Reviews
‘DOOM: The Dark Ages’ Evolves the Series While Maintaining the Classic Formula Fun [Review]
While I may have never made mods or been competitive in its multiplayer mode, I have a long history with the Doom series. After my dad uninstalled Wolfenstein 3D from our first computer when he found out how violent it was, I would go over to my friend’s house and get my fix of first person shooter ultraviolence by playing the first two Doom games.
When Doom 3 came out, I appreciated its change in tone to something more moody and spooky, and then celebrated its return to classic form with DOOM (2016). DOOM: Eternal was the first game that I bounced off of, not really enjoying all the extra bells and whistles of complexity they added to the extremely streamlined 2016 version.
All this history was in mind when I booted up DOOM: The Dark Ages, a prequel to the most recent games that again reinvents the franchise after the divisive reaction to Eternal.
DOOM: The Dark Ages plops you in the middle of a medieval war against Hell. The Doom Slayer is under the control of the Kreed Maykr, being dropped into missions alongside the Sentinels of Argent D’Nur as they battle against the demon forces of Prince Ahzrak. Even though it’s medieval-inspired, there’s still a cool mix of technology and fantasy imagery, so don’t worry that it’s going to be entirely swords and sorcery.
You might ask why I’m starting a Doom review by talking about story and characters. That’s because The Dark Ages really seems to want you to care about what’s going on. Game Director Hugo Martin mentioned in interviews leading up to the game that one of the three core pillars of the new game would be “story,” and there’s a surprising number of cutscenes in the game’s 15 hour campaign. Personally, this focus was off putting to me; anytime I see the Doom Slayer in third person, it feels strange to me after years of seeing exclusively through his eyes.
I’m sure people who have fun putting together the timelines of the series might enjoy the tale that unfolds, but everything here is pretty bland to me, with paper thin characters and not much going on narratively. I know you’re probably rolling your eyes at me for criticizing Doom for its story, but like in a cooking competition, if you put it on the plate, I’ve gotta judge it. The 2016 game had a fun tone, where it was almost antagonistic to the concept of even giving you exposition, so for the story to become one of the pillars of the Doom experience is a bit puzzling to me.
But that’s not why most of us are here – we’re here to rip and tear until it’s done, and the changes that DOOM: The Dark Ages makes to combat simplify the experience while adding a new layer to it, and for the most part it’s successful. The analogy the team at id Software has been using is that if DOOM: Eternal had you moving around like a fighter jet, The Dark Ages is more like a tank. The key behind this new design philosophy is the addition of a shield, which adds both a focus on parrying as a defense and new tactics that will keep you on the offensive.
In Bloodborne, when you find the wooden shield, the description mocks the very idea of shields, saying that they “engender passivity.” I was worried that its addition to Doom would change the aggressive, push forward style of combat that Doom is known for, but I’m happy to say it actually makes it feel even more aggressive. The shield has four basic uses in the game: throwing it like Captain America, blocking enemy attacks, parrying, and a shield charge. Of these attacks, I found myself using the shield throw the least, but it does act as this game’s version of the pistol, a way to kill fodder enemies without expending any ammo for your other, better weapons.
All the other shield options transform the game into feeling different from its predecessors. If an Arachnotron is shooting machine gun rounds your way, you can block with the shield to negate damage until you find cover to break its sightline. Or, if you just want to deal with it quickly, you can shield charge at it, slamming into it at high speed and putting it right in range for a blast from a Super Shotgun. This charge can also be used to zip you around the battlefield as you regroup, destroying some fodder enemies as you try to collect some precious health so you can get back into the thick of it. Even though you’re a bit slower than in Eternal, it still feels like you can be purposefully mobile when you need to be in a way that’s super satisfying.
I was fully expecting parrying to be a useless addition, but it contributed to the most important feeling Doom can give you: feeling like a badass. You can’t parry all melee or projectile attacks, just ones that are green, so spamming the parry button doesn’t make you invincible at all times. It adds one more thing for you to pay attention to as you assess the battlefield, but its bold color coding never makes it feel hard to read. On the default difficulty setting, the parry maybe feels a bit too generous, but not to the point where it felt like a cakewalk. It’s all extremely video game-y in the best way, but it makes squaring up against a specific enemy a bit more engaging. Nothing felt better than seeing a Cyberdemon across the way, dodging its red projectiles, hitting the parry on its green projectiles, then shield rushing into its face, parrying its melee strike, then smashing it with your mace, all with excellent hit stops to emphasize each moment.
