When the new Doom arrives on May 13, it’ll come with nine multiplayer maps and six modes: Soul Harvest, Freeze Tag, Warpath, Domination, Team Deathmatch, and Clan Arena. The selection ought to be familiar to fans of the series, or competitive multiplayer games in general, but like the rest of Doom, everything comes with a twist.
In Team Deathmatch, two teams are tasked with murdering each other, because Doom, and then Soul Harvest is basically more of that, only you don’t get points for killing the opposing team. Instead, when a player expires, they drop a soul that can be collected for a point. And since that’s far too tame for a game like this, the first player to be killed off will drop a demon rune that transforms its collector into a two soul dropping badass.
It’s basically Soul King, if you were one of the four other people who played the underrated multiplayer in F.E.A.R. 3. Incidentally, I might have to start petitioning id Software to bring that game’s Fucking Run! mode — in which a team of four runs from an unstoppable wall of death — with a Doom twist that swaps out the wall of death for an avalanche of demons.
Warpath is Sophie’s Choice meets King of the Hill, set in Hell, with a hill that moves along a set path, and opposite it, a demon rune. Players will have to choose to either focus on the hill, or risk going after the rune.
In Domination, the goal is to capture the control points that have been scattered about the map, unless the demon rune appears — its arrival is announced to all players — then you should definitely go after that.
Clan Arena is interesting because it strips away pretty much everything. It’s purely about eliminating the enemy. No pick-ups, no demons, no respawning, and not a single way to mend yourself, should your abdomen be hollowed out by a gauss rifle.
And finally, we have Freeze Tag. In this ridiculous(ly awesome) mode where shooting an enemy immobilizes them until a teammate can warm them up, with the exception being any frozen player can still be pushed into a pool of lava or some other environmental hazard by another player. This is where you’ll find me.
