Hands on: DOOM Multiplayer Beta - John Jason Fallows

Doom’s fast-paced multiplayer won’t set the entire world on fire, but there’s a subset of players who will find it to be breath of fresh air.

The long-awaited remake of Doom is making a genuine attempt to recapture the chaos of the 1990s-era PC shooters that the series helped to define. In its multiplayer component, which we played over the weekend as part of a close beta, that influence comes less directly from the original Doom itself, and more from its competitively-minded descendants, such as Quake and Unreal Tournament.

Fast and Furious

Eschewing modern first-person shooter mechanical standards like regenerating health, and embracing the notion that a rocket launcher and shotgun might be equally-viable starting options, Doom’s multiplayer runs and guns faster than even quickdraw-intensive shooters like Call of Duty.

The beta offered two modes, a standard 6-on-6 Team Deathmatch and “Warpath,” a king of the hill variant where teams (also of up to 6 players) earned points for controlling a highlighted area, which moved slowly but constantly along a set path around the stage. While Warpath is perfectly fun, and in fact gave players a reason to move toward a single, chaotic location, you get the distinct impression that the speed and brutality of the gameplay will overshadow strategy every time. Even when players were working together, their tactics seemed limited to moving in a pack and shooting at everything that moves, rather than dynamic coordination. Though there will be other modes, this feels like the kind of game where it will be hard to find players in any mode other than deathmatch within a few weeks of launch.

Much of the moment-to-moment gameplay comes down to players running around the arenas’ winding hallways, hunting each other down, then jumping and blasting each other until someone goes down. While co-ordination and strategy still benefit players, there’s an inherently frantic pace to the game and a drive towards constant motion— running, jumping, and shooting — that hasn’t been present in shooters in a long time.

Geared Up

Players start each match by choosing a loadout with two weapons and a piece of a “equipment,” which seem to be grenades or grenade-like options, such as a personal teleporter that allows you to return to a set spot with the press of a button. The weapons cover the range of standard options — there’s a scoped assault rifle, a faster plasma rifle, a sniper rifle, a flamethrower-like lightning gun, the aforementioned rocket launcher and “super shotgun” (which is really just a regular shotgun). Each weapon has a secondary function, which works by pulling the left trigger. For some guns, like the assault rifle, the secondary feature is simply aiming down its sights: Others, like the rocket launcher, which can make a rocket explode early, add some extra technical nuance.

The standout weapon, at least in terms of originality, was the “static rifle”, a precision gun that charges when you move and powers down when you’re standing still. While difficult to master, the gun feels in line with the spirit of the game: run and shoot and just keep moving until someone takes you down.

You can select up to four “hack modules,” temporary perks that grant passive bonuses, which you can activate every time you respawn. (Think of Titanfall’s Burn Cards, or a less invasive version of Halo 5’s “REQ Packs”.) The modules’ perks range from the mundane, but helpful — one, called “Vital Signs,” shows enemies’ health — to the genuinely advantageous power-up locator.

Related: Hands on: Miitomo

In general, the gear seems tailored to encourage players to rely on reflexes over tactical preparation or character customization. Though the multiplayer has a progression system, which gradually expands your player customization options and unlocks new weapons, there’s a sense that if you’re spending more than a few seconds in a menu, you’ve been there too long (case in point, you can set the hack modules to refill automatically.) Apparently by design, these matches are short, fast thrills.

Powered Up

The game’s dominating sense of urgency is aided by the abundance of power-ups scattered throughout the level. Rather than allowing players’ health or shields to regenerate, healing and armor power-ups, as well as ammo, are scattered liberally throughout the level. Most encounters seem liable to get messy, so there’s definitely an impulse to keep looking for the next thing. In addition, more potent power-ups, including speed-enhancing “haste” and quad-damage modifiers, appear in set locations throughout the level. There’s also a one-shot-kill super weapon called a Gauss Cannon.

The most important power-up, however, is the demon transformation item, which lets players turn into a powerful enemy from the game to terrorize the opposing team for 60 second. Beta players were limited to one demon option: the Revenant, a tall, bloody skeletal looking monster with shoulder-mounted rockets and a jetpack. It appeared that in the full game players would be able to set what demon they would turn into before each match. In one-on-one or even against two uncoordinated opponents, the demon dominates — it has more health than a standard player and a direct hit with its rockets is almost always a one-hit kill — but a coordinated team can take it down. If they do, another player can pick up the token and play out the rest of its time, allowing for talented (or lucky) players to swing momentum in a minute flat.

Since picking up power-ups before your opponents can make all the difference, knowing the layouts of levels inside and out becomes incredibly important. The two levels in the beta — a hellish, blood-soaked cave called “Infernal,” and a factory called “Heatwave,” which may or may not be floating on lava — featured winding hallways, portals, and hidden shortcuts. These labyrinths feel unwieldy at first, but can be learned and exploited with practice. The levels did seem, at times, a bit too large — matches with fewer than 12 people were often riddled with long stretches of searching for other players.

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Doom’s multiplayer won’t set the entire world on fire, but there’s a subset of players who will find it a breath of fresh air among first-person shooters looking for a blast from the past, or maybe just looking for something a little different than the upcoming wave teamwork-intensive class-based shooters.