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Doom Eternal is an intense game, so you can be forgiven for feeling a little overwhelmed by the demon horde, especially on higher difficulties. Compared to its predecessor, it’s a far more fast-paced experience because of its emphasis on mobility and demand for even twitchier shooting reflexes.

To make sure you’re ripping and tearing in the most efficient way possible, we’ve got a few tips to get your slaying started ahead of the game’s release on Friday, March 20. Once you get your hands on the game, be sure to leave your own tips in the comments section below, and we’ll update this feature with even more hints to keep you all ripping and tearing.

For more Doom Eternal, be sure to read our review in progress. Otherwise, be on the lookout for more guides in the coming days.

Never Stop Chainsawing

The chainsaw works a little differently in Eternal than it did in DOOM 2016: in fact it’s essential for obtaining the valuable ammunition you need to mulch enemies. You should be revving it more often than in the first game, as it will automatically recharge to one pip pretty quickly, which is all that is needed to shred apart basic imps and soldiers. However, you’ll still need to find fuel out in the world if you want to bisect larger enemies like cacodemons and revenants.

It took me a little while to break the 2016 habit of saving the chainsaw for larger foes, but in Eternal, get yourself in the mentality of cleaving demons every damn opportunity you get. It’s an essential tool for refilling your ammo, as those minor demons you tear asunder should drop plenty of shells and bullets for the rest of your arsenal. **Play Rocking Heavy Metal Guitar Solo**

Be ‘nade Happy

Both your frag and ice grenades exist on their own cooldowns, so you should not be afraid to spam throwing both and detonating carnage and freezing blasts. This can be super useful in moments where you need to freeze a bunch of demons to give you some space, so that you can blow them apart with frags. Though be sure to save some spares so you can deal with those pesky cacodemons: jam a grenade into their mouth and blow them apart with a subsequent shot. After a few upgrades, you’ll also be able to fire grenades out more rapidly, as well as bonuses that allow you to turn Imps into ice cubes or zombies into a thin red paste.

Never Stop Moving

Doom Eternal comes with a whole host of new movement options available to you from the outset, so be sure to utilise them! It’s weird that it feels like you’re barely on the ground while playing this game, but movement is key to staying alive in Eternal. With enemies firing rockets, whipping energy blasts, or mobbing you with their numbers, you can get overwhelmed very easily.

As bad-ass as the Doom Slayer is, he’s far from invincible, so agility is the best defence from fireballs and rocket blasts. Keep an eye out for things like monkey bars, try to keep dashing as soon as you’re able, and don’t be afraid to use the super shotgun’s meathook to drag you out of the fray and towards a lone enemy.

Barrels and Ammo

Another way to get ammo if you’re short between battles and need a few extra shells and rockets is to take advantage of the exploding barrels around you. Not only are they great to help you gib enemies that wander too close to them, but with the right upgrades, they can also be a means to resupply.

If you use a combination of the Thicker Skin, Environment, and Generating Barrels upgrades, not only do the big red barrels drop munitions, but they also respawn. And with immunity to their blasts you can go around shooting and punching them point-blank to your heart’s content until your pockets are brimming with bullets.

Linking Upgrades

As you progress, you’ll start to find Sentinel Crystals that can be used to upgrade basic stats, like your health, armour, and ammunition levels. While you can use the standard tree on the top left corner to get exactly what you want, you can slot them into the special perks below it, which require you to invest into two basic stat upgrades to unlock.

An essential perk to get is Loot Magnet, which brings all those sweet item and weapon drops to you; it also gets you every piece of armour possible, and since you’re battling through a demon infested earth, you’re going to need that constant protection. Quickdraw Belch and Belch Armor Boost are also wonderful, as they make the most of every fiery shot you unleash from the shoulder cannons.

Optimising Your Runes

Runes offer valuable passive upgrades, but which runes you’ll find helpful depends on your playstyle. Based on my experiences, there’s a few stand out ones I can heartily recommend.

