Worthless dreaming
In a dying world
That I already love
So I can’t give it up yet.

Intro Written February 12th, 2021.

This is my third revision of this opening paragraph. On previous attempts I tried to make it sound professional, to acknowledge and somewhat handwave the events of 2020, and make a fun and inoffensive list of albums that might give somebody something to listen to and even brighten their day a little bit.

I tried, I really did.

But here’s the thing:

2020 was fucked.

There is very little I could say positive about the past year. In my initial writeup of this intro I almost played it off as “but hey, at least we got some good music out of it right?” but even that comes with a sweeping caveat that can’t be ignored: the death of live music and entertainment to the COVID-19 pandemic. No matter how much you try to kick that can down the road eventually it’s gonna come back and bite you, and that’s what happened in the writing of this list. There were multiple points in writing the final segments on the list in which I broke down into tears, finally being forced to put to words what I’d refused to acknowledge until this point. I took a month longer than I wanted to because I dreaded it, I couldn’t bring myself to face those final albums which are so intimately tied with the issues we’d all faced this past year.

And so I tried, initially, to keep it clean. I stayed professional, and made a standard “here are the albums and this is why I like ‘em” list. It felt good at first! But the longer I went on the more and more it started to feel like a lie. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when it happened but there was a shift in mood along the way, and an acceptance of what 2020 really meant to me, not just what I wanted it to mean. I’ve kept all of the original text from my first rundown intact, both for the sake of integrity and because I believe it paints an incredibly vivid picture of the mindset that I’ve been in these past few months going through the writing process. This is easily my roughest work, and I have no intention of using it in any professional sense, but it is exactly as I feel it needs to be. This is my 2020 breakdown in 25 albums (including EPs.)

List writing began December 21st, 2020

25. Tricot – 真っ黒 (Makkuro)

If I could only list one thing that I think Japan does better than anywhere else in the world, it would be Math Rock. Tricot, with their energetic performances, hooky melodies, and misleading accessibility, are one of my personal favorite examples of this. With crisp and spacious drums, prominent bass, and the twinkling guitar we’ve come to expect, the band builds a collection of tracks that range from hard-hitting punk-y ragers to softer ballads, all with a hidden layer of technicality under its poppier sensibilities. The production is crisp and gives a great amount of space to the flawlessly performed instrumentation, but the real highlight here is the vocals. Ikkyu Nakajima has a way of captivating the listener with her soothing tones before erupting into frantic barking and high-energy singing tying the tracks together with some incredibly memorable hooks and harmonies. Even after ten years, Tricot proves that they have no intentions of slowing down with a fantastically captivating effort that keeps me coming back for more.

Favorite Tracks: 右脳左脳 | 秘蜜 | 真っ黒

24. Aesop Rock – Spirit World Field Guide

Eleven albums and over twenty years into his career, it’s astonishing to me that Aesop Rock has managed to maintain a consistently quality catalog of records, and his first foray into the new decade is no exception. On Spirit World Field Guide Aesop’s iconic verbosity and unpredictable rhyming schemes are backed by some of his best instrumentals to date, fusing the crisp chiptune-esque synths of The Impossible Kid with some of the more psychedelic and bizarre elements of last year’s Malibu Ken to create some of his most interesting and evolving tracks yet. From the opening moments to the last, a constant sense of restlessness populates the tracks. Paranoia, determination, confusion, and aggression color the dense lyrics which are made more digestible by Aesop’s pronounced delivery and some incredible hooks that leave every track feeling distinct from the others. With hardly a single dud in the tracklist, I’m once again left in awe of the sheer consistency that Aesop Rock has managed to maintain after all this time.

Favorite Tracks: Gauze | Coveralls | Kodokushi

23. Deftones – Ohms

Despite my disappointment in 2016’s Gore, there has never been a time where I’ve doubted Deftones’ ability to craft fantastic alternative metal tracks, and with Ohms it really feels like they’ve hit their stride. With a greater focus on their heavier guitar riffs and Chino’s range of vocal stylings, and by fully embracing the melodic and shoegaze-y elements that helped them stand out from the crowd of 90s Alternative Metal, they’ve brought forward a project that not beautifully exemplifies why Deftones remains relevant to this day, and created a sound that is unique to them. From the dynamic and beautiful tones on ‘Pompeji’ to the balls-out heft and aggression of ‘This Link Is Dead,’ the band pulls off every sound they attempt here, and play to their strengths without ever becoming stagnant. There was never a doubt in my mind that Deftones would be able to pull off another great album, but I’m glad it turned out so unique.

Favorite Tracks: This Link Is Dead | Pompeji | Error

UBOA – The Flesh of the World

Hot off the release of her masterwork The Origin of My Depression, the album I crowned as my album of the year last year, Xandra is back with a new EP and a new sound to go with it. No longer consumed by seas of industrial noise and harrowing shrieks of emotional turmoil, Uboa’s sound has shifted to something more softly introspective and beautiful. With dozens of layers of synths, choral harmonies, and keys, we’re presented with a soundscape that truly lends a sense of epic scale and proportion to the monumental performances that Xandra delivers. The songwriting here is tighter, more confined than last time around, leading to a sense of forward motion and purpose in the tracklist, with some truly hair-raising climaxes. While not quite the viscerally distressing monolith of her best work, it holds a special place as a moment of growth in her career, and for Uboa as a project going forward. I can’t help but wonder whether or not this more melodic songwriting style will translate to a full album in the future, but as-is this is easily one of the best EPs I’ve heard all year.

