Doom: The Dark Ages hands-on tech preview – idTech 8 impresses hugely on PC

Doom: The Dark Ages is set to release this May, but last week I had a chance to sit down for several hours to play the game on a high-end PC. What I can say and show is limited, but the latest modern Doom and its idTech 8 underpinnings already look hugely impressive. There’s plenty to praise here – as well as a few caveats that are worth bringing up.

First, the engine. Machine Games’ Indiana Jones showed just how capable modern versions of idTech have become, and The Dark Ages shares the same extremely realistic visuals – albeit in starkly different setting. Everything feels alive, with a tremendous amount of secondary animation – blowing trees and flags and pouring rain and storm clouds.

Though I didn’t get a chance to see the game at max settings – or in its upcoming path tracing mode – the game was running with standard RT enabled, including RT reflections (like Doom Eternal) and RTGI (like Indiana Jones). This looks nice, with more watery levels showing off full RT reflections with atmospherics layered on using SSR. There are plenty of reflective surfaces around despite the move to more naturalistic environments, but it’s precisely that shift in tone that allows the RTGI to shine. This enables much more accurate and dramatic lighting across a huge space that’s almost entirely lit by natural sources like flames and the sun.

It works well, as it did in Indiana Jones, but there’s more of a focus here on destructible, physics-driven dynamic objects. Eliminating baked lighting means that these objects can blend more seamlessly into the environment, and allows for Crysis-style destruction that was absent from the prior two games. Wooden structures can be blasted away until they buckle under their own weight, leaving remnants that can be hacked at further to separate them into even smaller pieces. This makes arenas in the game feel much more active, with things changing and structures breaking apart as you engage enemies. Later sequences with a huge Doom mech take this even further, as you can stomp around destroying a massive city environment – very cool.