Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal took the principles of the 2016 reboot and pushed them into a shape that resembles a rhythm game more than a classic shooter. This time demons have occupied Earth, and the Doom Slayer drives them out across ruined cities, frozen orbital stations, and hell itself. The story is more expansive and full of mythology, but the main focus stays on the combat, which the developers rebuilt into a carefully thought-out resource system: the chainsaw supplies ammo, the flamethrower shakes armor loose from enemies, and executions restore health. The player must therefore constantly switch between tools and can never settle into a single favorite weapon.

Movement has gained new emphasis: a double jump, an air dash, monkey bars, and climbable walls turn the arenas into three-dimensional playgrounds you fly through at high speed. Each type of enemy also has a weak point whose destruction changes the course of the fight, so encounters resemble a puzzle solved in real time. Between battles the game offers platforming sections, secret areas, and challenges that stretch its length well beyond the campaign itself. It also included an asymmetric multiplayer mode and, later, an extensive story expansion.

Technically, it's a very finely tuned title: the id Tech 7 engine handles enormous, visually striking spaces at high frame rates, and the game keeps excellent readability even in the middle of chaos. The visual style moved away from grey industrial aesthetics toward saturated colors and comic-book exaggeration, and the music once again builds on hard electronic metal. Reviews were very favorable, though some players objected that the game is more demanding and less relaxing than its predecessor. It's precisely that demanding edge, however, that makes it one of the best-designed action games on PC today, one worth trying again on a higher difficulty. Anyone who learns to switch weapons without thinking gets an experience found nowhere else in the genre: combat turns into fluid motion in which every button press has its exact reason.