Favorite Tracks: Inside/Outside | The Flesh of the World | God Unbounded

21. Loathe – I Let It In and It Took Everything

I had never heard of Loathe until this year, and honestly I still haven’t gotten around to checking out their debut record, but I honestly feel that this is one of the most impressive and fantastic metal records of the year. Not dissimilar to the ways that Deftones fused Alternative Metal with Shoegaze later in the year, Loathe fuses and contrasts the sheer ballistic energy of Alternative Metal with the distorted and warm sounds of shoegaze to craft one of the most impressively smooth listening experiences I’ve had with a metal record in a long while. Though never lacking in heavy and intense riffing and guitarwork, where the band truly shines here is in its melodic moments, where everything comes together as a beautiful soundscape with gorgeous vocals, driving instrumentals, and a splash of shoegaze distortion to seal the deal. When the album does get heavy, though, it’s practically unrivalled in its field this year. The warmth and breadth of the mix translates perfectly between sounds and leads to an all-encompassing sense of scale to everything being thrust forth. What might normally be seen as relatively standard hardcore riffs are made infinitely more special and fully solidifies the record and the band as one to look out for.

Favorite Tracks: Is It Really You? | Gored | I Let It in and It Took Everything…

It’s been about seven years since the Playstation 4’s launch in 2013, a console that, despite in retrospect not being that massive of a leap from the previous generation, managed to host some of the best and most technically impressive games ever made. Now in 2020 Sony is back with another box, the Playstation 5 and, while not quite being their biggest game-changer system in terms of features, it comes damn close with additions that promise to push gaming forward in a big way. Despite some caveats, the overall experience of using a Playstation 5 is crisp, streamlined, and above all fast.

A Necessary Jump Forward

From a hardware perspective, the leap forward is obvious. This is thanks to a custom 825GB SSD, built from the ground up with the console’s specs in mind to maximise its potential and its usable power. Able to process and load upwards of 8 gigabytes per second, in contrast with the PS4’s 50-100 megabytes, load times are essentially a non-factor going forward, at least for exclusive titles. This applies not only to games, but to the firmware and UI itself. I tested a few games from cold boot (console turned all the way off) to in game running around and found that Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon’s Souls both averaged just under 50 seconds, while Astro’s Playroom came it at an incredible 35 seconds. Comparing this to games like Bloodborne and the previous Spider-Man game on PS4, it’s night and day.

Now, you may have noticed a pretty big caveat in the above paragraph. 825GB? That’s it? Unfortunately yes, the PS5’s internal storage is just shy of a single Terabyte, with no currently available storage upgrade options. What’s worse is that only 667.2GBs are usable, and a whopping 80 of those are taken up by a mysterious “Other” section which seems to be tied to backwards compatibility, as when I moved all my PS4 games off the console onto an external drive it practically disappeared. What this means is that some pretty massive concessions need to be made by any user with a large or growing collection of games for the platform. As file sizes increase, this will only get worse and worse, with games like Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War already taking up over 200 gigabytes of space, functionally a third of the total storage. PS5 games are also not capable of being played off an external drive, though backwards compatible games are. Strangely though, you can’t even store them there temporarily to download another game to play, you must uninstall it completely to make room which means hard decisions may be a regular occurrence for some users. While Sony has promised to make upgrade options available eventually, the low storage capacity at launch has real consequences on the overall user experience.

Aside from the storage speed and capacity, there’s not much to gawk at when it comes to the PS5’s Hardware. It’s boasting a Custom RDNA 2 graphics processor capable of not only up to 8k output, but raytracing at adaptive 4k resolution in certain games. It’s a technical leap miles ahead of that between the PS3 and PS4, and makes a massive difference when it comes to futureproofing the system. 16 Gigabytes of GDDR6 RAM gives developers far more leeway with their development, and combined with the aforementioned SSD makes far more dense and detailed environments possible in games going forward. All of this with the added perk of being completely silent when in use, unlike the jet engine that was the PS4. It’s able to do this because of its massive size, which means a sacrifice in convenience, but I find it to be totally worth it. Ultimately it will come down to how developers utilize and become acquainted with the hardware to determine whether or not the jump is enough to sustain a whole generation, but given some of the incredible experiences the PS4 managed to squeeze out of its hardware this past year alone, I have high hopes.

Approaching the Dream

One of the features that has kept the Xbox line of consoles in my mind this past generation and moving forward has been their dedication to backwards compatibility. On this year’s Xbox Series S/X Microsoft is striving to make games from all the way back to their first system playable on newer systems with notable enhancements such as 4K upscaled resolution and better framerates. When Sony announced the PlayStation 5 I couldn’t help but be hopeful that they’d do the same, and with their marketing before launch seeming to focus on the “Legacy of the PlayStation” I was all but certain that was what they’d do. I did get my wish in the end, but only partly. The PS5 is capable of playing practically every single released game for the PS4 natively via either disc or download. The store from last gen is carried over with almost 3,000 available games, all of which will play on the system with only about a dozen exceptions.

It’s no secret that the PS4 would struggle at times to maintain steady framerates, especially in later multiplat games like Battlefield V and Far Cry: New Dawn. While exclusives designed for the platform where far less likely to run into such issues, even some of those were restricted by the aging hardware, most notable amongst them being the occasionally frame-y but gorgeous Ghost of Tsushima and the technical nightmare of Days Gone. On the PS5 those issues are seemingly remedied entirely by the sheer power of the hardware, with most games running flawlessly without a single frame drop. Games with PS4 Pro enhancements run flawlessly in Fidelity mode, often locked at 60fps with rare exception, that exception being games with framerate caps. Many developers would lock their PS4 games to 30fps to preserve energy and avoid frame drops in more intensive moments, a move that makes sense but has unfortunate consequences for the PS5, where it can be jarring to return to a lower framerate after being accustomed to the practically solid 60 that its games run at. The most notable and disappointing example for me is Bloodborne, my self-proclaimed “favorite game of all time” and one I was ecstatic to play at a smooth 60fps, only to find that it was locked at 30 because of the game’s physics engine. Some more recent games, including the aforementioned Ghost of Tsushima and Days Gone, have received patches in the wake of the PS5’s launch, making them some of the best games to play on your console once you’re done with the new lineup. They run smooth and solid at 60fps and even have some minor graphical enhancements to sweeten the deal.

