Doom: The Dark Ages.

Yes, it's a pretty game. Sure, they hit their design goals, but it's the design itself that I hate. It's geared entirely towards close combat to the point where half the weapons are redundant or otherwise stupidly useless compared to others. It's geared towards close combat to the point that the player's projectiles disappear after a certain distance, while the enemies' shots can travel much further. Sure, there's plenty of 'nice' things they added to make it easy to churn around a bunch of groups of enemies up close, but it's insanely dumb how it's 100% of the game design. Especially because many of the maps are trying to show off large vistas and open areas, where it becomes VERY obvious that the player's shots disappear while you're being pelted by enemy fire just fine.

The extra game modes of flying and being in the mech are neat in concept, but so insanely underbaked they feel more like a waste of time task to push through than a cool extra part of the game to enjoy. They're not mixed in with the on foot parts well at all and feel more like basic transitionary moments they attempted to add some gameplay to.

The attention to detail sucks, especially in the UI. A couple easy points demonstrate it: The most obvious is how their UI triggers work. You can click a button, and it plays the activate sound, but it's not activating if you click it before the mouseover/highlight animation is done. In a similar vein, most affirmative interactions are a stupid wait for it long-press while going back to the mian menu from between levels is as simple as an escape key press. A purposefully slow forward with an instant back is just... pointlessly dumb. In a similar vein, while the game is showing you all the crap you did and found in the level, your only options are to sit there and get annoyed with the obnoxious, slow, and loud tallying of everything, or skip ahead to other pages and go back. Escape and space don't skip or do anything there. Basically, there seems to only be one poorly thought out path to get to anywhere in the UI, with no convenient or standard alternatives implemented: Half baked.

The story and character designs were made by edgy teenagers. It's infinitely worse than Doom Eternal or 2016. Old Ones are C'thulu ripoffs, most of the styling of Hell/etc are now just generic scifi with a bit more red, and many of the new designs are somehow more generic ripoffs of older doom. They pull inspiration from tons of other spooky things instead of rolling with the Hell themes or other established lore. So much of the added lore is just ripoffs of greek mythology and other things, too, like a boat to ferry souls and a bunch of other crap I don't care to remember because it's just not memorable, intersting, nor do they fit the usual themes of Doom.

In a similar vein, so much of the story is lackluster and uninspired. There is some interesting sounding writing hidden in the lore book, like why the slayer's mount is half mech, but it's simply stated in the lore instead of being a potentially cool way to introduce the mount or other things. So much of the game is ONE game loop (close combat) with few dynamic options and a bunch of extra half-baked fluff tacked on.

It's frustratingly narrow sighted and underbaked to deserve to follow Eternal or 2016. It feels like it's in some parallel universe from the other games, even from 2016 and Eternal.

I want to play the DOOM Slayer rampaging through a Hell inspired by 90's metal, not some parallel universe written by edgy teenagers where he's some glorified Master Chief ripoff with anger issues for a personality who's just following orders.