There’s some good twists on classic weapons here, along with some new ones, but it feels like they lost a little something along the way. My go-to weapons were the Plasma Rifle and Super Shotgun, which feels appropriately devastating given the ease at which you can get into close range, but some of the new weapons also felt pretty great too. There’s one that grinds up skulls and blasts out the shrapnel in a wide pattern, allowing you to take on big hordes at a distance. Another clever addition to your arsenal was one that launched a ball on a chain, which leans into the melee-range combat The Dark Ages excels at. I did miss the alternate fire modes for the weapons that were featured in DOOM (2016) and DOOM: Eternal, which have been replaced by a series of passive upgrades that can be purchased. These never feel quite as exciting as the alt fires, but you can definitely feel your weapons getting more effective as you advance down the upgrade paths.
It surprised me how little I was switching between weapons, because previous Doom games always felt like they were limiting your ammo in order to keep you cycling through things, but I quickly fell into a rhythm with my loadout and only changed things up to force myself to experiment. The glory kill system is a bit stripped down in this game; enemies will still flash in a staggered state when you get them low on health but executing them is no longer tied to a long animation, and you’ll still get ammo if you do melee finishers on them. Using the shield to get in close made it easy for me to always have ammo, so I was never really scrambling to find a new weapon when my mains ran out.
The range of enemies feels great, and they have expanded move-sets to match your parry abilities. It’s a cool escalation that matches your capabilities, and many of the new enemies are designed to be very in your face with melee attacks that test your timing. Each of them has a very distinct look, which allows you to know exactly what you can expect at all times, a very important fact given the speed of combat. All the horrible demon creatures are gorgeously rendered and show some really gruesome battle damage as you blast away at them, giving you a tangible sense of progress as you run through them.
There are a few bosses near the end of the game, which I think feel appropriately complex and exciting, but most of the time when they want to ramp up the intensity of a fight they throw in leader enemies. These are stronger versions of standard enemies that have shields protecting them until you kill a certain amount of other enemies to make it vulnerable. It’s another really video game-y element, but it works by adding complexity to the encounters, forcing you to dance around your invincible foe and take out the others. Even with this wrinkle, it still feels like DOOM: The Dark Ages runs out of new tricks about sixty percent of the way through the campaign, making some of the later half feel less exciting.
There are 22 missions throughout the game, with a variety of level sizes. They’ve promised to deliver their most expansive levels to date, which has resulted in more open world-esque spaces to explore. Some of the levels drop you on a big battlefield where you’ve got three to five objectives scattered about that can be completed in any order, which feels unique but not exactly transformative. Many of the spaces you explore are just outdoor areas, which sometimes feel a bit barren and lifeless. This might just be a taste thing on my part, but one of the things I always appreciated about Doom was the juxtaposition between the sci-fi space station and the demonic infestation of Hell imagery, so the medieval setting, with castles and forests and the like, isn’t as interesting to me. While I definitely didn’t find all of them, I wasn’t as intrigued by the secrets hidden around the levels, and the puzzles to reach them were rarely super satisfying.
Doom loves putting you in arenas as you tear through waves of enemies, and The Dark Ages features good, if uninventive, spaces for these types of fights. Given the extra mobility from the shield, they build impressively large arenas for you to fight in, which gives you space to bounce between different little pockets of enemies that litter the landscape. Arenas feel good to traverse, littered with health and ammo pickups to keep you in motion, but they all start to blend together, as none of the arenas are really built around unique or memorable locations or moments.
There are some unique additions to the world of Doom that have mixed success at being additive. The game introduces a new area called the Cosmic Realm, which is very Lovecraft inspired, that you’ll spend a few missions in. It provides a well needed change up to the levels, sometimes leaning into more strange and mind bending spaces, but for the most part it’s still a lot of rocky areas that don’t do much to distinguish themselves aside from a different color tint.
Throughout the missions, you’ll run into two massive additions to the gameplay: sequences where you pilot either hulking mechs or powerful dragons. These feel designed to deliver epic moments, but don’t really hold up as much gameplay-wise. In a mech, you just punch and dodge melee-focused enemies as you stomp through the areas, without the same complexity you’re used to in the rest of the game. While on a dragon, you’re basically just flying around shooting at specific points on the map, locking onto targets and dodging as you continue to pelt them until they explode.
