Despite the constant influx of new titles in the video game industry, a few franchises have managed to stick around since the beginning. One of these seemingly-eternal franchises is Doom.

The original game of the Doom series is credited by many to be the pioneer of first person shooters. Because of its success, many subsequent titles were considered to be little more than “Doom clones.” While the third installment of the series was mostly well-received, it also received criticism for being too slow and boring.

Finally, the newest release of Doom marks an explosive return to form for Id Software. Like its acclaimed predecessors, the new Doom is violent, bloody and fast-paced. The game makes the player abundantly clear of this from the moment you hit start.

Within 30 seconds of starting the game, the player’s character, titled doomguy, brutally bashes a demon’s head in and shoots two others with a pistol. From there, the weapons only get more powerful, the hordes bigger and the carnage more intense.

The game banks completely on its combat. All of the levels are composed of similar rooms with multiple levels to jump between and linear movement through the level. In any other game, these would be detrimental and repetitive, but in Doom the combat is just so much fun that things like exploration and variety would just get in the way of the player.

That’s not to say that the game is ugly by any means. The new Id engine is gorgeous and the models of all the demonic enemies look great. Bethesda, the publisher, has stated its plans to add support for vulkan (the next-gen graphics API) via a patch, so in a few weeks the game should run as flawlessly as it looks.

The soundtrack is composed completely of metal and remixes of older Doom songs. Sound effects all have a punch that isn’t normal for most games.

All of this comes together to make the combat almost feel like a form of meditation. In most games nowadays, combat is almost a whack-a-mole affair, with slow, drawn out hiding and shooting becoming a norm. In this game, combat is a blur of bullets that starts, happens and ends in the blink of an eye.

This is not to say that Doom has been free of backlash. The game, despite its huge successes, has often been met with the same criticism that has plagued the franchise, being called childishly violent and over-the-top. This isn’t even including the responses to the the use of Satanic imagery and demonic prevalence in the scenery and gameplay. However, these elements are what make Doom the fun, erratic experience that it is. If the hilarious amounts of violence and offensive symbols are too much, the game should simply be avoided.

Doom has almost no story. No healing. No weapon limit. No competitive ranking system. No cover system. In a way, Doom is good not because it has features, but because it lacks them. It ignores the current FPS staples that get in the way of the most important part of a video game: raw fun.

So is it a complex, meaningful or deep game? Nope. Is the game enjoyable? Absolutely. Doom is its own game and does what it tries to do fantastically, producing an experience no other game could compare to.