Ultimately it’d be a lie if I said I was disappointed with the execution of backwards compatibility on the PS5, but I also can’t help but see the missed opportunity it poses. The idea of a single place to play all of my games across five whole generations is just too good to pass up, not to mention a way to finally play PS2 games in HD effectively. If they had gone all in with the feature I feel that it would have been an unbeatable deal that nobody should pass up, but with where the system is now it works more as a nice timekiller while we wait for more titles to release.

Only Half the Story

These days when you buy a new console, there’s an expectation that there will be a unique experience outside of just playing video games. The PlayStation 5 plays it safe in this regard, offering a cleaner and faster version of the last console’s UI and UX with a few notable additions. The homepage is a more stylish and crisp iteration of the last, with smaller and smoother icons taking up less space on screen, leaving the bottom 2/3rds of the screen available for game info and a stylish piece of art. Themes are gone this time around, but it’s hard to imagine how they’d pull that off given the fact that games now take up the whole screen and play their own music when scrolled over. All the way to the left of the Home Screen is the store, which is mindblowingly quick and easy to navigate relative to the PS4. There’s no loading screen, no separate executable, it’s a menu like anything else, laid out conveniently for your purchasing pleasure. It seems obvious that they’d make the money-spending part of the console the easiest to use, but it’s still a welcome change.

For subscribers to PS+, a service which previously allowed you to play online multiplayer games and receive a couple select games monthly, there is a new tab with a new feature unique to the PS5, that being a list of twenty (at time of writing) of the bigger PS4 game available to play at any time for subscribers. Similarly to PS+ monthly games you only have access to them for the time you are subscribed to the service, but with excellent games like Bloodborne, God of War, Persona 5, and Monster Hunter: World included it’s hard for me to complain.

While not technically a new feature, the PS5’s in-game overlay is far more feature-rich than its precursor, and is now an integral part of the console’s experience. The overlay is split into two segments: the customizable quick action bar and the dynamic cards system. On the quick action bar you can access the home menu, notifications, accessories, and power settings, as well as optional accessibility and streaming settings. New to the console are a game switcher which allows you to hotswap games on the fly, and the Game Base which is essentially the social hub, allowing you to start group chats, send invites, and call friends. A little more interesting is the cards system, which acts as a progress tracker as well as a way to navigate your game. It shows trophies you’re close to obtaining, with statistics and info about what you need to do to complete them, as well as various possible activities which can be immediately warped to by simply clicking the card. The system is also capable of tracking your current objective and progress and, with a PS+ membership, provide you curated video hints and tips to make some trickier puzzles or collectibles easier to complete. It won’t be a gamechanger for everyone, but it’s a great option for users who want to get to the meat of the game faster or who don’t want to make vast traversals across the enormous landmasses that make up most games these days, only to find a single collectible or side mission. All of this is optional, of course, and is up to the developers’ discretion, but if nothing else it’s an interesting example of how the hardware can be used in interesting ways.

Putting the Player in Control

We’ve come to my favorite aspect of the whole system, and the one I was most shocked by: the DualSense controller. At a glance it may look like a simple fusion between the DualShock 4 and the Xbox One controller, and in hand it could certainly feel like that, but a slew of new and impressive features differentiate it enough to fully warrant both the change of name and slightly inflated price tag.

In terms of what you’d expect from a modern game controller, everything it there. The shape and feel is more comfortable without moving any of the buttons from where you expect them to be. The battery life is solid, generally lasting me a normal day of playtime without ever running out of charge. The thumbsticks grip well, and the buttons are responsive, if occasionally mushy. The controller itself feels solid and sturdy, far heavier than previous controllers in the DualShock line. None of these things are what make the controller shine, though. The real magic lies in the haptic feedback, the triggers, and how the two work together with each other and with the internal speaker to enhance the players immersion in some truly incredible ways.

Remember when the Switch was first being shown off and they made a big deal out of “HD Rumble,” only to have a single-digit number of games use it properly? The DualSense seems to be doing the best they can to circumvent that by really going all in on the feature, offering a level of fidelity that’s hard to describe without using tactile adjectives like grainy, metallic, or hollow. In Astro’s Playroom, the pack-in game which acts as a showcase of the DualSense’s capabilities, the controller responds faintly to every step you take, making slight but noticeable alterations to the texture as you walk over different surfaces. Walking through a sandstorm will cause the controller to shake in ways that feel precisely as if it’s being hit with individual grains of sand, and walking through the rain will make it feel as though individual raindrops are falling on different areas on the controller. It’s a difficult feature to explain but believe me when I say that it’s truly a gamechanger for most of the games that use it, and it makes playing games that don’t use the feature feel empty.

The other most important element is the triggers. If you’ve ever used a Nintendo GameCube controller you’ll already have a decent frame of reference for what this thing is doing. On that controller the triggers were analog, with a button at the end that would click in and be a separate input. The DualSense controller is able to create those “buttons” anywhere in the trigger’s depth at any time, in interaction with the software. This allows for something like the rock-climbing minigame in Astro’s Playroom, where grabbing onto rocks has you breaking past a thin “barrier” in the trigger, but grabbing onto cracked rocks requires a lighter touch, so as not to grab too hard and break them. Another example is drawing a bowstring, where the further you pull the harder it gets to hold the trigger down.

