The Top Games of 2020 – DOOM Eternal

I’m working on a series about the games that kept me busy this year. These are my favorites, not necessarily “the best.” Also, these posts will be in no particular order. We’ll do a podcast in the near future ranking our top games of 2020.

DOOM ETERNAL

You may have forgotten Doom Eternal came out this year. I couldn’t blame you. March feels like ages ago.

But it still stands out in my mind. And any time a game can overcome the recency bias of other games to stand out by the end of the year, it deserves a mention during these lists.

I enjoyed Doom 2016, but I fell off of it and never finished it. Doom Eternal seems to have somehow made the already very good-feeling combat even better, and managed to explore the Doom Slayer’s past in an unexpected way.

Doom’s now signature combination of face paced gunplay and booming music are so well designed and play so well together that once you start getting into a rhythm with it, the combat feels like no other shooter.

There’s double jumps, dashes, melees, a shoulder mounted launcher, glory kills and lots of guns. Seamlessly combining all these elements into fluid motion while Mick Gordon’s music blares in the background is maybe as good as video games get in the shooter genre.

This is the one game on my list of favorites from 2020 that I have very little to say about. It’s a great feeling shooter that’s a blast to play.

Maybe the biggest disappointment is that they’ve still yet to come up with a multiplayer mode I find compelling enough to stick with. Even a cooperative mode of some sort would extend my interest. Oh well, maybe next time.