Seek And Destroy allows you to launch into a glory kill from further away, which is not only great for regaining health, but also grants some valuable invincibility during the animation to get you out of a sticky spot if you’re cornered. Punch and Reave lets you throw your Blood Punch much more safely, as you’re guaranteed to get a good chunk of health back with each meaty right hook.

On the other hand, Dazed and Confused increases the enemy stagger state, which may not seem that valuable at first, but later on when arenas get really hectic, you’ll be glad that the demons you didn’t get to tear in half are still kindly waiting for you to finish them off.

I’m also a fan of Chrono Strike. With this handy Rune, using your weapon mods mid-air allows you to slow down time, which is great for assessing the situation you’re about to shortly land into, or just for maximum cool points when you land an in-air slow motion headshot on whatever soldier is below you.

Prison Yard Practice

You’ll visit the Doom Fortress Prison once in the story, but remember you can always go back there anytime you want to warm up your shooting skills, try out a new weapon build, or just practice things like movement and weapon switching without consequence. All those imps are locked up down there in the bowels of your fortress, so you may as well use them for something…

Useful Praetor Perks To Get

Not all Praetor Suit perks are created equal,and some will serve you much better in the early game, especially when praetor points are harder to come by. Thicker Skin and Frag Stock Ups will allow you to shrug off barrel explosions and fling your own munitions more frequently. Getting Item Finder as early as possible will make it much easier to find future upgrades and collectables, as long as you keep one eye focused on your map, that is. It’ll help you find more tokens, as well as Sentinel Batteries, which will then allow you to unlock more items and secrets back in your fortress.

Now Playing: Doom Eternal: Things You Should Know Before Playing

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Editor’s note: We will be finalizing this review once Doom Eternal has officially released and its multiplayer servers become available. Look out for an update after the game launches on March 20; for now, read on for our full thoughts on the single-player portion.

Id Software’s return to Doom in 2016 was a phenomenal update of the franchise’s classic shooter formula. It was fast and intense, full of huge monsters and scorching metal tracks, modernizing the feel of the 1990s original while adding some new-school flourishes. Where Doom 2016 brought the original Doom into the present, Doom Eternal feels like a big step forward in making the franchise something new: It’s a master class in demon dismemberment after the introductory course to ripping and tearing of four years ago. Like its predecessor, Doom Eternal makes you feel like a monster-shredding badass–not just because you’re the strongest Doom Slayer, but because you’re also the smartest.

Doom Eternal is all about effectively using the huge amount of murder tools at your disposal. Health, armor, and ammo pickups are at a minimum in Eternal’s many combat arenas, and the game instead requires you to earn these by massacring monsters in a variety of different ways. Stagger an enemy and you can tear them apart with a brutal glory kill, which refills your health; douse a demon with the new flamethrower and they’ll start to spout armor pickups; or cut them in half with the chainsaw to grab some much-needed ammo.

In order to stay alive, you can’t just run around blasting madly, expecting to tear through everything in your path; you have to run around blasting rationally to keep yourself at fighting strength. Keeping all your numbers up means continually rotating through your glory, chainsaw, and flamethrower kills while also making sure you’re using the right gun for a particular job. Many of the toughest enemies now have weak points that allow you to snipe off their most lethal weapons, and you’ll need to assess threats and knock them out quickly.

At first, it seems like Doom Eternal provides an altogether unwieldy list of things to manage. Between all its weapons and tools, their various ammo counters, and your health, it can all become overwhelming. With so much to keep in mind at all times, it takes a bit to get accustomed to Doom Eternal. And constantly pausing the action to pull up your weapon wheel to check ammo counters and decide which weapon to use on the monster about to tear your face off can feel antithetical to Doom’s run-and-gun, rip-apart-everything approach.