As a whole, the controller combines what made the DualShock 4 so reliable with some truly unique new features to create a controller that has me questioning what the Xbox Series will do going forward, and has me anticipating their interpretation of these ideas in their seemingly inevitable second controller. It’s a major selling point for the system, and something that unfortunately you kind of have to try to understand.

A Question of Value

Ultimately, I love my PS5. I think it’s an absolutely incredible system that pushes the boundaries for console hardware in some very exciting ways. For me, it was absolutely worth the $500 price point, and I can see it lasting me years with no issue. Unfortunately, it’s more apparent than ever that purchasing a $500 piece of hardware isn’t something that most people will be able to justify. In a time where income could disappear at the drop of a hat, if it hasn’t already, I struggle to recommend the console to anyone but the most financially secure or the most hardcore of players. When I purchased my console on launch day I was in a significantly more financially secure spot than I am now, and if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t yet have bills or rent to pay, I would probably regret my purchase far more. Ultimately your decision on purchasing the console comes down to what having a new console on release means to you. While the launch games are incredibly good, I can’t help but feel that they’re such a known quantity that it’s hard to justify purchasing a new console just for them, especially when most of them are also available on the PS4.

Overall, while I consider the PS5 to be a stellar piece of hardware, it’s not an essential one. The features are incredibly cool and at times game-changing, but it will likely be a few years before we start to truly see the in-game impact of them. To me, the PS5 is absolutely worth the price of admission, but it ultimately comes down to what you consider to be valuable in your life, now more than ever.

When I first heard that All Thoughts Fly, the latest record by composer and singer Anna von Hausswolff would be entirely instrumental, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. Part of what had made her so interesting in the past was the contrast and collusion between the lush instrumentals she crafted and her clean and vivid vocals. Even more confusing to me was the fact that this record is composed, performed, and recorded entirely on a single pipe organ, an instrument she’d used in the past mostly to back and bolster up the leading instrumental.

All Thoughts Fly is not like Hausswolff’s previous records. Where they were far more structured and written, fitting neatly into the definition of “song,” this record feels more like a group of explorations through long-winded but singular ideas stretched out into a single piece that makes up the album. While tracks like Dolore di Orsini and the closer, Outside the Gate (for Bruna) feel more composed and performed than the twelve-minute title track, for example, each track maintains a very loose sense that lends to the feeling that it could have been improvised, at least to an extent.

I cannot help but assume that this feeling is intentional, as the loose and almost meandering structure of the tracks gives them a far more palpable sense of both loss and hope throughout. As the track Sacro Bosco begins we’re greeted by the crushing pounding of bass that would sound right at home in a horror soundtrack. As the track progresses however, it begins to loosen into a less structured and more free composition, with the low drone being overshadowed by glistening highs that fly through the air like windchimes. On Persefone there is only one progression throughout the entire seven-minute runtime, but this drone is made far more approachable and given new meaning by layers upon layers being added one by one. There’s an incredible sense of melancholy and sorrow in these chords and while there are no words, there’s a lot to be extracted from both the name of the piece and the tone it’s encompassed by.

Admittedly, I know very little about the pipe organ and its mechanics, both in how it is played and the sounds it can produce. The descriptions I’ve used for the sounds have and will be based entirely on what they sound like to me, a somewhat uninvolved listener. With that said, it’s hard for me to imagine some of these tones coming solely from the instrument I used to hear fill my childhood church hall. The reverberating drilling noise and repeated clicking on Entering come to mind as something I have to assume was recorded with some kind of reverb effect, but is nonetheless incredibly effective as a dreamlike revisit of the first track’s ideas. The aforementioned bass tones on Sacro Bosco are incredibly jarring and moody, and while I’m sure the organ is capable of producing notes that low, I’m curious about the specifics of this production as it almost feels muted in comparison to the rest of the instrumentation.

The few issues I have with the record mostly play as a counter to their strengths, particularly in how the tracks drone on. While I’ve already cited Persefone as an example of this drone done to perfection, I can’t help but find that the trance-like state provided by the title track isn’t strong enough to hold me for the whole twelve-minute runtime, and while I do find myself reinvigorated by the addition of bass at the 8-minute mark, the structureless nature of the track makes it difficult to latch onto anything, leaving me wondering if there’s a way the track could have been more memorable outside of a few key moments.

At the end of the day I’m happy to admit that I was wrong to be skeptical of Anna von Hausswolff’s ability to craft powerful pieces with just a single instrument, and while I wish at times that I’d been given something more tangible to hold on to, the emotional resonance of All Thoughts Fly is potent enough to keep me on my toes and awaiting whatever comes next.

Favorite Tracks: Persefone, Sacro Bosco, Outside the Gate (for Bruna)

Least Favorite Track: All Thoughts Fly

Rating: 7/10

Buy the album here: https://annavonhausswolffsl.bandcamp.com/album/all-thoughts-fly

This is part of a semi-daily series of reviews as a project throughout the month of November.

For the third year in a row, Southern Hip Hop powerhouse Denzel Curry has dropped a record, this time teaming up with renowned rap producer Kenny Beats, known for his beats on tracks by JPEGMAFIA and Zack Fox. In just seventeen minutes they pull together one of the most enjoyable and airtight records of either of their careers.

