DOOMed

Thanks god Ratchet and Clank exists and is fucking amazing. Were it not for that, the particular brand of horrible on offer in the DOOM multiplayer beta might have been the straw that shattered my sanity. Between my Vive not shipping, Scarlett JOHANSSON as Motoko KUSANAGI in Ghost in the Shell, Batman vs. Superman, and FUCKING DOOM, it's a god damn miracle there's not a gif of me naked in the middle of downtown getting tazed by one of those segway cops.

Well, shit. Doom multiplayer is awful.

The open beta is live this weekend on PC, PS4, and XBone, and my god is it a wreck. Again, I’ve let myself get hyped, only to be dumped like I shit myself on prom night.

And what’s bothering me isn’t that the DOOM’s multiplayer is bad (it is), it’s that it’s called Doom (we’re doing caps lock for the remake, lowercase for the OG, because Bethesda did that “name the reboot the same thing” thing.) 

Every trailer, interview, and gameplay demo since it was debuted at E3 has been hammering us over the head with this promise of a return to the fast paced, rocket jumping, arena multiplayer games of yore. The remake of the original Doom theme pounding in the debut trailer, while the screen fills with the blood and metal and Cyberdemons and “fuck you, kill shit” 90s brutality that put the original Doom and Quake on a historical pedestal usually reserved for the likes of Mario and Pong. DOOM’s promotion asserted with such confidence that its primary concern was staying true to form, that it even fooled a cynical, “no preorders under any circumstances” motherfucker like myself. They convinced me (or I convinced myself) that no matter its shortcomings, at least that much would be true. The single player would be Doom, and the multiplayer would, essentially, be Quake. 

And it’s not. Dear god, is it not. A great arena shooter doesn’t have loadouts. DOOM does. A great arena shooter has twitch-freak speed. Black Ops III is faster than DOOM. A great arena shooter embraces verticality, allowing for frenetic, acrobatic ‘splosion-fests. DOOM’s combat happens at ground level. A reality that results in the game’s greatest sin: The rocket jump is a pointless, flacid, dick waggle in the direction of one of the coolest tactics in the history of competitive gaming.

The rocket launcher in Quake III was a swiss army weapon. The old standby. Rocket jump absurdly high in the air, aim at enemies on the ground, shoot at their feet, land, circle strafe while railing spacebar, and 1-3 shots later (depending on your aim and enemy armor level) you’re swimming in giblets. If that ground based enemy was equally skilled, it was time for a brutal aerial ballet. A ballet that also ended in giblets...It was fucking beautiful... I wasn’t really going anywhere with that, I’m just being wistful for the sake of it. And that’s not my fault. They called this game Doom. Invoked legacy and nostalgia in its aesthetics and branding. Pretended to the throne. OFF WITH THEIR HEAD!

I’ve found it impossible to judge this game without that legacy coloring my conclusions, but unfurling the facts makes it fairly obvious that even if I could judge DOOM on its own merits (lack of), said judgement would be harsh. It tried to be both loadout and pick-up focused, two great tastes that have proven time and again they don't taste great together. Even if these oil-and-water setups miraculously emulsified, the result would be rendered mute as soon as the Demon Rune spawned. A pickup that turns one lucky player (lucky being the operative term) into a dual rocket launcher wielding, STUPIDLY over-armored Revenant. This guarantees a huge increase in frags, tipping the game’s tenuous balance so horribly that it falls over and shatters its coccyx.

I take back that last sentence. Not the balance part. Or coccyx cuz that word's hilarious. I take back use of the word “frag.” These aren’t “frags,” they’re “kills.” They’re frags in Doom or Quake. Unreal Tournament 2k4 even merits use of the term. But not DOOM. You haven’t earned the word frag, DOOM!

All of this is bad enough, but there’s something truly horrible that still lurks in the darkest corners of this shit pile: The combat is paper mache. The guns feel weak, the hits barely seem to register, the deaths aren’t gratifying, and in what can only be construed as an effort to drive this "action-rpg bad" combat home, hit points appear over your opponents head with every successful shot. They can be turned off in the option menu, but as they’re on by default, you’ll just be blinding yourself to the obvious. This is a Bethesda game. And for any perceived good brought by that company (I’m no fan, but I can understand the appeal), they’ve never been the best at making the kind of gratifying combat at the core of Doom’s appeal. Wolfenstein was solid, but not a classic, and DOOM is most certainly a backpedal.

I’ve never had my hopes dashed so quickly as with such finality as they were in the time between loading up DOOM and playing my first match. (I didn’t even get into the “arena shooters are at their best in free-for-all, which is absent from the beta” thing.) 

Single player better show up on time, bring beer, and stay late to help clean up, or there’s no way DOOM and I are gonna be friends.