Doom: The Dark Ages- Ripatorium Update
After a successful but relatively quiet post-release season, Doom: The Dark Ages is back. Honestly their timing was great. It’s been about four months since the game released, it did well, was liked by a lot of people (including me), but after a while it was like “What’s next?” Well, that would be the Ripatorium. The Ripatorium is a customizable arena mode that lets you create waves of enemies to battle. It’s a great way for people to make use of the brilliant combat system the Dark Ages introduced outside of campaign mode.
So for starters- I loved the combat of this game, but I didn’t necessarily always want a level size dose of it, nor did I want to have to replay the whole campaign. With that in mind, I really appreciate the Ripatorium for letting me get in a Doom combat fix in like- 15 minutes. It’s great. But I still think it has a ways to go to be like Doom Eternal’s Hoarde Mode and I hope they expand on it. Which I think they will- it’s only version 1.0.
The first thing you’ll notice with the Ripatorium overall, is how customizable the experience is. You have three arenas- "Ruins of Kar-thul”,”Village of Khalid” and “Harbor of Souls.” You can pick which song plays. I wish it could do a playlist, but most of the time you’ll have time limit. You pick those things and then you get to the Arena settings.
So, you can pick 60 demons to fight per wave. You can adjust the amount of waves. You can do an endless mode. But the amount of demons isn’t an exact science yet. You can only deploy 10 soldiers minimum at once. But you can also only deploy like 4 mancubi at once (though you can get around this- just wait.) So your options are much more limited than they initially appear, though you can still do a lot of cool stuff.
One addition I thought was neat was classes within enemies. You can see in the picture aboce that there’s now different classses of Cyberdemon. This is true for Mancubi, Aggadon Hunter’s, Komodo’s and a Battle Knight’s and possibly a few more. It adds some variety in difficulty and lets you deploy a lot of them to kill. It also just looks cool. I didn’t find them noticeably more difficult, they just took longer to kill. But I’m glad it exists.
The arena quality here is okay. They aren’t super interesting, but they do have some variety in elevation that allows for some cover and more dynamic movement. My big complaint is that there’s not staggered spawning, so I’m literally just fighting 60 things at once, when I would rather face waves of increasingly difficult foes. Like, I said, it’s not fine tuned yet. I’m sure it will get better. The question is, how much better?
Surprisingly, of all the arenas, I liked Village of Khalim most. I don’t love the map in the actual game, but this arena is really neat. It’s the most atmospheric and is more wide open. Yes, things are shooting you constantly, but you can run and worry less about getting stuck on a small rock or some bullshit. You also have pillars you can use, so there is some cover. But conversely, I felt like I could fly around a little bit. Lot’s of upside to this map.
The other two arenas are alright, like I said, but Harbor of Souls just aren’t an area I liked that much and this arena, while a great one in game, doesn’t hit the same in this format. The same can kind of be said for the other arena as well. I didn’t feel like they complemented the mode that well and they weren’t that interesting either. I hope to see more arenas in the future and more variety among them besides “Open hilly/rocky area.”
The combat itself is fun as always, but the structure does feel a little primitive and underdeveloped at this stage. I’m glad this feature exists and that they’re working on it, but I’m not in love with it yet. That being said, I’ll still probably play this 1-2 times a week, just because. It’s fun and I think it demonstrates once again how good Doom: The Dark Ages combat really is. There’s not terribly much else for me to say about this map, but I think if you liked this game, this is something you would probably also enjoy. Cheers!
