DOOM Eternal - Too much of a good thing

Despite really liking DOOM 2016 (enough to finish it on Nightmare) I kinda missed the boat on Eternal and only just got around to playing it these last few weeks. Normally I write out slightly longer reviews but I'm gonna keep it fairly brief for this one since there's already 1000 posts on it and just go over some of my thoughts in bullet-point form.

* The HUD is obnoxious - I could scarcely see what was going on past all the UI cluttering up the screen. Luckily, it's not only very customizable but actually barely necessary at all - by about half-way through the game I'd turned it off the UI entirely, and being able to set the weapon to its classic center-screen position meant I didn't even miss having a crosshair most of the time. It's not like this is a game where pinpoint accuracy is that important anyways.
* I'm glad I did so because it makes it a lot easier to appreciate the gorgeous environments. There's a lot more variety to the locations this time around and while they're all pretty video-gamey with lots of big empty hallways and obvious combat arenas, they're still very appealing and crisp.
* In terms of the tone this felt less like DOOM to me and more like Quake or maybe even Unreal - it's outright fantasy more than satanic horror. I didn't mind in the end, it's different but still very cool.
* I love the dash ability, but otherwise found that most of the gameplay additions just felt like unnecessary fluff. The blood punch in particular was just annoying, I almost never used it on purpose but rather wound up doing it by accident while trying to perform a glory kill and wound up screwing myself over.
* Some of the things that I felt were minor issues with the previous game really started to wear on me with this one as it just went on and on and on. Where old-school DOOM had these big sprawling levels with enemies scattered all over, new DOOM seems to be more just a series of combat arenas and they all kind of play out the same way. The thing I noticed is that they throw lots of enemies at you but not all at once the way that, say, Serious Sam does - rather it's more of a drip feed where you kill one guy and another one then spawns in. The weaker enemies are mostly just there to provide you with health and ammo and it's really only the larger ones that matter, and frankly some of the encounters get pretty tedious as it just feels like you're running in place. This gets especially annoying once the Makyr Drones start showing up.
* The emphasis on both the chainsaw and glory-kills make health and ammo pick ups feel a bit meaningless, particularly since as mentioned earlier there's pretty much always a few weaker enemies scattered around and respawning endlessly in each arena - it starts to feel like it's just regenerating health mechanic with an extra step. At least it means you get to use the minigun a lot.
* The boss fights still kinda suck. In particular the

Spoiler

Icon of Sin

was just sorta boring - visually spectacular, sure, but the fight itself was just drawn-out and repetitive without much in the way of challenge - I can't speak for NIghtmare difficulty but on Ultra Violence there are respawning sword and gas pickups all over the place so it's pretty hard to actually die, it just takes a while.
* Like 2016, I got way more upgrades and points than I ever actually wound up using and frankly the light RPG mechanics do nothing for me.
* Marauders are lame. They're one of those enemies in games that are really irritating, less because they're hard and more because they force you to prioritize them and play in a very awkward, restrictive way until they're dealt with. After the first couple encounters I realized you could pretty much trivialize them with the ballista + super shotgun so they're not even really a challenge, just annoying.

The long and short of it is that this is basically just more DOOM 2016 for better and worse. It's a lot of fun but the extended run-time causes it to wear a bit thin and some of the weaknesses of the formula become more apparent as a result.