Doom (BETA)

It’s not always easy to talk about how a game ‘feels’ to play. It’s a combination of various things. What I can say is that this beta of the multiplayer component of the upcoming Doom didn’t ‘feel’ very good at all. In fact, it didn’t even really feel like a beta, more like an alpha build still in the early stages of testing.

It doesn’t feel complete. ‘But it’s a beta’, you might say – ‘of course it’s not complete!’ But I’m not simply talking about content, but that nebulous ‘feel’ of the game. It feels like it's lacking in so many areas that it’s hard to believe they released a beta in this state.

I’m not sure if the developers regard the MP component of the new Doom as all that important, because it certainly doesn’t feel like it, based on what I’ve played. It feels tacked on. A ‘tick on the back of the box’. It was expected – so here it is.

 

I played an hour of the beta and I’d already had enough. But to be fair to the game, I played on for a couple more, just to see if the game would grow on me, if something would ‘click’ and it would all begin to make sense.

But it didn’t. The more I played, the more I realised just how shoddy the whole thing felt. Upon opening the game I spent a few moments attempting to explore and tweak the graphical settings … only to find that there weren’t any. Outside of some basic options, all of the advanced visual settings were unavailable.

So I can only assume, that for the purposes of this beta, the game was set to a Low or Medium preset given how visually dated it appeared. It’s not a looker, that’s for sure, with some poorly textured environments and flat lighting. Everything in the game has a ‘chunky’ kind of look to it, particularly some of the weapons which seem to take up half of your screen.

But graphics aren’t everything, and I can hardly fault the performance, with a solid 60FPS at all times. No, it’s the gameplay where this beta fell horribly flat for me. Movement felt very light, yet oddly slow. In fact, there’s very little feeling of any weight to the game. Weapons lack any kind of punch. I just didn’t get any feeling of kick or weight when moving, shooting or jumping. Or also when being attacked.

 

And that’s a pretty serious issue, as you can suddenly see your health going down, before turning around and realising that someone has been blasting you in the back with a shotgun. And yet, there’s no real feedback of that. No, I don’t mean having jam smeared across my screen, I mean the hard kick my character should receive from taking a shotgun blast to the back at close range.

Even the rocket launcher feels flimsy and weak, with little splash damage or knock back. In fact, only 2-3 of the weapons in the beta felt at all effective. The rest, the assault rifles in particular, felt utterly weak and useless. In short, the weapons and how they handled in the beta was pretty f**king bad. They felt like alpha build versions. They simply weren’t satisfying or fun to use.

The beta contained two maps, with two game modes. The first was a basic TDM, which is pretty much what you’d expect. The second was a far more interesting ‘capture the area’ mode, with the twist being that the area was mobile and traversed a set path around the map. This was pretty neat, as a mode. Shame about the rest of the game. The beta also contained part of the MP customisation and unlock system. But these systems also felt very basic.

 

It felt like another case of simply adding in something people might expect from a modern MP mode, but without any effort being put in to make those elements engaging and enjoyable for the player. The customisation is nice, if limited, but all the ‘level up’ and unlock nonsense feels like a waste of time, like it was just added in to tick another box. The map design was okay, but felt small. And the whole ‘temporarily turn into a demon’ thing felt cheap and pointless.

I don’t know what the point of this beta was. It makes the MP component of the new Doom seem like a cheaply and hastily added afterthought. None of it felt right. It didn’t feel good to play. It felt weak. It lacked kick, impact and punch. I can’t even recall the music, if there was any. Even the announcer sounded bored.

Yeah, I know, it was only a beta, and isn’t that the point of it? For this kind of feedback? But the game is scheduled to release in less than a month, so is there any real chance that any of this will be improved? And if this is such a stripped back version of the game, why do an open beta at all?

I don’t have much more to say. It was just a bit crap, really. If you’re thinking about getting the new Doom for its MP, you might want to think again.