Both of these sections have little meters that fill up before allowing you to do the cooler big-damage moves. The dragon parts feel particularly annoying, forcing you to dodge green attacks to fill up the meter before being given the stronger weapon that can actually do damage to weak points. It feels like an artificial way to force you to engage with the dodging mechanic, making the dragon parts feel pretty weak overall. While I wasn’t over the moon about either of these additions, it does offer a break from the standard gameplay and provides some good large-scale spectacle, if that’s something that works for you.
On a technical level, DOOM: The Dark Ages looks and runs incredible. I played on the PS5, and it was smooth as butter while rendering some gloriously large areas with ease. While I think it looks great, I do wish that it wasn’t so dark in its color palette, which again may come down to the trappings of its new setting. Enemies felt less vibrant than they did in the previous games, causing them to get lost among the landscapes of darkly-colored rock. Since a big part of the combat is focused on being able to quickly scan the battlefield and make tactical decisions in the moment, being able to spot enemies at a glance is critical, so I wish they just popped a little bit more to help out with that.
The sounds of the game are good, building on what’s already been in the series so far without adding much new. You still get really satisfying sounds as your guns blast and your enemies are being eviscerated, with the same heavy Doom soundtrack propelling you through it all. That being said, I don’t really feel like the music felt as memorable this time around, and I couldn’t tell if that’s because it didn’t feel novel or because it actually wasn’t up to the standards of previous games. I suspect it’s the latter, given that this score was done by Finishing Move, rather than Mick Gordon who did the music for the 2016 reboot, but I’d have to sit down and listen to the soundtracks side by side to figure it out.
All the changes to the Doom formula in The Dark Ages proves that id Software knows how to continue to evolve the gameplay of the series in ways that still emphasize the feeling of the original. The new shield and parry combat focus manages to align perfectly with the classic aggressive and kinetic battles in ways that I didn’t expect would work, allowing you to deliver the game’s signature brand of over-the-top and crunchy violence in brand new ways. While the change in setting didn’t work for me as much aesthetically, it seems like a welcome change that keeps the series from stagnating. I wish they would reconsider their shift to story and ‘epic moments’ like the mech and dragon section, because I felt like some of the fundamentals of level and encounter design were lacking a bit compared to previous entries, despite having a satisfying combat feel overall.
I’m glad we can see this type of fast-paced, reflex-based shooter on such a huge budget, because id knows how to make a thrilling shooter that is as satisfying mechanically as it is visually.
Review code provided by publisher. DOOM: The Dark Ages arrives May 15 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Xbox Game Pass.
The dynamic at the heart of extraction shooters is so well suited to horror that it’s kind of amazing that most of the genre’s foundational works have taken either a sci-fi or militaristic bent, rather than an explicitly supernatural one.
After all, one of the main conditions imposed by these games is that you’re always left to fend for yourself in a hostile environment, with barely any resources, barely any direction, and barely any lifelines to call upon, which might as well be the storefront page description for every Resident Evil released to date.
In addition to this, the titles will also have you forging shaky alliances with strangers, who are liable to desert or outright double-cross you the second that these temporary pacts cease to be advantageous; a quintessential trope of zombie movies and many other subdivisions of horror. And then there’s the high-stakes proposition that’s inherent to the genre, whereby all the valuables you retrieve out on a mission could be lost forever if you don’t manage to exfiltrate in a safe and timely manner. Again, petrifying.
Honestly, one of the most nerve-wracking experiences you can have in multiplayer gaming these days is trying to haul ass to the cargo elevator in Arc Raiders while you’ve got an inventory full of precious loot and everything’s on the line. The way your heart races as you nervously scan the horizon for threats, try to suss out the intentions of other players who could be enviously eyeing your plunder, take calculated risks, and wait on tenterhooks for your escape route to open is identical to the biological response you have when being chased by, say, a drill-wielding lunatic in The Outlast Trials. The only thing that’s different is the cause of fear and what you’re afraid to lose. That, and the fact that enemies in Arc don’t tend to have their genitals brazenly flapping around when trying to kill you (although it can never be guaranteed with some of the weirdos that populate online lobbies).
It’s therefore mindboggling that, out of all the biggest names in the extraction shooter space right now (Escape from Tarkov, Delta Force and this year’s Marathon), only Hunt: Showdown engages with horror themes directly. Even then, it’s kind of its own thing and doesn’t quite tick all of the genre’s boxes.
