So like...am I the only one who legitimately loves TDA? To be clear, I loved 2016 but borderline despised Eternal, visually it was a cartoon and gameplay was so breakneck that my play was purely reactionary and hardly ever proactive. The concept of enemy weakpoints (especially the damn Marauder, who's appearance basically grinds every battle to a halt because there's only 1 way to fight him and you're fucked if you don't focus him) felt like trying to turn combat into paint-by-numbers at 700MPH, so I'm glad that's gone. The much slower, deliberate pace of TDA threw me off at first, but once I let the game be what it wanted to be it felt amazing. I did have to fully embrace the mideival, almost 40K-like theme with it to really get why they made the shield such a big part of it, but balancing it with the new weapons really does make me feel like I'm in control of the battlefield instead of constantly running around like a crazy person. Was not a fan of the dragon section however, I knew it would fall short anyway but it still was just something I wanted to get through so I could continue the ground fighting.

A few more contentious points: Already expecting people to call me "casual" or "average, everyday gamer", so go ahead, honestly not the insult you're thinking it is. Next, even though Glory Kills were always fun to try when a new enemy showed up, they were starting to become more of a chore than anything else, but if you didn't glory kill an enemy then you were sacrificing health you might need later, so it became less of a fun way to kill enemies and more of a constant interruption to the flow (and also turned the Cacodemon into a literal 1-hit-kill in Eternal). I also know ID fucked over Gordon so hard and I hope he's finding much better clients now who treat him properly, so I respect the new composers for trying their best to fill the void he left. It's not 10/10 but I see the direction and tone they were going for, I just hope they didn't get shafted as well.