I got lucky, as in winning the cosmic lottery lucky back in 1996. My parents just brought home our first ever home computer, a Windows 95, and in that old beautiful machine was a demo for DOOM, the original DOOM. Being 5 years old at the time I had no idea what DOOM was, all I cared about was finally being able to play Sonic CD, but everything changed when my father brought home a copy of the game. I fell in love, and my brother and I wasted hours upon hours playing DOOM, watching my Dad play DOOM, and talking to our friends at school about DOOM. My family loved DOOM so much we even had the DOOM poster hanging in the computer room. Then came DOOM II and we played that religiously. One day I saw a game called Final DOOM and convinced my Mom to buy it for Dad as his birthday present. She did, he loved it, and we played it constantly.

DOOM vanished for our family when we upgraded computers and in 2004 DOOM 3 was announced and I was excited, until I read the reviews and saw some gameplay footage. It was missing everything I loved about the original games, awesome weapons, lots of bullets, and TONS of demons to shoot. So I decided to keep the happy memories and not have this game soil DOOM for me. What got me interested again was finding out that DOOM was coming back for 2016, completely rebooted with a flair of nostalgia and the awesome perks of today, and I got the play the Beta during the weekend of April 1st.

Now this is only the Beta, I wasn’t expecting much when I downloaded it onto my PS4, but I must say, you can tell quite a bit from a game that makes you play until 4 A.M. while your girlfriend is sound asleep right next to you. You may be thinking to yourself, “Psh, 4 A.M. is nothing. I did that last night,” well dear reader for me it was something that hasn’t happened for years. The Beta only consists of multiplayer with 2 modes of play and some major customization for your avatar and the color scheme of your weapons. The cool thing is that as you play the Beta you unlock even MORE colors, patterns, armor pieces, a few new weapons, and even new taunts. The sweet feeling of nailing an opposing player with a perfectly timed plasma blast mid air and being able to ‘make it rain’ had me stare at the screen and think to myself, “Holy shit. That was amazing.” Even with the limited modes, maps, and weapons, I still found my self saying, “One more match then I’ll sleep,” a good 20 times before I actually did. It was that fun.

You may be asking yourself, “Should I be excited for this game?” and my answer to you is, “HELLS FREAKING YEAH YOU SHOULD!” Granted all I got to play was the multiplayer, and what got me to love the original DOOM wasn’t multiplayer, it was the single player mode that got me into the game and the shooter genre in the first place. If all goes well, I think this new DOOM can bring something that current shooter games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Star Wars Battlefront (ESPECIALLY Star Wars Battlefront) haven’t had in quite some time, a great single player campaign. Yes I know CoD and Battlefield do have single player campaigns, but DOOM was so much fun in the 90’s because it didn’t over bear you with story, it was all about the gameplay which can translated into, “You’re on a moon that orbits Mars, the gates of Hell are open and you need to go through all the demons to live. Here’s a chainsaw and a pistol to start, there’s a crap ton of guns to find inside, try not to die. Oh and have fun.”

From what I have played thus far in the Beta, the fast paced action is back, the developers had looked really hard at the source material and stuck with it, and it is so fun I kept playing until I couldn’t keep my open any more. Hopefully the finished product is everything we want and more, and so far it looks like Doomguy has made his glorious (and GOREious, I couldn’t resist) return to living rooms everywhere.