Right out the gate, it’s obvious that Kenny Beats is taking a lot of inspiration from classic hip hop producers on this record, particularly Madlib, and giving it his own glitchy flair. Pitch-shifted vocals are abundant throughout, and skipping beats are basically a given. Songs like Take_it_Back_v2, Lay_Up.m4a, and DIET_ show his talent at crafting hard-hitting, memorable tracks with jarring basslines, vibrant samplework, and timely use of vocal manipulation. On the other hand, So.Incredible.pkg, Track07, and the climactic ‘Cosmic’.m4a show off his ability to build more reserved and intricate beats, with lo-fi samples over smooth bass and sampled jazz drumwork. Every track ties into the next while still being divided into very obvious tracks, and lays the groundwork for Denzel to do his thing.

And boy does he ever. The delivery on UNLOCKED is some of the most hard, aggressive, and varied he’s laid down to date. At times he sounds like if DMX rapped on Madvillainy, and that’s absolutely a positive in my book. With the help of some pitch shifting shaking it up he gets away with practically nonstop aggression practically unnoticed, and lends to an exhilarating listening experience front to back. The fifth track, DIET_, is one of the most obvious examples of Denzel’s tonal range on the record, building from a low-energy spoken flow all the way to practically screaming like on his Bulls on Parade cover.

Lyrically Denzel is on the top of his game with some of his best wordplay to date. I could fill a whole review with one-liners from the record, but instead I’ll just include a few of my favorites here:

Overall if I had to make one gripe with the record it would be that it could have been fleshed out a little bit more. At only 17 minutes in length it’s an incredibly tight and consistent listening experience, but some of the tracks feel like there’s more that could have been done to build them into full tracks rather than a collection of good ideas. Despite that I can’t deny how great of a time I’ve had and continue to have with the record, and with banger after banger it’s hard to hold much against it.

Favorite Tracks: DIET_, Lay_Up.m4a, Take_it_Back_v2

Least Favorite Track: Track 01

Rating: 9/10

Buy the album here: https://denzelcurrymusic.bandcamp.com/album/unlocked

This is part of a semi-daily series of reviews as a project throughout the month of November.

Here’s the thing about Old School Death Metal (OSDM,) the genre kind of peaked close to when it began with bands like Death, Morbid Angel, and Autopsy. It would take a lot for a new record in the genre to stand out to me as particularly interesting or engaging and, as fun as it can be, I don’t think Necrot’s latest effort Mortal quite cuts it these days.

Starting with the positives first, because there are definitely plenty, it’s undeniable that the performers on Mortal are at the top of their game with their riffs and songwriting in their chosen style. The drums are the real highlight here, with lightning speed and precision throughout. Fantastic cymbalwork and time signature changes keep the playing diverse and drives forward the riffs which, for the most part, are engaging and powerful. The palm-muted bass is difficult to hear for the most part, and while I wish it had more overall presence I can tell that the sound would be a lot weaker without it. The guttural vocals as meat & potatoes as they are, are at least entertaining throughout and are never high enough in the mix to irritate me and hold enough power to engage me.

Where the instrumentals start to bug me are during many of the guitar solos. These aren’t poorly performed by any means, it’s clear to me that the lead guitarist is incredibly technically proficient and knows his way around a fretboard. The issue lies in the fact that for the most part they’re ripped straight out of classic Death Metal records without much taste. This is particularly noticeable in tracks like Asleep Forever and the especially phoned-in sounding title track. Solos like the ones in Stench of Decay (maybe the most stereotypical OSDM song title I’ve ever seen) and Sinister Will break up the monotony in a far more effective way, and those wind up being some of my favorite tracks on the record, but for the most part I find myself more irritated than impressed.

My biggest gripe with Mortal overall is a general disappointment in the songwriting and structure, particularly in the latter half of the record. While Your Hell and again Stench of Decay are bombastic enough to engage the whole way through, by the last thirteen minutes of the record I find myself wishing it had ended already. Malevolent Intentions is by no means a bad track, but I find myself underwhelmed by how few chances it takes and how by-the-numbers it ends up sounding. The title track is the most egregious example of this, it being over eight minutes in length while never really pushing the envelope enough to justify the space it takes up. Again, nothing here is particularly bad per se, but it’s hard not to wish for something a little bit more substantial when Death Metal as a genre has pushed its boundaries so much further in recent decades. 

Despite my strong reservations with the style of the project and its length in the back half, I can’t deny the kick I get out of the first three tracks and Sinister Will. I’m not sure if I wish the album as a whole were shorter or if I just want something a little more experimental, but I’m hopeful that with their abundant technical ability they can pull off something a little more engaging next time.

Favorite Tracks: Your Hell, Sinister Will, Stench of Decay

Least Favorite Track: Mortal

Rating: 6/10

Buy the album here: https://necrot.bandcamp.com/album/mortal

It seems like an eternity since ID Software shocked the world by making a good Doom reboot in 2016, proving that the tried-and-true genre of the FPS, a genre they helped to create in the first place, could be more than the stagnating trope it was slowly becoming. I didn’t get around to the game until mid-2018 – a mixture of lacking a platform to play it on and sheer ignorance on my part – but when I finally did it quickly became my favorite shooter of all time, and immediately I hungered for a sequel. That sequel is finally here, and I spent well over a week after launch playing it constantly, only stopping to write for this site. At some point while blasting through Doom Eternal’s later missions, I came to a realization. 

This is the greatest first-person shooter I have ever played.

And honestly? The competition isn’t even that close. In my time playing games I have played tons of shooters, and enjoyed most of them, but ultimately nothing has captivated me so viscerally as this masterwork. Let’s dive in.

