Hey everyone! It's really been a while since I've made any sort of content on this blog (I think my last post was the Android N Preview Rundown) but today I've got something new for you to read! In this post, I'll be talking about the Doom Open Beta that ran from 4/15 to 4/17 this weekend. So without further ado, let's get started!
Reviewed on PS4
First of all, this is not a beta. This is a demo. I found the game to run extremely smoothly at 60fps with no slowdowns and no bugs or graphical glitches whatsoever. If this were a beta, the game would definitely have at least some of those issues, but you won't find them here. Besides, the whole point of a beta is to release an unfinished prototype to testers and then make tweaks to balance and game code and things of that sort. So basically, to find out if the game is broken and anything else is wrong (and then proceed to fix it), you need to release a beta test version a lot more than one month before the game comes out. This game is releasing on May 13, which means that there's literally a month until the final release. I have the sneaking suspicion that they actually do have all the multiplayer maps and gamemodes and whatnot finished, they're just withholding them from us on purpose to have a reason to actually call this a beta. Trust me, it's not a beta. It's a demo that lasts for a few days with a fraction of the finished game's content. Anyway, now that that's out of the way, let's discuss the game.
The most important thing in a game in my opinion is gameplay. So what's it like? Well, this game tries to be a hybrid of fast-paced arena shooters like Quake, and slower paced console-pandering games like Call of Duty. The end result is an abomination that does not cater to either crowd. It's like Doom can't make up its freaking mind about what it wants to be, so it just ends up being trapped in the middle and tries to do everything while succeeding at nothing. This might be due to the fact that the game was most likely developed specifically for consoles and then ported to PC, and Bethesda and ID Software know that a real arena shooter can only be played properly with a keyboard and mouse, so they just decided to water down the gameplay to make it possible for the consolers to enjoy. The result of this decision is a game that does not take advantage of the PC's capabilities and does not satisfy the PC communities' expectations, and I don't blame them for thinking that this game is garbage (36% positive on Steam!).
Another thing that I don't like at all about this game is the fact that there are loadouts. The whole point of an arena shooter is that you spawn with nothing and then have to pick up the weapons from different parts of the map. Why are we just throwing that idea in the trash? Just to protect casuals and console players? Oh yeah, I just remembered that this isn't an arena shooter. It's a pathetic attempt to recreate one that has a lot more in common with Call of Duty. This is totally unacceptable. Check out this review from one of my favorite reviewers, he has pretty much the same stance on it as I do.
Regardless, I still had a bit of fun with the open beta, although this was probably just because it was something slightly new, and pretty much all games are fun for the first few hours. It might also have been because the game's skill gap is so compressed that you can pick it up and be destroying people within five minutes. I'm sorry, but that's just not right.
There are seven weapons in the game, the Heavy Machinegun, Super Shotgun, Plasma Rifle, Static Rifle, Vortex Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and Lightning Gun. I played with all of these weapons except the Static Rifle and liked most of them, although I really wasn't a fan of the Rocket Launcher in this game. It felt way too weak compared to the other weapons, which is surprising considering that launchers tend to be the most overpowered guns in FPS games. Instead, the Super Shotgun takes the cake as being the most overpowered weapon in the game. Seriously, this thing is ridiculous. It always kills in one or two shots, while guns like the HMG have to land about 20 shots to get a kill. That really needs to be balanced before the final multiplayer release. Other than that, I found that all of the weapons in the open beta were pretty well balanced.
As well as guns, there are also three pieces of equipment that can be inserted into loadouts; the standard Frag Grenade, the Personal Teleporter, which you throw and then teleport to wherever it lands, and the Siphon Grenade, which steals health from enemies and heals you in the process. There aren't really any issues here, although I did feel like the Siphon Grenade was way too weak compared to the Frag Grenade, so of course that needs to be buffed significantly to have a chance against other equipment.
There is a bit of customization in the game as well. You can add patterns and colors to all of your weapons, as well as being able to rename them to whatever you want. You can also change the armor pieces, as well as add colors and patterns to it. Finally, you can change your character's taunt, which is the action that they perform when you get top of the leaderboard and your character is shown on the victory screen. All in all however, I didn't feel that the customization was very deep or meaningful and could have easily been left out entirely.
