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‘Doom’ Multiplayer Trailer Mixes it Up
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.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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