Revelations Is the Expansion That Finally Makes Doom: The Dark Ages Click

I'll say the quiet part out loud: Doom: The Dark Ages was my least favourite of id Software's modern trilogy. Not a bad game - a heavy, ground-bound one. Eternal taught us to be airborne acrobats juggling weapon swaps like a rhythm game, and then Dark Ages sat us back down, handed us a shield, and told us to stand and trade blows. Some people loved that weight. I spent a lot of hours missing the vertical dance.

Revelations, the game's first and only expansion, is the patch to that itch I didn't think I'd get. It landed on July 7 across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series, runs $19.99 on its own, and is bundled in for anyone who bought the Premium Edition. It's the third expansion in this run after The Ancient Gods 1 and 2, and going by early reactions it's the strongest of the three.

The spear does the heavy lifting

The headline addition is a new left-handed weapon that works alongside the shield: a chain spear that gives you vertical mobility again. That's the whole ballgame for me. The base campaign's problem was never the combat design, it was that the Slayer felt bolted to the floor. Give me a way to yank myself around an arena and reach high ground, and suddenly the shield-and-flail loop has the rhythm I was chasing the whole time.

Around that you get a proper new story campaign clocking somewhere in the 10-to-12-hour range - genuinely long for a Doom expansion - a big hub area stuffed with secrets, revisited levels with fresh puzzle and combat wrinkles, an Uber Boss, and Master Arenas built for people who actually want to be punished. The Ripatorium got a pass too.

Worth it on PC?

If you bounced off the base game the way I half did, this is the reason to reinstall. The id Tech engine has been a reliable performer on PC across this trilogy - clean frame pacing, sane VRAM behaviour, the kind of port that reminds you what a competent studio can ship. I'm not going to quote you numbers I haven't measured on my own rig, but nothing about Revelations suggests they broke that streak.

Twelve hours of new content that also retroactively improves the twenty you already played is a rare kind of DLC. It doesn't just add - it corrects. That's the good stuff.

Image: Pelle Wessman from Malmö, Sweden / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doom_Disks_(2954946319).jpg