A main point of anticipation leading up to Doom Eternal’s release for me was absolutely the visuals. They were incredible from not only a tech perspective (though there is no lack of impressive tech involved) but in their massive variety and color palette. Nearly every environment is distinct, and nearly every level unique. Through the ~15 hour campaign you’ll blast demons through ravaged cityscapes, space stations, ancient ruins overrun by foliage and, of course, hell. Relative to the 2016 game this is a massive step up. While the graphical fidelity of 2016 was undeniable, there were few levels that stood out visually from one another — an issue that is indisputably rectified this time around.

Elements of combat have been tweaked visually to give the gameplay a more visceral punch, with returning glory kills being tweaked to fit the Doom Slayer’s new toolkit and new ones remaining both creative and consistently entertaining. The enemy design and variety is also at an all-time peak, with veteran demons like the Revenant and Cacodemon being adjusted to better fit the newer, less grounded visual style (a controversial decision, but a fitting and welcome one in my book,) and new additions to the series, like the Whiplash and Mecha Zombie, fitting seamlessly into the massive cast of incredibly distinct enemies created solely for you to destroy. A new, incredible tech addition is the “Destructible Demons” system, by which enemies visually take various forms of physical damage with each hit. Shooting a Hell Knight in the arm with a shotgun will tear that arm right down to the bone, (a bone that can be broken and used to impale said hell knight’s skull, by the way) and Arachnotrons can be reduced to piles of blue mush by a single volley of rockets, leaving them significantly more vulnerable. It can be easy to miss with the intense speed of gameplay, but these details do wonders for the overall experience, and are hugely appreciated.

Along with some more cartoonish, “video game-y” enemy designs, Doom Eternal brings a flush of color to the HUD and gameplay elements, with ammo types being color-coded and really popping against the background, and the UI having a far more vibrant color palette, with contrasting greens, purples, and reds giving everything a more retro feel. It’s a welcome addition for me, but one that I absolutely understand not gelling with everyone, especially if you loved the more grounded style of 2016.

I hesitate to mention my only issue with the visual aspect of Doom Eternal because I’m fairly certain it is an issue with my system, and not the game, but I feel like I wouldn’t be doing my job here if I didn’t. I experienced many framerate dips throughout the game. It never went below 40fps, but it was noticeable, and fairly frequent. I do not have fantastic hardware, so I assumed it was on my end, and it still may be, but running a performance checker showed that I was running well below maximum in every field, and the issue was on every graphical setting. It was never enough to diminish my enjoyment while playing, but it is worth noting in case anyone is having a similar issue.

Overall the visuals of Doom Eternal are, to me, a massive improvement over the 2016 game in every way, and I was constantly taken aback by the spectacle I was engaging with. It truly is a visual powerhouse to behold. 

The previous game definitely had a story, but it was seemingly secondary in every way, and could be easily pushed to the background for anyone who would have preferred a purely gameplay-focused experience. Under the facade of its “play comes first” intention, however, was an incredibly deep lore found in codex entries detailing every aspect of the Doom universe, all written with a deadpan seriousness that only works because it’s clear that both the writer and the reader know how ridiculous it all is. Both of these elements return in Doom Eternal, but under a far brighter spotlight.

For better or worse, the story in Doom Eternal is front-and-center. The Doom Slayer’s objective is no longer just to kill every demon he gets his hands on, (though that’s certainly still a motive,) but there are motives far greater than him at play, with the fate of humanity in the hands of multiple factions with their own motivations. The plot is visually delivered in gameplay, but far more prominently it is delivered through frequent cutscenes, at least one per level. These cutscenes break the first-person perspective and show interactions between the Doom Slayer and representatives of the aforementioned factions, both peaceful and… not.

This decision will absolutely be a point of contention for players as they make their way through Doom Eternal. While I personally enjoyed the story and its many twists and turns, and was not distracted by the representation in cutscenes, there will absolutely be players who hate this decision and would have preferred it either remain in first-person, or not contain any cutscenes whatsoever. There is absolutely the option to skip these cutscenes, and if you don’t care about the story whatsoever that is a very viable option, but it is unfortunate that there is no option for people who would like to see the story but do not enjoy small movies in their games. It was not an issue for me, but there’s definitely a section of fans who this game may not serve.

The lore and codex entries make their return as well and are exactly as you remember them from the last game: incredibly intricate, detailed, and played completely straight-faced. They’re incredibly interesting if you want to take the time to read them, and one hundred percent optional which is, to me, a testament to how much passion the people at idsoft have for the series, to put in so much effort that the majority of people will not see.

But all of this story and visual spectacle is utterly pointless if the game to go alongside it isn’t good, right? It’s time to finally answer the question you probably wanted the answer to in the first place: how does the game play?

Doom Eternal plays better than any FPS on the market right now.

I am well aware of the gravity of that statement, but I have complete confidence when I say that there is no First-Person Shooter I would rather interact with than Doom Eternal.

Anyone who’s played Doom 2016 will tell you that the combat of that game centers around a core loop of resource management through aggression. It mandates aggressive play through the ‘Glory Kill’ system, through which you regenerate health by getting up close and personal, executing enemies with a visceral melee animation that spews health everywhere for you to pick up, allowing you to continue tearing through other enemies. An alternative to Glory Kills is the chainsaw, a tool you find limited fuel for throughout the level, and which replaces the health drops with ammunition of every type. The solution to every problem is to get more and more violent, blasting and tearing through everything in your path until you’re the last one standing.