Enter The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. The latest from Chilean developers ACE Team, this new contender brings a bounty of fresh ideas to the table, but its most significant innovation to the extraction shooter formula is how it embraces horror with open arms. And it’s a match made in heaven. Or in the depths of some eldritch, unfathomable nightmare, depending on how you look at it.
Fortune and Glory
As you may be able to figure out from the subtle clues in its title, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is firmly situated in the H. P. Lovecraft universe. The game’s press notes adorably claim that this puts it in the company of about a hundred other releases that have similarly embedded themselves in the cult author’s public domain oeuvre. Which actually seems like a conservative estimate, unless they meant to say: “a hundred other releases from this year” (see Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, The Sinking City 2, Cosmic Fear and The Necromancer’s Tale).
I truly believe there’s a danger that we are fast approaching the saturation point for Lovecraftian media. The appeal of these things is supposed to lie in the horror of the unknown, yet by now we’re as acquainted with Deep Ones, Shoggoths and Yith as we are with our 9-to-5 work colleagues. And they provoke a comparable feeling of ambivalent disdain. I, for one, cover Lovecraft adaptations so often that my word processor has gone from not recognising the spelling of Cthulhu to predictively writing out The Great Dreamer’s terrible name whenever my finger so much as glides over the “C” key.
At least ACE Team are taking inspiration from lesser-known and lesser-mined source material here. Loosely based on the novella of the same name (or at least the story within that story), The Mound transports you not to the well-trodden mountains of madness, the overdone sunken city of R’lyeh or the familiar streets of Arkham, but instead to the untamed wilds of the Americas.
Taking place during the so-called “Age of Discovery”, it casts you in the role of a Spanish conquistador embarking on a perilous voyage across the New World. Following the trail of an ill-fated expedition that went missing somewhere south of the equator, you’re on the search for riches that are beyond human imagining. Of course, this being the Cthulhu mythos, the only things beyond human imagining that you’re bound to find here are ancient sinister forces and ghastly abominations unfit for mortal gaze.
You see, this lost continent you’re charting is not an especially hospitable one. The further inland you go, the less inclined anyone with the vaguest of self-preservation instincts would be to hang around. Impossibly thick canopy blots out the sun, chattering whispers emanate from the treeline, the desecrated corpses of your fallen brethren litter the ground, and the forest itself starts to play tricks on your mind. Not to mention, the local fauna just keeps getting bigger and meaner.
Alas, the myriad treasures of these accursed lands are too tantalizing to abandon, and so it’s up to a few courageous (or perhaps certifiable) explorers to brave this tropical hell and bring back some booty. For God, for gold, and for Spain.
Into the Heart of Darkness
In gameplay terms, this maps rather neatly onto the standard extraction shooter format. Every day starts with you waking aboard your galleon, the Tempestad, from which you can interact with members of the crew — both NPCs and co-op partners — customise certain aspects of your loadout, trade resources, and eventually pick your next quest.
When it comes to the latter, you’ll sign a contract stipulating the required objectives you agree to complete, as well as the starting gear that you’ll get to take with you. Conditions for payment can range from you needing to bring in a certain quota of goods to rescuing survivors from other ships or acquiring logbooks that will help you edge closer to the overarching goal of finding that previous expedition.
Once you’ve signed on the dotted line, you’ll then choose a place to make landfall (effectively your map for the coming session) and head out on a skiff with your party of firebrand comrades. Upon arrival, you’ll be met with gorgeously rendered, handcrafted environments that are ripe for exploration and, with minimal direction, are then left to your own devices as you strive to meet the terms of your selected contract. Nine times out of ten, this means scavenging for loot and bringing it back to the Tempestad without falling victim to the unutterable terrors that lurk in the underbrush.
Speaking of which, threats here can take on both a physical and metaphysical form. There’s certainly no shortage of ferocious beasties that call the region home, including giant insects, betentacled freaks, strange quadrupeds that look like panthers from an alien world, and congealed knots of maggots that have lumped together into some kind of perverse mockery of human anatomy. However, the much more insidious scourge is the one that inexorably worms its way into your head, causing you to hallucinate startling images, luring you into traps with false promises of fortune, and even leaving you unable to discern friend from foe. So, lush vistas aside, it’s not really a place where you’ll want to take up a timeshare!
The equipment you’re loaned by the quartermaster can help to keep the evil at bay for a time (there are muskets, crossbows, spears, rapier swords, crucifixes, and darkness-expelling lanterns). Still, there’s only so long you can push your luck and hope to endure the innumerable attacks before you just have to call it quits.
