Seven demons that reveal the infernal depths of Doom Eternal's combat
8.8.2024
By Rick Lane, Contributor
This is a tricky balancing act for any action game, but Eternal has a unique solution. Its blighted Earth and blasted hellscapes are one giant killing school, and the demons you fight double as the lecturers at Murder University. Each of its ferocious fiends has one or several weaknesses the Slayer can take brutal advantage of, blasting and slicing foes with ever-increasing efficiency. This in turn lets id Software constantly turn up the pressure, knowing the player can rip and tear their own shortcuts through the game's quivering flesh maze.
In this manner, the secret to Doom Eternal combat is best understood through those hissing, hateful hellspawn. So here are seven of Doom Eternal's most instructive demons and the ways they teach you how to kill.
Cacodemon
A classic Doom foe, the Cacodemon is one of the earliest enemies you encounter in Doom Eternal. A giant cyclopean tomato that shoots fireballs from its toothy maw, it also comes with some of the most explicit instructions on how to fight it. Near the game's outset, Eternal tells you that by launching a grenade into the Cacodemon's mouth, you can instantly make it vulnerable to a health-replenishing glory kill.
But Eternal isn't only teaching you how to kill Cacodemons easily: One of the best ways to avoid taking damage in Doom Eternal is to get airborne. Since Cacodemons are floating enemies and all glory kills are melee attacks, grappling with a Cacodemon also gets you off the ground. This lets you use Cacodemons essentially as floating platforms, getting you away from the chaos of the ground and giving you time to think and reposition yourself for your next attack.
Arachnotron
Returning to the series for the first time since Doom, the Arachnotron is a giant brain with spider-like mechanical legs that shoots its plasma turret from a distance. Arachnotrons are a real nuisance if left unchecked, but there's a simple way to nullify their effectiveness in combat. A well-placed shot with the combat rifle's scope mod can instantly destroy the turret, leaving the Arachnotron unable to perform ranged attacks.
Like force-feeding grenades to Cacodemons, this is a tactic Eternal openly points toward with a tutorial. But again, there's more to it than this more immediate function. The Arachnotron is designed to reinforce the importance of disabling enemies that can't be killed instantly. The combat rifle's scope can likewise destroy the jetpack of a skeletal revenant or the arm cannons of a Mancubus. This lets you focus on more imminent threats while forcing these backline enemies into close-range combat where the Slayer is most dangerous.
Hell Knight
Like the Cacodemon, the Hell Knight is another iconic Doom foe. But Doom Eternal's Hell Knight is a very different beast from earlier games. Deprived of its green fireball attack, this Hell Knight is a burly brawler, rushing the Slayer to pummel them with punches and ground-slam attacks.
Ostensibly, the Hell Knight's role in combat is to emphasize the importance of dodging, and it's certainly wise to stay on your toes when one of these muscular monstrosities is around. Counter-intuitively, however, the quickest way to kill a Hell Knight is often to stand your ground. Hell Knights are vulnerable to sustained fire from weapons like the chaingun and the combat shotgun's full auto mod, which causes them to stagger out of their melee assault.
Both these weapons slow you down when firing, forcing you to hold fast rather than retreat. In this manner, Doom Eternal teaches players not to shy in the face of aggression, but to return it in kind, and that a good defense is a viciously hostile offense. This tactic becomes even more important when facing more powerful melee-focussed enemies, such as the blade-wielding Dread Knight and the towering Baron of Hell. Both are vulnerable to the chaingun's mobile turret mode, which requires real guts to use against these incredibly dangerous foes.
Prowler
Originally introduced as a multiplayer-exclusive demon in Doom (2016), the Prowler is a particularly nasty variant of the series' classic imp, reimagined in more recent games as a nimble simian scamp that peppers you with fireballs. The Prowler fights in a similar fashion, but can also teleport around the battlefield, vanishing before your bullets can hit the target, then reappearing behind your back for an ambush.
The Prowler can be one of Eternal's most annoying enemies, but it exists for a good reason: to remind you of the importance of immobilizing foes. One of the most neglected weapons in Eternal's arsenal is the ice bomb, which freezes multiple demons in place. It's an enormously powerful tool, but because it doesn't damage enemies directly, it's easily forgotten about in the chaos of a firefight—especially from the midgame onward.
It's no coincidence that this is when the Prowler enters the game. Its evasive talents are designed to encourage you to fold the ice-bomb into your combat rhythm, deploying it regularly to make larger-scale encounters more manageable.
Cyber-Mancubus
The Cyber-Mancubus is physically and functionally similar to a regular Mancubus, only its mountain of fat rolls are completely clad in green armor, making it even more durable than its naked brethren. A Cyber-Mancubus can be a real drain on your ammo count, which is why you're better off getting up close and giving this armored freak a good hard blood punch to the stomach. The blood punch is a powerful melee attack that can kill multiple smaller enemies in one hit and deal serious damage to tougher foes. But blood-punching a Cyber-Mancubus also destroys its outer shell, leaving it much more vulnerable to other attacks.
Much like the Prowler and the ice-bomb, this un-symbiotic relationship exists to remind you to use the blood punch, as it takes a while to recharge after use, making it easy to forget about. As such, the Cyber-Mancubus is essentially wearing a XXXL T-shirt that reads "punch me!"
Doom Hunter
One of the toughest foes in Eternal, the Doom Hunter has been surgically designed to give the Slayer a hard time. They're heavily armored, protected by an energy shield, and have a weapon arsenal almost as extensive as the Slayer himself.
Yet while the Doom Hunter is formidable, there are actually multiple ways to eliminate it. Its shield can be overloaded with the plasma rifle, leaving it more vulnerable to other attacks. Alternatively, you can attack its metal "sled" with sustained fire from the chaingun or gatling-shotgun, which also destroys its shield.
These multiple angles of attack are also the reason the Doom Hunter exists. With so many tricks and shortcuts to remember when killing demons in Doom Eternal, it can be easy to become overly reliant on one tactic. This can cause you problems when, for example, you run out of a certain type of ammo. The Doom Hunter emphasizes that there's more than one way to skin a demon, no matter how big and scary they might appear.
Marauder
The most infamous example of Doom Eternal's instructive enemy design, the Marauder is an intensely aggressive, samurai-like demon notorious for being able to block nearly all the player's attacks. Indeed, the only way to stop a Marauder assault is to shoot it when its eyes blink green, essentially parrying its attack as if you're playing a FromSoftware game like Sekiro.
The Marauder's strict nature has been the source of extensive debate, with some finding this boss enemy too restrictive. But the reason for this design is not to limit player creativity, but to make them virtually unstoppable in combat, because the Marauder is designed to teach players all about weapon-switching.
When the Marauder is stunned, the player has a brief window to deal damage to it. Shooting them repeatedly with a single weapon will barely give you enough time to hit it once. But switching weapons in Doom Eternal instantly primes them for firing, making them shoot much faster than waiting for them to "reload." Hence, by juggling weapons like the super-shotgun and the ballista, the Slayer can deal huge damage in a very short space of time. By mastering weapon-switching, the Slayer can eliminate a Marauder in a matter of seconds.
This technique is not useful only against the Marauder, it's enormously helpful when fighting any of the game's "Super Heavy" demons. Barons of Hell, Doom Hunters, even the almighty Tyrant—nothing can withstand the Doom Slayer's perfectly performed gun-juggling act.
Thanks to this gallery of foes, Doom Eternal teaches you to rip and tear with the best of them. You can find Doom Eternal on the Epic Games Store today.