Doom Eternal maintains this loop, and adds an extra few layers of depth on top of the already strategic gameplay of 2016. The most immediately noticeable change is the far more limited ammunition reserves, balanced by the regenerating chainsaw fuel. The chainsaw has three levels of fuel, the more fuel you have the larger the enemy you’re able to eliminate, same as the previous game. Here, however, the first level fills up over time, while the rest can be found in the levels, just like in the last game. The combination of these two mechanics facilitates an even more aggressive style of play, in which you rapidly seek out smaller “fodder” enemies to saw in half to keep your guns filled for the big ones, and leaves a layer of strategy in saving your fuel for the larger enemies, if you want to get rid of them in one hit.

Another resource that has been modified to encourage quick and aggressive play is that of armor. Previously, the only way to obtain armor was through pickups throughout the levels. That is still an option of course, but in Eternal a new weapon has been added to the arsenal: The Flame Belch. Essentially a shoulder-mounted flamethrower, the Flame Belch sets anything in front of you ablaze, allowing you to kill them faster and, when they die or take damage, causing them to drop armor everywhere. This applies any time an enemy is on fire, and once again continues the theme of “if you want something, you gotta kill something to get it.”

This brings us to the main tool of interaction with the game’s systems: the guns. Doom Eternal brings back a majority of the weapons from the previous games, with some notable changes and updates. The pistol has been completely removed from the game for the first time, seemingly a statement on the game’s message of pure aggression which the weakness of the pistol directly opposes, and in its place on the weapon wheel comes the BFG, which has been upgraded to weapon status rather than a hotkey “kill button.” Every other weapon returns, with the Gauss Cannon being renamed to the Ballista, and all of them are given a truckload of upgrades to work towards. Each weapon has two upgrade paths, each a different “mode” for the weapon, and each path can be upgraded to add more features, allowing you to truly customize your toolkit to fit your needs for creative killing. My personal favorite is the Meathook, an upgrade for the Super Shotgun that is literally a grappling hook, launching you towards the enemy to get close enough for a shotgun shell to the face (There’s even an upgrade that makes hooked enemies catch fire.)

The Meathook highlights another addition to Doom Eternal’s gameplay loop, the mobility. The double-jump returns and is immediately available, but more interestingly is the addition of the dash, a single button press that works like a dodge in many modern games. This is incredibly useful not only in combat, but in the new platforming sections. Platforming existed in Doom 2016 between combat sections, but it’s taken to a whole new level in Eternal, with climbable walls, air-dashes, and horizontal bars to swing off of like some kind of demon-slaying monkey. It’s this game’s way of offering space between combat encounters while never disengaging the player, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying it.

A couple more notable elements of combat before moving forward. Grenades are back, with a shoulder-mounted launcher similar to the Flame Belch that can also shoot ice bombs. I often found myself forgetting these existed, but when I remembered them it often made a huge difference in the outcome of the battle. A new mechanic called Blood Punch makes its debut, a limited-use melee move that instantly kills small demons and staggers large ones, and is also essential for knocking the armor off of some enemies.

It wouldn’t be a Doom game without memorable levels, and I must say that even after only my first playthrough it was incredibly easy for me to recognize every single level and its layout when I saw it played by someone else. This was obviously aided by the fantastic visual design, but the play spaces themselves felt more alive than ever in Doom Eternal. This is largely in part due to the increased mobility and faster pace, with every swinging bar and jump pad ingrained into my memory, but I also think that the enemy placement does a lot to push the player to make use of the terrain around them. No arena is ever too crowded to see every element, but they’re also packed with just enough enemies to force the player into a constant state of motion, evading fireballs and rockets at every turn. 
Speaking of enemies, let’s talk about them. The majority of demons in Doom Eternal have weak points or weaknesses, which encourages a diverse playstyle and weapon selection throughout. Notable examples are the Arachnotron, a spider-like enemy with a turret on its back that you must destroy to stagger it and deal massive damage, and the Cacodemon, a flying beholder-like creature who opens its large mouth before every attack, making it incredibly easy to launch a grenade in there, blowing it up from the inside. Not every enemy is a hit, I groaned every time the snake-like Whiplash or the demon-summoning Archvile showed up, but they are simple enough to dispatch and never truly distract from the core gameplay loop. If you’ve played Doom Eternal, you probably know what I’m about to bring up. We need to talk about the Marauder.

The Marauder is an enemy introduced a little under halfway through the game, and he is the single most talked about feature of the game, and the most widely hated. The Marauder is an enemy who is slated to be in a similar league to you in combat, and mechanically it shows. He has an axe, a shield, and a shotgun, all of which he uses in various situations. The tutorial popup you receive upon first confronting him says to keep at “medium range” to fight him, only attacking when his eyes flash green while he’s swinging his axe. Unlike other popups, though, this one is completely mandatory to follow, because if you don’t he will obliterate you. If you stay too close, he shoots you with his shotgun to knock you back, if you stay too far he launches an axe blade as a projectile, and if you attack him at any time when he’s not going for a melee hit, he brings up a shield that is completely invulnerable to any attack. He also summons a spectral dog to attack you as a distraction, though I never quite figured out what triggers it. It’s a waiting game where you stand at an unspecified range waiting for him to attack so you can hit him with a shotgun over and over again. In the context of being a boss, which is how he’s introduced, he’s a great breath of fresh air which forces you to switch up your strategy, the issue is that he doesn’t stay as a boss. In the latter half of the game he shows up during some normal combat encounters and completely destroys the flow of combat, forcing you to either ignore him in favor of the others enemies, just tanking his massive hits, or try and remain within his undefined “medium range” radius. It’s incredibly stressful and while it did not ruin the fun I was having, it was a distraction that I feel would have been aided if there was some way of circumventing him with either the BFG or another late-game weapon that I’ve not mentioned.

