The Dark Ages veer closer to Halo by incorporating the dragon into the mix like a Banshee; being able to fly across this battlefield, raining down fire before divebombing into a miniboss battle, would help maintain the pace and make the dragon feel more integral to the experience. If such a level exists beyond what I've seen, I'll be very happy.

Regardless of the overall shape of the full campaign, I am fascinated that so much of what I've seen feels like a resurrection and reinterpretation of ideas once considered ill-fitting for the series. Very little of the cancelled Doom 4 was released to the public, but a Kotaku report from 2013 paints a clear picture. "There were a lot of scripted set pieces," a source told the publication, including an "obligatory vehicle scene." That's precisely what we've got in the Atlan and dragon sections – mechanically simple scripted sequences reminiscent of Xbox 360-era shooters' novelty vehicle levels.

In a 2016 interview with Noclip, id Software's Marty Stratton confirmed that Doom 4 "was much closer to something like [Call of Duty]. A lot more cinematic, a lot more story to it. A lot more characters around you that you are with throughout the course of the gameplay." All that was scrapped, making it genuinely fascinating to see so much of it return in The Dark Ages. This campaign is set to feature big boarding action setpieces, lusciously rendered cinematics, a much wider cast of characters, and huge lore reveals.

The question now is: were those ideas always a bad fit for Doom, or were they just a bad fit when they looked too much like Call of Duty? Part of me remains skeptical, as fans once decried "Call of Doom", but I'm also excited at the idea of id Software making this approach work by grafting it onto the now-proven modern Doom formula.

The beating, gory heart of The Dark Ages unquestionably remains its on-foot, gun-in-hand combat. Nothing in this demo suggested that it will not be center stage, and everything I played affirms it's another fantastic reinvention of Doom's core. I believe that alone is strong enough to support an entire campaign, but id Software obviously has other designs. I'm surprised that a couple of the studio's new ideas feel so mechanically slim, and I am concerned that they will feel more like contaminants than fresh air. But there's still a lot more to see, and only in time will these fractured demo missions be contextualized. And so I eagerly await May 15th, not just to return to id's unrivaled gunplay, but to satisfy my curiosity. Is Doom: The Dark Ages a good late-2000s FPS campaign or a messy one?