Hands-on with the new Doom: The detail of Doom 3, the speed of Doom 2

He is jumping—literally jumping—with joy, bouncing up and down with clasped hands and wide eyes. This pogo stick of a man next to me in line is obviously excited to play the Doom multiplayer demo at this year's QuakeCon. And by the looks of the dozen other fans before us with mice and controllers already in hand, he's not alone.

With over a decade since the last major Doom release in 2004, this franchise reboot has to clear a pretty high bar of fan expectations. Based on some hands-on time with the game at QuakeCon this week, fans probably won't be disappointed—and neither will newcomers. The demo shows off a game that carries an understanding of what it means to blend the memories of yesteryear with modern sensibilities.

The first thing you do in the demo, in fact, is establish your loadouts, picking one of three presets (Assault, Sniper, or Ambusher) or customizing your own with two weapons and a piece of equipment. Your armaments are mostly familiarly retro—rocket launchers, plasma guns and, of course, Super Shotguns—but then you also have new equipment like grenades and a teleporter device. This last addition is pretty great: drop it down, then hit the equipment button again to warp back to that spot, getting you out of a sticky situation and potentially telefragging an unsuspecting enemy to boot. Though you can change loadouts between deaths, it probably won’t be long before you realize you just want rockets forever.

Speed, speed, and more speed

The demo featured a single multiplayer map, named Heatwave, but it's a tight, workable location for the six-on-six setup. It's pure team deathmatch laid out over a hellish foundry replete with lava pits, jump boosters, and a bevy of multilayered, overlapping catwalks. The area is littered with opportunities to both get the drop on the other team and slap your forehead after jumping into the fire.

It feels very much like a Doom 3 multiplayer map, but it moves at the much-increased speed of Doom 2. It plays far faster than I was expecting, in fact, thanks in part to a compacted mix of open spaces and tight corridors. The setting lends a very particular slant to the interpersonal encounters, fraught battles that ended up being relatively protracted by modern shooter standards.

In other shooters, you might be killed instantly by a sniper shot from across the map or melee'd from behind into an undignified death. In the new Doom, those kinds of situations were more often the opening move in a terse, five-second chess game, albeit with rockets instead of rooks.

The movement system is more robust than you might remember if you haven’t played a “classic” id shooter in a while. The game felt like a Quake match taken down a few dozen notches. Twitch shooting skills can save you, but making yourself harder to hit by moving around like a caffeinated hummingbird is the key to success. The focus on constant movement fills combat with a great sense of scope, as you know that both you and your errant shots are filling the space.

The new traversal scheme, which allows for grabbing edges and climbing up to a higher surface, actually opened me up to an incredible sequence of events. Facing down another player, I was hopping around and blasting rockets until I accidentally mantled up a catwalk, grabbing a bar and pulling myself up until I was 20 feet above. I saw my crimson foe below, apparently confused at my disappearance, and I brought him to a most delectable end.

What’s a revenant doing here?

Then I was killed by a revenant. Well, a human revenant. The new Doom features a new demon rune item, which occasionally appears on the map with great fanfare. Whoever wins the mad scramble to get to the rune first turns into the aforementioned revenant, a giant, beastly thing with double rocket launchers, a bucket of health, and a jetpack.

It's a ton of fun to play as a revenant but not so much fun to fight against one. Across two rounds, my teams had vastly different ideas about how to handle the new opposition. When we left the revenant to its own devices and only engaged when we crossed paths, it felt like a welcome wrinkle to the match. When we tried to hunt it down maniacally, it felt like a slow speed bump in an otherwise brisk and frenetic structure.

Inserting a revenant into our bloodied interpersonal proceedings felt like an unpleasant and near-insurmountable externality. Killing a revenant player isn't an impossible task, but it's harder and different enough to feel somewhat loathsome.

Weapon pickups (and quad damage and invisibility) felt far more familiar. The six weapons available for loadouts are serviceable, but things like the gauss rifle are only strewn about the map for players to nab in the middle of all the action. While the choke points created around those and the demon rune's acquisitions are similar, the close-quarters fights over weapon pickups were generally more agreeable.

Cyberdemons aside, the two Doom matches I tried quickly congealed into a slick six minutes of explosions and emancipated body parts. The only other negative bits were a few unfortunate solitary periods when my teammates resorted to asking, "Where is everybody?" over the headsets. I wondered the same thing as I found myself wandering for upwards of 20 whole seconds without even seeing them.

Perhaps Id Software has yet to find the proper blend of old school mechanical speed and new school engagement pacing to keep everyone bunched together. In any case, the lulls were rare and short-lived enough to not get in the way of the rest of the excitement. This is a very promising start for a very storied franchise. So far, Doom is fast, exciting, and, most importantly, fun.

Doom is due to hit PC, PS4 and Xbox On in the spring of 2016.