Doom (4)

So, the Doom beta came out today on steam. I think the game had an alpha at some point but I never knew about it. I saw that my steam library had the Doom beta so I downloaded it. The trailers for the game looked amazing. Awesome graphics, with cool gore and it looked to me like classic Doom gameplay mixed with today's graphics.

I thought I would play for about an hour, but I think I ended up playing for 3 or so.... It was pretty addictive. The beta has 2 maps, and a bunch of customizations to unlock for your space marine with different helmets, and other pieces of armour. You can also get different patterns and colours for it as well.

There are unlockable custom loadout slots and weapons to unlock though you can only take two weapons into battle with you at a time unlike the old Doom and even Doom 3, where you could carry the game's whole arsenal in some magic pocket and switch between them all on the fly. The weapons can also be visually customized with different patters and colours as well as with a slider to adjust the amount of rust and wear on the gun. Those features are actually pretty cool and you can come up with some neat looking sets.

I only played Team Deathmatch but there were 3 modes total. TDM is just like in any other FPS game, but its a good jumping in point to get a good feel for the game. The game doesn't have regenerating health, so you will need to find health and armour pickups on the map to stay alive and you will need to pick up ammo boxes so that you don't find yourself against a group of enemies and nothing to shoot at them. Though you could resort to the melee attack, but unless your enemy is near death, it wont do much.

If you catch an opened at 10 percent or less health and perform a melee attack on them, you will perform a "glory" kill which is a small animation of you doing a cool finishing move on your enemy. It's actually pretty neat and very satisfying to pull off.

At some point in the match a power up will show up on the map and the first person to grab it turns into a monster from hell. When you are the monster you are more powerful and can rack up a nice amount of kills for you team. The other team really needs to work together to take you down, and if they do its not that hard to take the monster down because he only has 3 times the amount of health as a regular character. It's a pretty neat gameplay mechanic which spices up a match.

I had a blast playing the beta so far, and look forward to playing more, but I'm wondering if its enough to pay $80 dollars for. Depends on what content comes with the game. If there are lots of maps and a really solid campaign then I will buy it for sure. Also it looks like there will be lots of customization and wont have all the micro-transaction BS that lots of games like Halo 5 and Mass Effect have.

With so many games coming out, and lots of games being disappointing these days I will need to do more research before dropping almost 100 dollars on a game. I'm not into the trend of micro-transactions and season passes and DLC packs. It makes me feel like a slave to rich companies when I end up buying DLC packs for games I already blew a bunch of money on.