Doom: The Dark Ages

• Your shield will block 360 degrees, not just the direction you're facing. Keep it up while running away to grab health to avoid getting shot in the back and you can also parry attacks from behind if you guess the timing right.

• Your shield abilities and reflected attacks only trigger off of parried hell surge projectiles, but when browsing upgrades remember that any reference to hell surge attacks also includes the melee version. I got very used to the idea it only applied to projectiles, but some of the last weapons you get have upgrades that are a lot more potent and make a lot more sense when assuming there's a melee attacker in your face triggering them constantly.

• Your melee attacks seem underwhelming at first since they don't stun enemies and, at least at ultra-violence difficulty, you don't have the health to just trade swings with them. Some actions will make enemies falter (get stunned for 1-2 seconds) indicated by an orange ring around their head where you can sneak 1 or 2 attacks in. Otherwise, you'll pretty quickly get the shield toss which will stun unarmored enemies and let you really wail on them, which is especially important if you want to stick with the starter fist weapon since it wants you to chain attacks.

Settings

• Auto-Run: The game has it off by default and turning it on lets you move a bit faster all the time at the expense of making a handful of platforming sections more awkward.

• Threat Detector: The game will put indicators around the screen letting you know what direction attacks are coming from. Helpful for cleaning up stragglers and highlights parryable attacks.

• Slow down on parry: The game does slow-mo every time you parry an attack. YMMV but the slow down messed up my timing when trying to parry multiple attacks back to back and I wound up turning it off.

• [Steam] The weapon wheel (hold Q) won't work on mouse and keyboard if a controller is connected. Turning off controller input in the game menu doesn't fix it, either disconnect the controller or go into steam and disable Steam Input.