What we've been playing - Hell and unrelated lumberjack fantasiesA few of the things that have us hooked this week.Image credit: Eurogamer / id Software Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Additional contributions byTom OrryPublished on March 15, 2025 15th MarchHello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week, Bertie realises he has a soft spot for Hell-based games, as he dives into Doom Eternal while also still paddling around in Diablo, and Tom Avowed revitalises his Avowed experience by dropping the difficulty a bit.What have you been playing?Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.Doom Eternal, PC Image credit: Eurogamer / id SoftwareI can't believe Doom Eternal is five years old already. I slept on it when it first came out, for some reason, so I'm swatting up on it now. And my god, what a game.Doom 2016 was so cold by comparison. It was all feature-less grey space station corridors and hanger-like areas, until you got down to the more gothic, elaborately carved Hell architecture later on. But here in Eternal it's maximum Hell from the beginning. Earth - or a planet like Earth (I'm not paying that much attention) - has been taken over so you portal there from your snazzy Doom space station (!!) to sort it out. Hell, then, is already there, and it's there in abundance. The remnants of a titanic war are writ large all around you. Spiked Hellish architecture scratches at the skies, themselves blood-red and fiery orange with pain. It's spectacular.And the doors! There's a moment early on in Eternal where you need to open a huge Hell door in order to get somewhere - the kind of door designed for a 30-foot being of some unholy kind (ie. the best kind of fantasy door) to walk through. But instead of opening only one colossal door, Doom Eternal instead opts to open three, in a carefully choreographed rhythm, one after another, thump-thump-thump, until a tower with a beam of orange light zapping down on it is framed in the distance beyond. This sequence is everything Doom Eternal does in microcosm:- knows what you're expecting and overdelivers on it. It's about as subtle as a pantomime.Excess, though, can be a fine line to tread. Let's see where it goes from here.-BertieAvowed, Xbox Series XTo see this content please enable targeting cookies. Some tips for people starting out in Avowed.Watch on YouTubeSo I've stuck with Avowed. I had a little wobble when I encountered some bears only to be completely torn to pieces. A few tries later I was about to give up and move on to something else, but I thought I'd drop the difficulty down and give it one more chance. And, yes, the game is now ludicrously easy, my character able to one-shot bears with the kind of axe you might offer to a child (let's call him Timmy) learning how to become a lumberjack from his gruff father (Steve). Steve wants Timmy to follow in his footsteps, but he knows he's just a four-year-old child incapable of wielding a giant axe. This small baby axe won't hurt a fly, he thinks to himself, but Timmy will have fun. That's me. I'm Timmy. Having fun with my baby axe that can somehow down giant bears.Lumberjack fantasies aside, I'm loving the world of Avowed. Yes, it can look a tad unclean on Xbox (I bet it looks lovely on a good PC), but the colours, the buildings, the views, are all rather wonderful. Perhaps a little bizarrely, but maybe not as I've just watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy with my son, it crossed my mind how wonderful a game with this level of world design and grandeur would fit the world of Middle-earth. Clearly that's never going to happen, but it would be magnificent.-Tom ODiablo 4, PlayStation 5It's staggering the amount of work Blizzard does on Diablo 4. This is a week-old video covering some upcoming changes. The changes mean Diablo 4 feels like quite a different game when you don't play it for a while, but it's always welcoming to go back to.Watch on YouTubeEvidently I like Hell-themed games. I'm back in Diablo 4 again - it's my go-to chill game at the moment - and I'm amazed by how rapidly things progress in the game once you hit level 60, which seems like a contradictory thing to say given level 60 is the final level you can reach (I consider Paragon levels something separate). I'm much more used to a level-cap being a kind of plateau in a game, upon which everyone evens out a bit and settles into a pattern of incremental gains over large ones, but that wasn't the case here. Here, my relative power skyrocketed as soon as I hit 60.There are a few reasons for this. One, I'd saved up some Ancestral Legendary equipment to use once I hit level 60, so the moment I did, I equipped it, and these items were much more powerful than what I was using before. Two, I already had 25 Paragon levels banked from a previous incarnation of the game, back when the level cap was 50, so I - in effect - immediately added another 25 levels' worth of progress the moment I hit 60. So I cheated the power curve a bit, I guess.But the third reason relates to the huge changes Blizzard has made to loot since the game launched. Simply put: you now have much more control over adding and adjusting equipment properties than you used to. You can take an already powerful legendary item and slap another couple of enchantments on it, significantly increasing your overall power (across all of your equipment slots, that's nearly a dozen new enchantments), or you can adjust those already on it to better suit you. It used to be that you got what you were given, but now there are myriad ways to shape everything around you.And the result? Incredible - near ridiculous - power. Which is exactly what Diablo is all about.-Bertie