Doomguy. The only badass soldier that has literally been to hell and back. DOOM has seen a massive change over the years since its initial MS-DOS release back in 1993. From the iconic E1M1 music which has spawned thousands of fan remixes to the ruthless Cyberdemons.

The latest DOOM started production way back in 2008 when it was called “Doom 4”. After the not so popular take on Doom 3’s horror style gameplay, the previous lead developer at i.d Software wanted to take Doom 4 back to its roots which was fast paced, all out action and the slaughtering of demons in as many ways as possible. As the years went on Doom 4 was well into development even after ZeniMax Media had acquired i.d Software in 2009. However, in 2013 an article on Kotaku had revealed that Doom 4 was in “development hell” and had been completely scrapped and restarted in 2011. It has also been renamed to just DOOM.

Fast-forward to 2014 and a closed presentation was made at Quake Con to debunk any rumours that had been surrounding the game about it being in danger. And it received some serious praise. A year later at e3 2015, i.d showed the world the brand new DOOM game using the i.d tech 6 engine. Executions, melee attacks, double jumps, heavy metal music and standing ovations. No more needs to be said about how well this game was received.

Having just played the closed BETA recently, the game feels like the fast paced, old school type game we’ve been waiting for. If you have ever played Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Red Faction, Timesplitters etc., you’ll feel right at home with this game.  You get to chose your starting weapon and grenade type, but ammo and health must be picked up in game. There’s no health regeneration mechanic in this game, which truly makes it feel like an old school game. Frantically going around with +1 health, looking for any amount of health so you can try and survive the next firefight. What differs the Closed BETA to the Closed Alpha is the added in customisation menus. You can now change the appearance of your character with a variety of armour colours, patterns and symbols. You can even chose how ‘worn’ and ‘immaculate’ your armour looks which is chosen on a scale of 0 – 100%.

As for weapons we had access to the Plasma Rifle, Rocket Launcher, Vortex Rifle, Static Rifle and the Super Shotgun. They added in two new weapons, these were the Lightning Gun and the Heavy Machine Gun. They had taken out the Repeater for the BETA for some unknown reason. As expected, the Super Shotgun was ridiculously OP and coupled with the Rocket Launcher or Plasma Rifle was a deadly combo. Up-close the Super Shotgun was pretty much a one hit kill, bit failing this a quick press of the melee button would result in a “glory” kill which showed the player either snapping their victims neck or kicking them up in the air and punching their face into the ground. Pretty badass if you ask me.

The Lightning Gun was pretty powerful if used in the right hands. The primary firing mode gave a solid stream of lightning which did about 8 or 9 damage depending on where you hit the enemy. However, the secondary firing mode did less but did splash damage and would injure multiple enemies. I came across a team that took down a Revenant in about 5 seconds. Needless to say, this gun is probably going to get nerfed at some point. The Heavy Assault Rifle was basically an LMG with a scope that counted as your secondary firing mode. Combined with the Quad Damage pickup, this weapon was an absolute beast. The Demon Rune would still transform you into a Revenant which was extremely satisfying to get kills with. Hopefully the other Demon Runes in the full game are just as fun to use. As for grenades they had added in one more grenade type called the Siphon Grenade. This grenade sapped energy from the opponent and gave it to you in 5’s. So the more enemies within the range of this grenade, the more the health you would obtain in quick succession, a definite lifesaver after a bloody fire fight with more than a couple enemies.

Moving onto game modes, we had Warpath and TDM. Warpath was a very interesting and particularly fun version of King of the Hill. In Warpath, the capture area moves around the map in a circle following a clearly marked path. In addition to this, whenever a Demon Rune would spawn, it spawned on the opposite side to this path. So choices needed to be made on whether or not to continue capturing the area or going to spawn as a Revenant. Not a very hard one to make considering the Revenant has 200 health, dual rocket launchers and jet pack to fly around the map. Just make sure you’re the first one there.

The game itself does suffer from screen tearing a little bit but seems to stop once you have spawned. Achieving 1080p/60fps on console is a feat to achieve but the signs of the game struggling on console is shown through things like screen tearing.  The Master Race will of course have no problem running this game at max settings, considering their ‘rig’ is powerful enough. But on the PC side of things, a lot of the PC players were complaining that there were not enough options to mess around with and having a 60fps locked on the game was ridiculous, considering a lot of the players that were playing this game were running 144Hz monitors. There was an “advanced options” tab but was greyed out according PC players. Hopefully i.d will give them their wish for advanced options so that they can fiddle with as many settings as possible.
Overall this game is going to be a breathe of (old) fresh air into the over saturated market of FPS games. The fast past gameplay with old school tactics makes you rethink your normal strategy that you would normally bring to a FPS game.

Unfortunately the DLC plan i.d have laid out for this game has come under serious criticism as you pay £40 for a few maps, one new weapon and a playable demon. The rest is customisable armour pieces, taunts, hack modules and equipment. Pretty whack compared to other FPS DLC content. We all hate DLC and i.d have to be very careful and play their cards right if they want DOOM to succeed like its previous instalments.