As for the graphics, I thought that they were not only nothing special, but looked mediocre at best. Nothing really impressed me in this department, but I can overlook it since I don't really care about graphics in games. I'm perfectly happy to play a game from 1995, even though I wasn't around back then to play games. As long as the game is fun, I don't care. To make up for the average graphics, the game does run at a buttery smooth 60fps even on consoles and doesn't show any signs of slowdowns in any areas. I almost said that this was impressive, but we should have much higher standards by now. Every game we play on consoles should run at 60fps no problem in this day and age. The fact that we're only two years into the Xbox One and PS4 and they've already reached their technological limitations is a true indication of their actual worth and capability.
So far, there's two maps in the beta, heatwave and infernal, and two gamemodes, Team Deathmatch and Warpath. Basically, Warpath is king of the hill where you have to capture and hold a hill with your team, except the hill is constantly in motion along a set path. I thought this game mode was an absolute blast to play, and really made up for the sub-par, lackluster, and ultimately uninspired Team Deathmatch mode.
There are some pickups lying on the ground throughout the map, including tons of health and ammo crates, a massive railgun that is an instant kill weapon, and a demon rune, which causes you to become a hugely unfair and overpowered demon with twin rockets that instantly kill players and deal splash damage. The demons in this game need to be seriously nerfed, because it's really frustrating to be constantly stomped on by them by a player who happened to get lucky enough to find it in the match.
Overall, Doom seems to not only be a pretty generic FPS game, but also an abomination mash-up between two different genres of games, similar to what happened with Call of Duty Ghosts. The beta was fun this weekend, but in the end this isn't a game I can see myself paying $60 for and then continuing to play into the future. Unless the single player offering is absolutely fantastic, I think I'll give this one a miss. I thought that this would be the first multiplayer game that I would truly enjoy on my ps4, but I guess I'll have to keep waiting...
So, that wraps up my thoughts on the Doom Open Beta, what do you think? Is this a game you'll be interested in buying?
Thank you so much for reading! :D
And with that, I'll see you guys later!
Reviewed on PS4
First of all, this is not a beta. This is a demo. I found the game to run extremely smoothly at 60fps with no slowdowns and no bugs or graphical glitches whatsoever. If this were a beta, the game would definitely have at least some of those issues, but you won't find them here. Besides, the whole point of a beta is to release an unfinished prototype to testers and then make tweaks to balance and game code and things of that sort. So basically, to find out if the game is broken and anything else is wrong (and then proceed to fix it), you need to release a beta test version a lot more than one month before the game comes out. This game is releasing on May 13, which means that there's literally a month until the final release. I have the sneaking suspicion that they actually do have all the multiplayer maps and gamemodes and whatnot finished, they're just withholding them from us on purpose to have a reason to actually call this a beta. Trust me, it's not a beta. It's a demo that lasts for a few days with a fraction of the finished game's content. Anyway, now that that's out of the way, let's discuss the game.
The most important thing in a game in my opinion is gameplay. So what's it like? Well, this game tries to be a hybrid of fast-paced arena shooters like Quake, and slower paced console-pandering games like Call of Duty. The end result is an abomination that does not cater to either crowd. It's like Doom can't make up its freaking mind about what it wants to be, so it just ends up being trapped in the middle and tries to do everything while succeeding at nothing. This might be due to the fact that the game was most likely developed specifically for consoles and then ported to PC, and Bethesda and ID Software know that a real arena shooter can only be played properly with a keyboard and mouse, so they just decided to water down the gameplay to make it possible for the consolers to enjoy. The result of this decision is a game that does not take advantage of the PC's capabilities and does not satisfy the PC communities' expectations, and I don't blame them for thinking that this game is garbage (36% positive on Steam!).Another thing that I don't like at all about this game is the fact that there are loadouts. The whole point of an arena shooter is that you spawn with nothing and then have to pick up the weapons from different parts of the map. Why are we just throwing that idea in the trash? Just to protect casuals and console players? Oh yeah, I just remembered that this isn't an arena shooter. It's a pathetic attempt to recreate one that has a lot more in common with Call of Duty. This is totally unacceptable. Check out this review from one of my favorite reviewers, he has pretty much the same stance on it as I do.
