It will never not seem weird to me that turgid guffola like "Doom: The Dark Ages is a premium singleplayer campaign featuring three core pillars of engagement" have moved from quarterly investor statements to consumer-oriented marketing. Luckily for all of us today, that stultifying corpo-speak isn't the real reason we're here: We're here to check out a new trailer for Doom: The Dark Ages, revealing—for the very first time!—the Cosmic Realm, which has teamed up with Hell for reasons unknown but that are surely not good.
I have to give credit to game director Hugo Martin for the remarkable flexibility he shows here. After reminding us about the game's "pillars of engagement," he effortlessly shifts to the horrific glories that await in this new realm: "You will bear witness to the cyclopean architecture of this Lovecraftian dimension as you explore its darkest secrets and battle its most insane enemies!"
At first I thought he was just spouting some Dio-style nonsense because it sounds cool, but as a matter of curiosity I looked it up and yup, it's a real thing. Cyclopean masonry, according to Britannica, uses very large blocks of stone connected without masonry; examples can be found in Crete, Italy, and Greece, and the name comes from the ancient belief that they were constructed by the Cyclopes, a Thracian race of giants. So, score one for Hugo.
The Cosmic Dimension does seem more pointedly Lovecraftian than Doom's usual take on Hell, although in a broader sense it seems to me like a distinction without a difference: They're both poorly lit, filled with jerks, in desperate need of maintenance, and just generally suck. But it does afford id Software the opportunity to create some new enemies by reworking old ones as multi-dimensional "hybrid" creatures.
There's also a new weapon to wheel around, "an ancient tool from dimensions beyond our own" called the Reaver Chainshot, which looks a bit like a handheld mass relay that fires a cannonball attached to a chain. It pops off in two modes: A quick, light attack that will put a bonk on a single enemy, and a charged attack that will—back to you, Hugo—"unleash brutal long range melee strikes, turning your enemy's insides into demonic pulp."
"This weapon is unlike anything we've ever had in an id game," Martin says in the video. "It brings the fantastic melee combat featured in Doom: The Dark Ages to a whole new brutal level of bonebreaking destruction."
No matter what else you think of all this, you have to admit that a "melee gun" is definitely a very Doom idea.
Our own Doomslayer Joshua Wolens went hands-on with Doom: The Dark Ages back in March and came away impressed: While questions remain, he found it a "great, ridiculous power fantasy" in the few hours he had with it. It's set to launch on May 15, and is up for pre-purchase now on Steam.
