The next meeting will take place on May 17 at Vocari Hub. The party starts at 1 PM and ends at 10 PM. You don't have to stay the entire time and can come and go as you please. The featured game is Doom the Dark Age, which is single player only but I'll have it installed on three Xbox Series X and two PlayStation 5 systems. I will provide four pizzas, Cola, and bottled water for guests to eat at the party. Also I don't yet have a date for the June meeting. I know that the Nintendo Switch 2 comes out on June fifth, but I haven't preordered it and I'm not confident that I could acquire a system that first week. My goal is to purchase three systems to use for club meetings and hopefully I can do that quickly and then set a date for the June meeting.
Doom the Dark Age is a prequel to the other recent games, and is set before the story of Doom Eternal. The main character the Doom Slayer is working for the Sentinel Knights and is deployed to response to Prince of Hell Ahzarl’s invasion of the planet. This game supposedly has more frequent and longer cutscenes compared to other Doom games, but I haven't played it myself. I wrote this after watching three hours of other people playing preview copies of the game in March. The previews stated that the game's story is three acts long and spans twenty two levels in total.
The main new feature is the shield which replaces both the Meat Hook and the Chainsaw, and can also of course block attacks. Anytime an enemy attacks, regardless if it's physical or a projectile it will either be red or green. Red attacks are unblockable and you should dodge or strafe to avoid them, but green attacks can be absorbed, or parried by your shield. With precise timing multiple parries will make the Doom Slayer go to an empowered state and do a lot more damage for a few minutes, sort of like a rage mode in other games. You can also charge and dash into demons with the shield as well as throw it, but that will leave you vulnerable to projectiles until it flies back. There are six gun weapon types in the game, each also having an upgraded damage variant. There's the Combat Shotgun and the Super Shotgun, the Plasma Accelerator and Twin Shot Cycler, The Shredder and Spike Impaler, The Rocket Launcher and Grenade Launcher, The Chainshot which is like a retractable flail, and supposedly the BFG is also hidden somewhere in the game. There are also three melee weapons, a normal Mace, a Flail which is sort of like whip with a metal ball at the end and people speculate that the third weapon is a sword. Both Shield and Melee Strikes have at least three charges, and when you run out you'll either have to wait a while or perform a bunch of parry attacks to refill it faster. Everything can also be upgraded with gold or rubies at Sentinel Shrines within the levels.
In the Siege level there are special groups of demons that attack in a formation and have a temporary invincible Leader Demon commanding them. The underlings have shields and must be heated up with rapid machine gun fire to weaken them, and then do a melee attack to destroy their shield and finally kill them. Once enough of the lesser demons have been killed, the morale of the evil battalion will diminish and the leader can take damage. Killing the leader with also eliminate all the remaining minions. There are also some larger variants of normal enemies that grant health, shield and armor upgrades for defeating them. These larger enemies are also the only ones that still allow Glory Kills to be preformed, besides finishing off some bosses like in the vehicle levels.
So in some levels in Doom Eternal there were gigantic robots decorating the levels called Atlan Mechs. In Doom the Dark Age you can control an Atlan Mech for three levels. The Atlan robot moves slowly, and mostly seems to get into boxing matches with lanky demons during the one level I've seen gameplay footage of. Eventually though a double barrel machine gun flew from the sky and landed conveniently right in front of the Atlan's feet. At that point it was no longer necessary to challenge foes to fisticuffs and you could simply mow them down with the very large rifle.
There are also at least four levels that have the Doom Slayer hop on a fire breathing dragon and attack flying demon controlled ships called Hall Barges. People who play this section said the gameplay seemed a bit like Panzer Dragoon or Star Fox, but very out of place in a Doom game. Most complaints were related to locking on to a Hell Barge ship and then dodging several waves of red projectiles until a green one appeared that you could fire back. Then like in Halo or Battlefront you have to land on the Hell Barge, kill everything on it and set the engine core to explode before taking back to the skies on the Cyber Dragon. What's frustrating is that the developers have said that they used the money and time it would take to make a multiplayer mode and instead made the Atlan Robot and Dragon riding stages which seems like a pretty egregious error in judgment.
