New “Doom” is a blast

What separates “Doom” from today’s biggest first-person shooters is the speed. It’s fast, very fast.

It hearkens back to the late ‘90s online popular arena shooters à la “Unreal Tournament” and “Quake III Arena.” For those who aren’t familiar with arena shooters, they are hectic, chaotic and abstract. Players move at fast speeds in the arena as they fight for item control and shoot at their feet with a rocket launcher to reach at great heights. It isn’t for those who are squeamish of seeing excessive amount of blood and gore.

Not only is “Doom” trying to make you feel like you’re playing a game from the late ‘90s, but it does keep up with today’s modern first-person shooter trends. There are a lot of customization tools for your character and even weapon skins if you want to differentiate yourself from other players.

The weapon customization is perhaps one of the most intricate that the first-person genre has seen. You do have a lot of options to create very unique colors and effects on your weapon. Many first-person shooters fail to compete in this aspect, as most of them give you a simple preset to use.

“Doom” implemented a load out system: Players can choose whatever weapon they want to use. This means you don’t have to  learn where the weapon locations are as you always spawn with them. However, you still need to learn the locations of the power weapon and power-up as they are a big factor to winning the game or countering against the Demon Rune.

The Demon Rune is one of the most interesting aspects of “Doom.” It will allow you to transform into the iconic demons from the Doom series. The beta only included the Revenant, a skeleton-esque looking demon with a jetpack and two shoulder mounted rocket launchers. While the full version includes many more.

Doom is a blast. It might be a breath of fresh air if you never played this type of game before first-person shooters became more realistic and slowed down the intensity that you could get from arena shooters.

However, it does have a flaw in its simplicity. You are stuck carrying two weapons throughout the game and can only switch different ones in your loadouts. It would’ve been better if players had access to carry them all, just like back in “Quake III Arena.”

The game does seem to be missing something to make it better after playing many matches. It’s also disappointing that a movement system, which would add more depth to the base movement speed, is not implemented.

Despite of its flaws, it seems like the multiplayer is decent enough to play it if you’re looking for a chaotic experience, but it might not offer enough to make it the game you must play if you’re a shooter fanatic.