It’s then that the agonising retreat to the rowboat begins, as you try to lug your haul back to the starting point, usually with depleted survival resources. Should you successfully navigate the labyrinthine jungle and its many perils in one piece, then you’ll be escorted to your galleon and taken to the captain’s quarters, whereupon the client will assess whether you’ve fulfilled your end of the bargain or not.
New World, New Ideas
When divorced from its theming, the basic mission structure of Omen of Cthulhu isn’t too dissimilar from what we’re used to with Arc Raiders or Escape from Tarkov. Yet the execution is impressive, particularly for such a small development studio, and there are clever touches throughout to make the whole thing feel fresh and unique.
Almost every mechanic is filtered through the prism of either cosmic horror or seventeenth-century monasticism, leading to some ingenious twists on well-worn conventions. Case in point, you’re accompanied on expeditions by a rickety ox-drawn cart that acts as both a mobile storage unit and a lifesaving waypoint (its monk driver can blow a horn to summon scattered party members back to the same location, while a pierced bag of grain at its rear leaves behind a breadcrumb-like trail that ensures you never get too lost).
Another neat period detail is how the flintlock pistol is prone to malfunctioning in the rain, making it a bit of a gamble to pack said firearm when there’s a perfectly dependable bow & arrow available. The consequences of bad weather can be abated, however, by yet another one of ACE Team’s nifty ideas. Before heading out into the bush, you have an opportunity to dedicate your expedition to one of several patron saints, each of whom will grant different boons and blessings, including one who, yes, can quell that pesky precipitation. It’s a cool bit of flavouring that adds an extra layer of strategy to proceedings, as well as replay value for when the public matchmaking inevitably has you going through certain levels again and again.
Taking a cue from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, the game also toys with your perception in some smartly meta ways. For instance, if your character ends up succumbing to madness, then you may start seeing flies buzzing around your periphery and landing on the screen — in a way that I’m ashamed to admit had me batting at my laptop display on at least two occasions — while your auditory senses can be simultaneously deceived by misleading directional sounds piped in through the headset. Should you really lose your grip on what’s real and what’s not, then it can even escalate to the point where you begin confusing teammates for hostiles (and vice versa) thanks to fiendish hallucinations.
That last part makes for an inventive twist on the every-man-for-himself dynamic at the heart of a typical extraction shooter. You’re always encouraged to maintain a healthy level of distrust in other players when competing in these things. Normally, that’s because they have sufficient motivation to gun you down and rob your stuff, but here you’re all supposed to be on the same side, and everyone’s contributions go in the exact same pot. So, there’s no rational reason to turn on each other.
However, if you can’t be 100% sure what your teammates think is happening in their immediate vicinity, or if they even are your teammates to begin with, then it creates a scenario reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing. The reassuring logic of “safety in numbers” goes entirely out the window and you’ll not want to let anybody out of your sight for too long, lest they come back crazed or, worse, are supplanted by some monstrous imposter intent on sabotaging your crusade.
Misery Loves Company
On that note, multiplayer — and to a certain extent, multiplayer with strangers — really is the best way to experience The Mound.
At its core, it is built around the unreplicable interplay between reactive, hard-to-predict meatbags. Not only does this mean that there’s palpable tension whenever suspicions do arise amongst the group, and everyone’s furtively clutching to their weapons, but it’s equally electric when you manage to strike up an effective rapport with someone and just blast through contract after contract.
If the team doesn’t click, then the run can turn into a brutal war of attrition that affords next to no breathing room, as the RNG throws dozens upon dozens of enemy mobs at you, inflicts devastating bleed damage that drains your HP at an alarming rate, and relentlessly bombards you with compounding sanity effects. When a never-ending string of calamities befalls you like this, and you’ve got no one in your corner, you start to feel like the beleaguered protagonist of Beau Is Afraid during that movie’s absurd opening sequence.
Conversely, if you’re paired up with someone who actually communicates, shares the gear fairly, pulls their weight in finding treasures, and covers you when you’ve got your hands full, you can really turn the tables on the forces of darkness here. And it’s immensely satisfying to pull off, because it’s almost like you’re standing up to a school bully who’s overdue some comeuppance.
During our review stint, we played a couple of matches with someone who didn’t have a mic and, though we never exchanged so much as a whisper, we instinctively knew how to support one another. Before long, we settled into a beautiful, wordless routine whereby one of us would throw an axe to stun a zombie and the other would sneak up behind it for a close-quarters finisher. We don’t know their name. We never heard their voice. And yet we will forever cherish our time together as a supremely efficient monster-slaying duo.
