Doom: The Dark Ages is officially Steam Deck verified, which is surprising only in how long it took considering id Software’s history delivering shooters that are not just visually impressive, but exceedingly well optimised. The studio has worked minor miracles with handheld ports too, most notably the Nintendo Switch version of 2020’s Doom Eternal.
That said, The Dark Ages was the first Doom game to be fully and constantly ray-traced, making it a less obvious candidate for handheld gaming when it launched. While it ran well enough on most PC hardware and could even deliver reasonable framerates on a cheap gaming laptop, as Andy Edser noted in his PC performance analysis, the Steam Deck nonetheless struggled to meet its minimum requirements, and as such performance was underwhelming.
But that’s all changed, apparently. Update 2.2 introduces several handheld-centric optimisations and quality-of-life features. This includes general performance improvements and advanced optimisation settings for handheld devices, as well as more performant SFX and VFX when gaming on the go.
The update also adds handheld-specific autodetection, and device specifications for numerous devices including Steam Deck and the newly released Xbox Rog Ally X. I suspect the latter’s launch is partly behind Doom: The Dark Ages’ extra performance push, given that both id Software and its publisher Bethesda are owned by Microsoft.
Aptly named YouTuber Deck Wizard recently took Doom: TDA for a handheld spin, and id’s optimisations certainly seem to deliver a consistently smooth experience—though it is unsurprisingly a lot less shiny than when played on a proper PC.
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While update 2.2 is geared mainly toward smoother handheld play, it also folds in a bunch of bugfixes for both the campaign and the wave-based Ripatorium added in August. Primarily, it makes several tweaks to weapon balance, ensuring that damage stats are now registered properly when an enemy receives multiple damage instances in the same frame as its death (The Doom Slayer certainly dishes out the pain in The Dark Ages), while also tweaking the Slayer’s shield so that it properly accounts for melee stagger.
Elsewhere, the update adjusts numerous combat encounters across the campaign, and fixes an issue with “Sentinel civilians‘ heads being out of place in Hebeth, Siege – Part 1, and Sentinel Command Station.” Given just how many heads end up out of place in Doom: The Dark Ages, id Software should be credited for spotting these ones being incorrectly displaced.
While I’d probably still recommend you play The Dark Ages on a traditional desktop if you can, it’s well worth picking up if you’re partial to a bit of first-person blasting. While not as strong as 2020’s Doom Eternal, it does successfully remix the shooter’s fundamentals once again, as Morgan Park noted in his Doom: The Dark Ages review, where he called it”the trilogy’s sharpest zag yet—recasting the Slayer from a meaty fighter jet, ducking and dashing past the hordes of Hell, to a stalwart tank, smashing shield-first into the action”.
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