The Demon You Know – Impressions From The Doom Beta

Celebrating its twenty-third birthday this year, Doom had a huge role in defining the first decade of first person shooters. The genre has changed an awful lot since then, but with last weekend’s Doom multiplayer beta, it seems as though there are those within id Software hankering for the good old days. For better or for worse, it’s a little like stepping back in time.

The beta contained two modes, a simple deathmatch and a capture zone mode in which the area fought over moves constantly, following a set path around the arena. Whichever mode I played, just about every game involved running toward the sound of gun fire and then letting rip with everything I had. It’s there that one of the nods to modern shooters is made clear, as numbers start to ping off the player in your crosshairs, showing the hit points you’re taking from their pool of health and armour.

Everyone’s got 100 health points when they spawn, and it’s a finite amount that doesn’t recharge. It can be replenished and boosted with health and armour via pickups though. You’ll find these dotted around the map in various sizes, but there’re also a few more important power ups to look out for, whether it’s a haste mode that makes you run faster than Mo Farah or super powerful guns like the Gauss Rifle and Doom’s trademark BFG. Then there’s the demon runes that spawn a couple of times per game.

Demon runes are announced before they appear, giving you the chance of making your way over and being the one to transform into a super powered demon with twin rocket launchers and a jet pack. In this form, you can wipe out the entire enemy team in a matter of seconds, but you’re not invulnerable. Killing a demon drops the rune and allows another player to pick up it, helping to turn that tide.

You’ve got a standard mix of guns, with a rocket launcher and plasma rifle the two in the Assault preset, alongside a frag grenade. Sniper gets you the Vortex Rifle, Super Shotgun and a throwable teleporter, while Ambusher features an assault rifle alongside the shotgun, for close-quarters fighting. But those are just the presets, and custom loadouts and levelling up in the beta unlocked a Lightning Gun and a Static Rifle.

Completing matches grants you XP, with added bonuses for performing in-game feats, such as getting a certain number of kills with frag grenades. This levelling also unlocks cosmetic upgrade and hack modules. These can be deployed after you die to give you a temporary boost, such as spawning with extra armour or being able to see where your killer was, if you want to rush to avenge yourself.

But really it’s just spawn, shoot, die, repeat. A Greggs steak bake has more finesse to it, and it’s not as if the game is that amazing to look at, even if it is at a perfectly smooth 60 frames per second. The levels in the beta have your standard pools of lava and walkways, with the odd demonic symbols, just so you know that you’re in the Doom universe. The character design is all just generic space marine suits, and if you can tell one type and style of left armour from another when you’re running around, then you’ve got better eyesight than me!

The weapons also need some rebalancing to be fun. The rocket launcher can take someone out in a few hits – of course, the trick is to make sure they do hit – but the assault rifles seem to take your entire ammo supply in order to kill another player. Weapon switching is actually done with the right shoulder button, maybe as a way of encouraging you to get close and kill with a shotgun or one of the melee finishing moves.

Of course this is just a beta and a demo of what’s in the final game, but it’s safe to assume that this is close to what the game’s going to feel like when it’s out in May. For want of a better description, it’s old school and very PC. We’ve become used to shooters having some heft and weight, but your character in Doom seems to be made of helium, floating around levels without so much as a head bob. Weapons also have no real impact, so you can be hit in the face by a rocket and not move an inch.

While it lacked anything particularly original, the beta was still a lot of fun; there’s a lot to be said for just running about and shooting enemies in the face. However, the overriding impression is that Doom is distinctly unwilling to be dragged into 2016. It’s been riding on a message of how it’s getting back to the series’ roots and trademark gameplay, but at the same time it’s so retro that the characters even do the little bobbing animation at the loading screens, which most games designers realised no real humans do quite some time ago.