DOOM: Eternal is the PC’s Greatest Aim Trainer

Humans are fickle learners. It’s a rare talent to completely engross yourself in something, and if you can without burning out- This isn’t for you. For the rest of us mortals, let’s learn an incredible skill and apply it to 2020’s seminal shooter: DOOM Eternal.

But first, a bit of context.

Immaculate Aim on PC using a mouse has been a goal of competitive First Person Shooter players since the 90s. As mouse sensors and shapes inch ever closer to being perfected, individual skill is becoming even more important. FPS Games are in lock-step with MOBAs as the PC’s biggest genre, and with a level of competition so high as to seem dazzling- Year over year, competitors in this space are getting faster and many are going pro younger.

Enter the FPS Trainer, a tool I have quite the history with. At best they can be an excellent execution aid, sharpening your reflexes and warming up key muscles in your hands just before a match. At worst, however, Aim Trainers are Snake Oil, and might actually make you worse at your main game.

When a boxer is in intense training before a big fight, they don’t just rock the heavy bag for eight hours a day. Successful competitive athletes diversify their training for effectiveness and efficiency. Since gamers often begin their foray into competition as a hobby and don’t picture themselves as athletes, they fail to build this crucial foundation. If you’re an aspiring pro, and push yourself every day to play as long as possible, just stop. Maximize quality matches by stretching, staying hydrated, and dialing back on the twelve-hour sessions.

Back to Aim Trainers. Just as a boxer wouldn’t just practice their hooks, we shouldn’t just practice our aim. Aim Trainers are isolation training, like a bench press. Their design deemphasizes other important aspects of shooters, notably movement and decision making, while overemphasizing speed and reaction times. A boxer with one killer punch and no legs to stand on would be a complete joke in the ring: Getting trumped by opponents who’ve mastered their footwork.

Just like it’s easy to get overwhelmed in a gym with so many machines and choices, the sandbox nature of an Aim Trainer can trick you into wasting time, or worse, get you to completely neglect key concepts in favor of “mastering” one. Game developers are smart, and high accuracy on its own has hard counters in most games. Buy a Flash or lock down the Red Armor, and you’ve made your opponent look like an idiot.

To jumpstart my argument, I needn’t look further than one scenario from the top of Kovaak’s Leaderboard: Tile Frenzy. If you own this popular Aim Trainer, you’ve probably spent lots of time grinding here. It’s a high-speed scenario where the player targets large squares above and below in about a 120-degree cone. There’s no movement, resources, or a health meter to worry about. You simply flick to each target as fast as you can, building up muscle memory and target acquisition speed. You might already see where this is heading.

If you’ve played FPS games for a number of years, can you recall any time you were ambushed by five large, static targets in this pattern? Five big, red blocks that didn’t shoot back, try to escape, or move about at all? No? Of course, you haven’t.

Tile Frenzy is a dangerous precedent to set for learning shooter players. It’s very easy to get tunnel vision playing Kovaaks: To deemphasize your movement and positioning in pursuit of raw speed. Hour after hour, clicking on red blocks. Will there ever be a point where your thousands of hours of isolation training comes in handy? Perhaps, but few games are so aim dominated that Kovaaks is the solution. Top competitors aren’t using Aim Trainers beyond their warmup, I guarantee it.

Shootouts in an FPS are frenzied and mentally clouding. To actually cut through this brain fog, we shouldn’t be training our reflexes in the safest space possible. We need an environment that constantly tests every aim style, and dials up the intensity automatically to keep us interested and training at maximum efficiency. This environment needs to be varied, too: We need all manner of arenas with a healthy amount of verticality. Survival in this space should be so mentally taxing that our main game looks like a vacation by comparison. If an Aim Trainer is a boxer working that heavy bag, we’ll settle for no less than a title fight. This careful combination of stress, complexity, and difficulty is the perfect way to actually get better at FPS.

Enter DOOM: Eternal. id Software designed a shooter so tight and rewarding, that I’d wager it wont just sharpen your shooter skills- It stands to make you better at every game you play. Even in the vanilla campaign, the core combat loop is so demanding and rich with nuance I could just tell you to play it for yourself and end this article here. But then you play the game’s expansions and the gloves come off. id ratchets up the difficulty and complexity yet again, pushing shooter design further with every level.

The number of decisions you make in a single combat puzzle and more importantly, the speed at which you have to make them could probably fry a cheap calculator. Good DOOM: Eternal players are constantly flexing their brains by managing ammunition, timing ability cooldowns, and reading enemy placement. Smart weapon design and resource balance has you fighting at different ranges and changing strategies constantly.

But being fast isn’t DOOM: Eternal’s only trick. The game cleverly and sneakily pushes you to play bolder and smarter than any other FPS I’ve seen. Enemies aren’t merely aggressive, they’re crafty. Mancubi launch projectiles from afar, Pinky Demons smash through their own allies to flatten you, and even the lowly Imp has brisk movement. While the enemies are designed to be beaten, every Chess Piece on DOOM’s board is uniquely dangerous.

Against such a clever OPFOR, weapon choice is essential. By the time the player character is fully kitted out, you have a tool for every situation and playstyle. ID’s Weapon Design Team are to be commended for not only how fun everything is to shoot, but how no one weapon dominates the sandbox. Every demon is designed to have one clear counter, and while that might seem too easy in isolation, the encounters are built to test your mettle by throwing multiple differing enemy types at you at once.

Rather than isolating a single style, DOOM: Eternal combines hitscan, projectiles, splash, and spread weapons. Like an arena shooter, you need to train your brain to associate different problems with different tools, and switch quickly.

Other more subtle quirks of DOOM: Eternal’s Design shine through in its earliest combat encounters. I joked during my first playthrough nearly two years ago that Glory Kills could’ve been designed for a game tester who couldn’t stop scratching their nose while playing, or for gamers with needy cats in their laps. These have been a controversial mechanic since DOOM’s Reboot back in 2016, and while I wasn’t a fan of them in that title, they’re executed well here.

Glory Kills are NOT QTEs- They keep your health topped off and more importantly, give you a second to compose yourself before re-entering combat. I’m convinced DOOM: Eternal would be a worse game without them. Picking off a demon and putting them in a stagger state gives the player a choice: Sacrifice positioning and gain resources, or maintain position and lose them. Since you can’t beat a demon to death without getting in its face, Glory Kills and the way you use them become a skill of their own the game expects you to master. After a little while in the fire, you’ll find yourself intentionally avoiding some Glory Kills to keep yourself from getting surrounded. DOOM: Eternal gets you thinking in the best possible way. You’ll organically form and adjust your strategy until you triumph. Fail to meet the game in the middle, and it’ll straight up kill you.

Making a game that makes you fight like a cornered animal might not have been id’s goal with DOOM: Eternal, but it’s certainly a side effect of its hard but fair design. I’d absolutely recommend a blind run of the game on the Ultra Violence difficulty over a few hours in an Aim Trainer. If you don’t feel like a stronger shooter player by the game’s end, you’ll still have played the greatest FPS of the last ten years… And taken a meaningful break from speed-clicking on squares in a padded white room.

Bottom Line: DOOM Eternal is the best shooter of the decade, bar none; Aim Trainers suck. Play the former, skip the latter.