Once you get the hang of it, though, all of Doom Eternal’s many elements come together in a cascade of mayhem that makes you into the brainiest killing machine around. This isn’t the kind of shooter in which your twitch reactions and aiming skills will carry you through; Eternal is a game in which you have to be constantly plotting your next move, executing a calculus of carnage to keep yourself alive and make everything else dead. Every moment is about analyzing the battlefield to find the next enemy you can stagger and slice apart for health or ammo, figuring out which enemy is your top priority and what guns you’ll need to take it out safely, and where you need to head next in order to take the shots you need or keep the creatures chasing you from getting their own chance to rip and tear.

The mental math of figuring out how to keep yourself alive is a big part of what makes the game fun, but it’s the improved mobility that really lets Doom Eternal kick off a metal guitar solo and start shredding. Every big battle takes place in a multi-level arena adorned with jump pads and monkey bars that let you get around quickly, and you also have a double-jump and horizontal dash move for avoiding attacks and crossing distances. A few arenas have their irritations, especially those where it’s easy to trap yourself in a tight corner or back over a cliff, but mostly, Eternal’s level design provides plenty of opportunities to zip around like a bat out of hell, constantly finding your next target and assessing if you need to set it on fire, freeze it, cut it in half, tear it apart, or some combination of all of them. It all makes just about every fight feel like a speeding train seconds from going off the rails, with disaster only averted because you’re so damn good at killing stuff. Once you get the rhythm of Doom Eternal, it becomes a brilliant extension of what made Doom 2016 so cool.

Between battles, you spend your time using Eternal’s mobility to navigate its sprawling, twisting levels, and to uncover myriad secret locations that hide upgrades and weapon mods. There’s an even bigger emphasis on platforming than in Doom 2016, and puzzling through the environments to get around provides a welcome breather between fights. Some of the platforming can be a bit trying at times, especially when you need to clear big gaps to grab distant monkey bars or hit sticky walls you can climb. For the most part, though, navigating the environment is almost as much fun as smashing through Hell’s armies. These portions are also pretty forgiving, thanks to the fact that falling into the abyss now only penalizes you with a small loss of health instead of instant death.

The campaign took me around 16 hours to complete, and that included tracking down the vast majority of secrets and completing a lot of the optional fights that earn you additional upgrade points. Running throughout is a pretty involved story, which feels like a fundamental shift from the satirical, jokey tale of Doom 2016. Where that game put you in the Praetor suit of a Doomslayer who literally destroyed the radios trying to provide context for his endless massacres, Doom Eternal is much more self-serious, constantly spewing proper nouns and character names as if you’re intimately familiar with all the actors leading Hell’s invasion of Earth. Some of the humor of the last game remains, but the majority is all pretty tough to follow if you don’t spend time reading through the many collectible lore drops scattered around every level. Thankfully, keeping up with Eternal’s confusing plot isn’t really a necessary component of enjoying the game.

In addition to the main campaign, Doom Eternal also includes a multiplayer mode, as well as Master Levels, which are remixed versions of missions from the main campaign that provide additional challenge and will get added to Eternal over time. The multiplayer offering wasn’t available ahead of Eternal’s launch, so we’ll be updating this review and finalizing the score once we’ve had a chance to test it out.

Though it can take a bit to get the hang of it, the intricacies of Doom Eternal’s combat, combined with its enhanced mobility and option-heavy level design, create a ton of white-knuckle moments that elevate everything that made Doom 2016 work so well. Its combat is just as quick and chaotic, but requires you to constantly analyze everything that’s happening in order to come out victorious. Once you get the hang of the rhythm of Doom Eternal, it’ll make you feel like a demon-slaying savant.

The Xbox Store’s weekly deals have arrived, bringing steep discounts on a wide selection of Xbox One games. The big sale this week focuses on Square Enix titles, including franchises like Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider. There’s also the Wild World of Robots Sale, which features–you guessed it–games with robots. You also still have two more days to shop last week’s Triple Threat Sale as well, so you can still nab Far Cry, Tom Clancy, and Assassin’s Creed titles at low prices.

As Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s release draws closer, why not spend some time with some of the classics from the role-playing franchise? A bunch of Final Fantasy titles are 50% off at the Xbox Store. The OG Final Fantasy VII is a cool $8, and Final Fantasy IX is down to $10.49. You can also grab Final Fantasy VIII Remastered for $12, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster for $25, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age for $25, and Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition for $17.49.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, one of the most under-the-radar gems of this console generation, is available for the incredibly low price of $4.49 (was $30). If you haven’t played the stellar 2016 action-RPG from Eidos Montreal, don’t miss out on this deal. Dontnod Entertainment’s moving episodic adventure Life is Strange 2 is 60% off at $16, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition–featuring all of the post-launch DLC–is slashed to $19.79 (was $60).

There are, of course, a bunch of cool games featuring robots, so the Wild World of Robots Sale is pretty great, too. The superb SteamWorld Dig 2 is discounted to $8 (was $20) and critically acclaimed Metroidvania Axiom Verge is 50% off at $10. If you’re in the mood for some psychological horror, Bloober Team’s stunning Observer is down to $7.49 (was $30).

Xbox Live Gold subscribers can take advantage of even more deals. This week’s Deals With Gold are led by Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for $39 (was $60), Resident Evil 2 for $20 (was $40), and Monster Hunter World for $15 (was $30).

You can browse the full selection of weekly deals at the Xbox Store and check out our picks below.

Best Xbox One game deals

*indicates deals exclusive to Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass Ultimate subscribers

Nintendo’s online services are experiencing issues at one of the worst possible times. Nintendo Switch players are currently unable to connect to the internet, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ release is just days away.

The issues began this morning, with Nintendo’s online network services going down across Switch, Wii U, 3DS, and web browsers, according to the official Nintendo operational status page. All network services are affected, which means you won’t be able to play games or buy new ones until the problem is resolved. However, others have reported sporadic success connecting in specific games, so it can’t hurt to still try out the game you’re hoping to play.

Given the number of people currently stuck at home worldwide due to the coronavirus outbreak, it’s possible the network could be overloaded. Xbox Live suffered a similar outage late last week that was resolved within a few hours, though the exact cause wasn’t made public.

Downloading new Switch games could be the only way for some to buy them over the next few weeks, as certain states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania are closing “non-essential” businesses in order to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Alongside Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s upcoming release, the Nintendo outage comes just before Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase. It’s scheduled for today at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET and will feature 20 minutes of information on upcoming Switch games. If any of those games were planned for immediate release, the outage could be an issue.

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Persona 5 Royal is an expanded version of Persona 5, meaning there’s a lot to the game. The original release was an achievement as an RPG and an evolution of the long-running franchise. It brought together an expressive art style, incredible soundtrack, bold narrative, and wonderful characters for what turned out to be a 100+ hour journey in rebelling against abusive authority figures. In the same vein as Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 FES, P5R acts as a definitive version of the base game, but we’ll leave that to our review to determine that.

In the video above, reviewer Michael Higham talks about his experience after 50 hours with the game and how the new features and changes affect P5R so far. Given the length of the game (and Michael’s ever-growing workload), he’s taken the game’s advice of ‘take your time’ to heart. However, he still has time to evaluate the additions that come in those 50 hours. This includes the involvement of the new persona-user Kasumi Yoshizawa, the school counselor Takuto Maruki, and the way Confidant routes have changed slightly. As for combat and exploration, Mementos gets a few overhauls while palaces have been tweaked to accommodate some new elements like the grappling hook and Will Seeds. Additional mechanics like disaster shadows and persona traits shake up the combat for enjoyable twists that make things a bit more dynamic. All that and more is covered in this video.

We currently have an early review impressions feature on Persona 5 Royal to give you an in-depth look at this huge RPG and further examine its new systems. We previously talked to long-time localization manager from developer Atlus about how Persona has evolved over the years and how P5R has some tweaks to controversial dialogue. We’ll have guide content as we approach the launch of the game on March 31, and be sure to stay tuned for our full final review in the coming weeks.

Movie giant Warner Bros. has announced that the Harley Quinn spin-off Birds of Prey will be released earlier than expected for home video in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

Variety reports that the film will be released for home video on March 24. It will cost $20 USD to buy on a variety of stores, including Amazon and iTunes. A rental option will come in April.

