The Slayer's medieval era just added two more implements of mass violence. DOOM: The Dark Ages — Revelations launched July 7 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and id Software has correctly calculated that the only way to make a shield-saw more fun is to add a spear.
The expansion's new arsenal headlines: a grapple spear that latches onto enemies and yanks the Slayer across the arena, and a Captain America-style version of the shield — throwing, ricocheting defense-as-offense that remixes the base game's unique parry-everything flow into something punchier and fistsier. No new rulebook needed here: the guns are the grammar, and Revelations speaks it to "eleven".
The critical reception has lived up to the marketing savagery. Early scores have the expansion hovering around a 90 average on Metacritic, which would place it among the best-rated releases of the entire summer — an extraordinary number for what's technically packaged downloadable content, and a nice crystallization of The Dark Ages' year: the stodgy rock-solid base game growing stranger in hindsight.
It also arrives as the closing entry of id's modern trilogy-era conversation: Eternal, Dark Ages, Revelations — the studio having quietly become the most reliable firewall of old-school FPS DNA in the business. Whatever they do after the medieval exorcism closes has earned the waiting.
Shields up, spears out, demons down. Some weeks belong to one genre of violence, and this one is DOOM's entirely.