We talk about reboots, remakes, re-imaginings of movies all the time, but they do this with games as well. One of the latest is the resurrection of the classic First Person Shooter Doom. 

I really don’t know if there’s much call for this type of gameplay anymore. Everything FPS has gone to the tactical and team based, mostly realistic, and even role-playing style of play. Do you remember the way FPS’s were in the beginning? I do. I remember Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad, Dark Forces, DOOM, Hexen, ummm, shit, let me know the ones I missed. I remember the frenetic gun play, face punching, strafing, demon crunching badassness of level on level of total carnage. Pick up new gun, find the red key, open the door, smash more demons into piles of pixelated pieces and head to the next level. The double barreled shotgun? My weapon of choice, they didn’t make enough ammo to fuel my slaughter through the hellscape. They were glorious times and the FPS genre only grew from there and at first there was a place for the same kind of play with your Unreal Tournaments and a few one offs here and there like Prey, but it all changed. The entire FPS landscape became something new, and I was ok with that, I still am. I love me some Call of Duty, but even Wolfenstein became something else. And id Software itself tried to reinvent Doom for a new audience, but it wasn’t quite right.

This new version, with Bethesda behind it, could be an all new version of something we loved, that we grew up on. It appears to be a fast paced romp through hordes of demons using metric shit tons of ammunition in a variety of weapons. They say you won’t be crouching in a corner like a weak ass camper while your health builds back up, which hearkens back to the glory days of Doom 1 and 2 where there was no easy way out. You tried not to get hit, and you remembered where the hell it was you saw a med kit last, and if you already picked them up, then you went out there and took down the cyberdemon the hard way, praying you might find one through the next door.  The visuals are incredible from the trailer, and it’s hard to tell what is actual gameplay, but the colors remind me of classic doom. No more of that DC Comics gritty-my-parents-died-darkness and jump scares. I’m glad, because that’s not what Doom was. What I see here is the old made new again and I love that. It may be a nostalgia trip, but you tell me, can a game that plays like classic Doom still do well today? Or are we going to be done talking about it the day after it releases?

Doom is being developed by id Software and published by Bethesda. It launches May 13th on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.