By comparison, solo play is less invigorating. It’s technically possible, as a single bot will stand in for human players if you elect to go it alone. However, they’re a very poor substitution, and you can only rely on them so far. At best, they’ll dispatch a couple of creatures and sporadically lob junk into the ox cart.
Yet as you discover new areas deeper in the jungle, where the odds are increasingly stacked against you, it becomes a frankly unsustainable way of playing. The A.I. doesn’t show any urgency when you need to get somewhere quick, it often fails to collect items (including health and ammo that it desperately needs), there’s a bizarre tendency for it to go wandering off so that it can aimlessly hack away at foliage for a bit, and it’s of no use whatsoever when you’re in that climactic mad dash to the extraction point.
We similarly found ourselves getting a little peeved at the ox cart driver NPC as well, with their annoying habit of blocking the path to key areas and absentmindedly wedging us into positions from which we were unable to break free. Again, if you’re playing with another person, there’s a chance they could potentially coax the A.I. out of these tricky spots and liberate you from the impasse. Otherwise, it’s tantamount to a game over.
Better Run Through the Jungle
In all fairness, you’re not going to have a flat-out bad time if you end up soloing in Omen of Cthulhu. Just a more punishing, drawn-out one.
Indeed, whether you’re a solitary wolf, part of a tight-knit friendship group, or a social butterfly eager to spread their wings, there’ll be thrills aplenty here. That’s because ACE Team absolutely nail the fundamentals of both genres they’re combining.
For a start, the game is a real looker, with richly detailed environments, convincingly humid weather effects and pleasingly crunchy gore (obliterating a zombie’s skull into a glorious shower of pulp and bone never loses its novelty). Furthermore, the levels are as thoughtfully designed as in any good horror game — with the developers wisely abstaining from the use of procedural generation — while the first-person combat is slick and responsive, the stealth deliberate and nail-biting, and the island atmosphere so vivid you’ll find yourself perspiring within minutes.
It all comes together for a superlative offering that’s perhaps the most pulse-pounding extraction shooter we’ve played to date. Making a beeline for the rowboat as horrendous shrieks echo through the rainforest, and stygian darkness conceals how many monstrosities are on your tail, is one of the scariest experiences we’ve had all year. When you’re out of ammo, out of health, out of friends, and clinging to cargo that only slows your gait, there’s a tangible sense of panic that very few horror titles can elicit. I don’t remember the last time a game had me breaking into a sweat, but whenever I had everything to lose and something terrible breathing down my neck here, I got legitimately anxious.
Of course, if you do manage to exfiltrate, then it’s a triumphant moment deserving of an air punch. Or so one might assume. However, The Mound has one last devious mind game up its sleeve before you can confidently kick your feet up and take pride in a job well done. A post-match debrief in the captain’s quarters will put you at the mercy of a snivelling appraiser, who looks over your bounty piece by piece and tallies up its cumulative worth to see if you’ve been able to meet the agreed quota. It’s a final bit of jeopardy at the finish line that makes a prospective victory all the sweeter, and a prospective defeat all the bitterer.
Rest assured, though, that your efforts aren’t necessarily in vain if you don’t hit the requisite value target. Sure, you forgo the XP payment (which earns character upgrades like increased inventory space), but there are still other ways to make lasting progress. Certain artifacts that you collect, for instance, will be permanently added to the stocks of the Tempestad merchant, while any deer carcasses you bring back from hunting will go towards improving the effectiveness of consumables. Should you happen across a logbook, then you’ll also unlock brand-new areas of the world to explore, with brand-new creatures, brand-new treasures, and brand-new opportunities.
It’s thus rare that you come away from an expedition completely empty-handed. There’s still a sense of peril when you’re out in the wilds, as death doesn’t lose its sting, but these small wins help you feel like you’re making meaningful headway and give you the encouragement to stick with it.
And we really do see ourselves sticking with The Mound for the long haul. With its clever innovations, intriguing world-building, finely tuned co-op mechanics, and exhilarating risk-reward stakes, we believe this one has got a promising shelf-life and could emerge as a serious rival to some of the biggest names in both the extraction shooter and cooperative horror genres. Even the stupid lemming bots can’t bring it down.
Review code provided by publisher. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu releases on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series on July 15.
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