Regardless, I still had a bit of fun with the open beta, although this was probably just because it was something slightly new, and pretty much all games are fun for the first few hours. It might also have been because the game's skill gap is so compressed that you can pick it up and be destroying people within five minutes. I'm sorry, but that's just not right.
There are seven weapons in the game, the Heavy Machinegun, Super Shotgun, Plasma Rifle, Static Rifle, Vortex Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and Lightning Gun. I played with all of these weapons except the Static Rifle and liked most of them, although I really wasn't a fan of the Rocket Launcher in this game. It felt way too weak compared to the other weapons, which is surprising considering that launchers tend to be the most overpowered guns in FPS games. Instead, the Super Shotgun takes the cake as being the most overpowered weapon in the game. Seriously, this thing is ridiculous. It always kills in one or two shots, while guns like the HMG have to land about 20 shots to get a kill. That really needs to be balanced before the final multiplayer release. Other than that, I found that all of the weapons in the open beta were pretty well balanced.
As well as guns, there are also three pieces of equipment that can be inserted into loadouts; the standard Frag Grenade, the Personal Teleporter, which you throw and then teleport to wherever it lands, and the Siphon Grenade, which steals health from enemies and heals you in the process. There aren't really any issues here, although I did feel like the Siphon Grenade was way too weak compared to the Frag Grenade, so of course that needs to be buffed significantly to have a chance against other equipment.There is a bit of customization in the game as well. You can add patterns and colors to all of your weapons, as well as being able to rename them to whatever you want. You can also change the armor pieces, as well as add colors and patterns to it. Finally, you can change your character's taunt, which is the action that they perform when you get top of the leaderboard and your character is shown on the victory screen. All in all however, I didn't feel that the customization was very deep or meaningful and could have easily been left out entirely.
As for the graphics, I thought that they were not only nothing special, but looked mediocre at best. Nothing really impressed me in this department, but I can overlook it since I don't really care about graphics in games. I'm perfectly happy to play a game from 1995, even though I wasn't around back then to play games. As long as the game is fun, I don't care. To make up for the average graphics, the game does run at a buttery smooth 60fps even on consoles and doesn't show any signs of slowdowns in any areas. I almost said that this was impressive, but we should have much higher standards by now. Every game we play on consoles should run at 60fps no problem in this day and age. The fact that we're only two years into the Xbox One and PS4 and they've already reached their technological limitations is a true indication of their actual worth and capability.
So far, there's two maps in the beta, heatwave and infernal, and two gamemodes, Team Deathmatch and Warpath. Basically, Warpath is king of the hill where you have to capture and hold a hill with your team, except the hill is constantly in motion along a set path. I thought this game mode was an absolute blast to play, and really made up for the sub-par, lackluster, and ultimately uninspired Team Deathmatch mode.There are some pickups lying on the ground throughout the map, including tons of health and ammo crates, a massive railgun that is an instant kill weapon, and a demon rune, which causes you to become a hugely unfair and overpowered demon with twin rockets that instantly kill players and deal splash damage. The demons in this game need to be seriously nerfed, because it's really frustrating to be constantly stomped on by them by a player who happened to get lucky enough to find it in the match.
Overall, Doom seems to not only be a pretty generic FPS game, but also an abomination mash-up between two different genres of games, similar to what happened with Call of Duty Ghosts. The beta was fun this weekend, but in the end this isn't a game I can see myself paying $60 for and then continuing to play into the future. Unless the single player offering is absolutely fantastic, I think I'll give this one a miss. I thought that this would be the first multiplayer game that I would truly enjoy on my ps4, but I guess I'll have to keep waiting...
So, that wraps up my thoughts on the Doom Open Beta, what do you think? Is this a game you'll be interested in buying?
Thank you so much for reading! :D
And with that, I'll see you guys later!
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