Doom multiplayer is kinda meh.

The Doom open beta finished up this past weekend after several days of minimal fanfare. I don’t have the actual numbers of participants, but the majority of my personal friends weren’t aware that it was happening. With its time now expired, I will not mourn its absence. It isn’t that it was a bad multiplayer beta to show off. Unfortunately, Doom as a multiplayer arena game brings very little to the table that other modern FPS games don’t already do in PvP. Doom has never been about a competitive multiplayer experience for me. Even when I used dial-up for multiplayer in Doom 2, it was for co-op. So maybe it’s narrow of me to say that this game didn’t feel like my Doom, but there you have it. That aside, I spent some hours running around the maps and getting blown up (a lot), so I have a few things to say about it.

The first thing I did when I booted up the open beta on my Xbox One was to go into character customization. You know, like you do in Doom games that aren’t at all just a weirdly skinned Halo, right? My space marine reminded me less of the UAC of old and more of an ill-advised mashup of Master Chief and Cleatus, the Fox Sports robot. So I did the only responsible thing I could, I decked out my shooter-man in Seahawks colors. (Go Hawks!) Following that, I abused the random option for all of my weapons. If they’re going to kill me with their guns, I might as well kill them with my atrocious fashion choices. And if that’s not enough, there are also taunt slots to be customized just in case you needed to add a bit more machismo on top of everything else with a “come at me, bro.”

Being a bit of an amateur at the whole PvP thing (despite years of what I can only tenuously call “practice”), I decided that team deathmatch was the best way for me to start. At times it seemed like an unyielding cacophony of shotgun blasts, plasma fire, and splattering body parts. Other times I felt alone and isolated in the massive labyrinthine levels. I wandered frantically while straining to hear the sounds of battle—the siren call of adrenaline-fueled carnage. Despite my complete lack of innate direction, what I found myself enjoying the most was the complete lack of a radar system. It really is fun to sneak up on an unsuspecting sniper and unload a super shotgun into them. And then punch them to get that sweet, sweet glory kill. But, as much fun as that could be, it still didn’t feel like Doom to me.

Completing a match awarded XP that allowed me to level up. This is an entirely foreign concept to me in Doom. Of course I’ve seen the whole meta level thing in numerous other competitive games, but it seemed out of place here for some reason. There were certain weapons and custom loadout slots that unlocked as I gained levels, so I can see what they were going for in a Call of Duty sort of way. In the context of Doom, it felt like I had run a marathon only to cross the finish line and be handed a fish. I found the whole experience a little confusing. Of course, one of the many things I ended up receiving for finishing matches and gaining levels was more visual customization options.

With my feet appropriately wet with the blood of my enemies, I decided it was time to graduate to the second game mode in the beta: warpath. Think of it like a standard control-the-zone style match where one team captures a zone and tries to defend it against the other. Except in this case, that zone continues to plod ever onward through the map on a set path. In fact, there are arrows on the ground indicating the path and direction that the zone will take. It’s the kind of game mode that’s ideal for people who love to set up ambushes and use the topography of the map to their advantage. That seemed to sum up the other team pretty well in the couple matches I played before retreating back the the chaos of team deathmatch.

There are a number of reasons that none of this feels like a Doom game in my book. The customization, the leveling up, and the two-gun restriction of premade loadouts just scream generic FPS multiplayer. Even the ability to change into a revenant by collecting the demon rune that spawns in each level only serves to make me feel better about my ability to shoot things. I’m not sure if it’s entirely a matter of those inconsistencies with the older games or if it’s a bias on my part of not wanting to see Doom as a simple arena shooter. What I do see is how the multiplayer aspect of the game is going to allow it to be monetized well into the future. Right now, the Doom preorder bonus is an exclusive set of PvP armor and special paints. Then there’s a season pass that promises more weapons, multiplayer maps, and customization options. Will it eventually include microtransactions to purchase specific power ups or skins? That’s hard to say, but the potential seems clear.

When it was all said and done, I felt a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping that a multiplayer campaign mode (like the one present in the Battleborn beta this weekend) would make an appearance. Even if for just a short level, it would have been nice to experience something that involved battling a horde of demons instead of a bunch of guys that were colored red. I want to cycle through a half-dozen guns and blow some imps apart like smashing pumpkins into small pieces of putrid debris. I wanted my Doom. Hopefully, when the release day comes around, we’ll find out that there’s a substantial single-player campaign. On that day the skies will part, the angels will sing, and I will tear into some bad guys with a chainsaw. Despite loving what Bethesda and id Software did with Wolfenstein, I think I’m going to hold off on purchasing Doom until I see some streams of the single-player version that get me salivating for some extra-dimensional butt kicking.

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