This is a big change because Birds of Prey is still in theatres, and it’s happening in response to the coronavirus pandemic. With more and more people staying home instead of going out to a theatre–if they even can, considering hundreds of cinemas are closed–Warner Bros. is hoping to serve fans where they are: at home.

Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan said on Twitter, before this news was confirmed, that she was in favor of releasing the movie earlier on video-on-demand.

Birds of Prey is just the latest Warner Bros. project to shift plans due to the virus. Other Warner Bros. movies, including The Matrix 4, The Batman, Fantastic Beasts 3, and King Richard have all paused production and sent cast and crew home due to the outbreak. Another Warner Bros. movie, the untitled Elvis Presley movie from Baz Luhrmann, stopped filming after star Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced they had contracted COVID-19 while filming in Australia.

This move from Warner Bros. follows the news from film giant Universal, which announced that Trolls: World Tour would be available to buy on digital services the same day it was expected to come to theatres. Some of the company’s other movies that are still in theatres, including The Invisible Man, are coming to digital stores as soon as March 20 in response to the virus.

For its part, Disney brought Frozen II to Disney+ sooner-than-expected, while The Rise of Skywalker is also now available to buy through video-on-demand stores, ahead of schedule.

With theatres closed across the US and the world, movie studios are looking for ways to make up for what are expected to be gargantuan box office losses, and these moves are part of that.

Birds of Prey premiered in February and has made $199 million at the global box office, which includes $84 million from the US and $115 million from international markets. Its box office total is more than double its production budget before marketing expenses.

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Microsoft has recently shared a lot of details about the Xbox Series X. This includes a fresh look at how the console’s use of hardware accelerated DirectX ray tracing makes next-gen games look even better. Starting off with a definition: ray racing is essentially a technological framework that allows for improved lighting, shadows, and reflections. It also helps create more realistic-sounding audio. In short, it’s a way for developers to create “more physically accurate worlds,” according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says the Xbox Series X is the first-ever console to feature this kind of ray tracing, and it’s made possible thanks to the console’s custom GPU made in collaboration with AMD.

Will Tuttle of the Xbox Wire witnessed ray tracing on the Xbox Series X first-hand with Minecraft. Tuttle said the advancements that ray tracing offers were immediately obvious. “Shadows cast from objects soften or harden depending on how far away from the object you are, while lava gives off a warm orange glow that dissipates over distance and reflects off of minecart rails,” Tuttle said. “Even the moon casts its own rays, streaming down through cracks in the walls and reflecting off particles in the air.”

Additionally, ray tracing in Minecraft allows light to pass through transparent objects in a game and pick up the surrounding color and display it in a way that looks realistic. Ray tracing can also have a dramatic impact on how water looks.

“With ray tracing on, water was now fully transparent and allowed light from the moon to pass through it to the player underneath and realistically reflect off the seaweed swaying in the current,” Tuttle said. “It was really an impressive demo that brought what hardware accelerated DirectX Ray tracing in Minecraft could deliver to life in a way I never imagined.”

Tuttle went on to say Minecraft’s use of ray tracing “fundamentally” changes how Minecraft feels. You can see how the visuals compare by using the image slider tool above.

YouTuber Austin Evans was also invited to Microsoft’s headquarters to see the Xbox Series X and learn more about it, including its use of ray tracing. You can skip to around 2:40 in the video below to see Evans play Minecraft on Xbox Series X and show off its new visuals.

Ray tracing is also coming to the PC version of Minecraft. Once released, players can select ray tracing from the in-game settings menu. Players, of course, will also need a GPU that’s good enough to support ray tracing, as well as the latest driver from Nvidia. More details about ray tracing for Minecraft’s PC version can be found on Nvidia’s website.

The Xbox Series X is slated to launch this holiday, and that’s still the plan, despite concerns about COVID-19. For everything you need to know, check out GameSpot’s Xbox Series X news roundup.