All of that being said, I don’t want this to paint a picture of the combat of Doom Eternal being flawed, that’s far from the case. Besides the Marauder there is not a single thing about the gameplay that I would change, and he is such an infrequent occurrence that it was never enough to bring me down from the euphoric high I was constantly riding from the sheer visceral enjoyment I got from playing the game. Doom Eternal plays smartly into the strengths of its predecessor and improves on them in nearly every single way.

The part that excited me the most upon finishing the previous Doom installment was the incredible soundtrack by composer Mick Gordon. It made every instant of the game a brutally energetic rhythm of guitars, gore, and gunfire. Gordon pushed the envelope of video game music with his fantastic blend of downtuned extreme metal riffs (played on an absurd 9-string guitar,) crushing industrial riffs, and techno experimentation that brought forth what is possibly my favorite soundtrack ever composed – video game or otherwise. Doom Eternal does not change that and, while some may read that as an expression disappointment, I implore you not to.

It would be nearly impossible to overthrow the fantastically memorable and groundbreaking work on the original OST, but I think Gordon truly did come as close as anyone could expect with some key additions that still make the tracks stand out and remain consistently recognizable. The first of these elements to turn many heads, including my own, was the phrase “death metal choir” that got thrown around before launch. How such a wild concept could work and sound good is beyond me, but if anyone could do it it would be Mick Gordon, and wow did he ever succeed. The more human elements lend perfectly to the new setting and more human-centric story to give a tone entirely unique to this installment, without straying too far from the beauty of the original. The riffs on this OST are almost inarguably heavier, faster, and more intricate than in the previous installment, and while that occasionally leads to individual tracks being less memorable outside the game, it means that while the game is running there’s a palpable sense of speed and aggression even more notable than last time, seemingly reflecting the faster and more complicated gameplay. 

Outside obvious highlight of the main campaign, almost definitely the reason anyone will purchase this game, there is also an online multiplayer mode called Battle Mode, a 2v1 game mode in which one player controls the Doom Slayer, and the other two players team up as various demons from the game to take him down.

I will admit up front to not being much of an online gamer, most of the time once I finish a game’s main singleplayer offering I call it a day and move on, so I may not be the most qualified person to speak on things like weapon balance, refresh timers, and team strategy, but what I can speak to is fun, and I can confidently say that Doom Eternal’s Battle Mode with two friends is some of the most fun I’ve had in a multiplayer shooter in a while.

There’s something incredibly satisfying about teaming up as demons with another friend to take down the lone opponent with your variety of summon abilities, putting pressure on them until eventually they slip up and one of you manages to land that final blow. There’s definitely a learning curve, no denying that, but it didn’t take more than a couple matches until all my friends were on the same page and having a blast. The Doom Slayer plays exactly as he does in the campaign, which would leave one to assume that there would be an automatic experience imbalance, but having intelligent enemies plus the inability to slow down time while switching weapons leads to a constantly fun mode that, while I don’t have a large amount of experience with it, definitely kept me coming back longer than I thought after I finished the campaign.

Besides the Battle Mode, what can players expect from Doom Eternal after the credits roll? Well, alongside a slew of difficulty options to test your skills (including the return of the terrifying Ultra-Nightmare mode,) and a Lives mode that forces you to rely on 1-ups found around the level or risk losing all your progress, there’s also the return of the staple secrets, collectibles, and optional areas.

Unlike Doom 2016, where secrets were utterly hidden, secrets are marked on the minimap and even visible in-game with a “?” marker. The question is now simply how to get to the secrets, rather than where they are in the first place. This may be a disappointment for completionists who love a challenge, but for me it’s a welcome change, as in the previous game I ended up just using a collectibles guide after a certain point. The collectibles take the form of various objects for use in the hub area, with cute action figures to sit on the shelf (which I would absolutely buy in real life by the way,) vinyl records of previous idsoft soundtracks, from Quake to Wolfenstein, all playable both in the Hub and in levels upon replaying them. Most notable, however, are the cheat codes, which allow the player to tweak the game to their exact preferences with a variety of modifications, from traditional ones like infinite ammo and health, to more joke-y ones like the “QuakeCon” mode which adds a cheering sound effect after every glory kill. These are all usable upon returning to a level, and do not affect your collectible progress, making this one of the most forgiving Doom games to complete, if you want it to be.
There are also optional combat segments in Gore Nests and Slayer Gates, the former being a timed challenge in the pre-existing location, while the latter is an incredibly difficult arena fight that whisks you away to another location and pits you against a horde of enemies with the only goal being surviving longer than the demons around you. Both of these elements are extremely fun and, while I have yet to attempt many of them, they will prove to be a worthy challenge to anyone in the market for such a thing. I would also note that there are remixed “Master Levels” in the game, which shuffle elements of previous levels and add far harder enemies for an even more challenging experience. I have yet to attempt these, but from what I hear they are brutal but rewarding.

Doom Eternal has more than enough content post-completion to keep me coming back for a long time, and I anticipate returning not only for the current content, but for the upcoming story DLCs that have been confirmed by Bethesda to be releasing some time in the future.

And with that, I feel I’ve said everything I want to say about this fantastic game. I truly loved every moment I spent with Doom Eternal, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It was in no way hyperbolic when I said that this is my favorite FPS that I have ever played, its peaks of mechanical refinement and sheer unapologetic aggression leave me in a state of bliss that I struggle to compare to anything except the feelings I got from its predecessor. It goes without saying that I strongly recommend Doom Eternal to any fan of Shooters, and I sincerely hope that it will be an inspiration for anyone looking to create FPS’ in the future.