Skip to main content

Gun Jam unlocks the natural rhythm hidden in Doom

When I play a fast-paced shooter, I often find myself in an accidental rhythm. In Doom Eternal, for instance, I tend to enter a flow state where I’m almost moving and shooting to the beat of the game’s metal music. It’s never intentional, but I feel subconsciously compelled to keep up with the music and let it guide my rampage.

In Gun Jam, a new title from Jaw Drop Games, that experience becomes an intended mechanic. The first-person rhythm shooter takes the frenetic pace of Doom and turns it into a deliberate rhythm game, like Guitar Hero. I played through a full song while at GDC and found that the pairing made perfect sense, unlocking the secret beat that’s usually hidden in action games.

Run and gun

Gun Jam is incredibly easy to explain and understand. On its surface, it’s a basic first-person shooter where players traverse through linear levels and take down every enemy in their path. There are buttons to shoot, melee, and dash. There are no secondary abilities or ultimate attacks to juggle — controls are as streamlined as can be.

Enemy robots stand in Gun Jam.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The twist is that players attack along to the beat of a song. As a piece of music plays, icons scroll up the screen. Like many rhythm games, the goal is to hit the button once it hits the right point on screen. Players can use any action on those beats to trigger them, whether that be firing a gunshot or dashing.

Different colored beat icons cause players to automatically swap to a different gun. When the icons are popping up strictly on a 4/4 downbeat, players are generally shooting single shots from a basic pistol. Though during my song, the beat would suddenly flip into a triplet pattern as I switched over to a quicker rifle capable of firing off a quick bang bang bang along to the music.

I quickly found myself lost in the music. My leg started tapping out the beat, acting as a physical metronome to my trigger finger. Gunshots even have a percussive quality to them, naturally slotting into the score as if they were always part of it. Executing a level perfectly didn’t just mean I had killed all the bad guys as fast as possible; it meant that I had successfully found and followed the natural rhythm of the action. It’s what I already do in Doom, but with an on-screen meter to keep me on pace.

The game features original music by composer James Wrigley and tunes will come in three flavors: Trap, metal, and EDM. While I was already bopping along to the bit of music I heard, the more exciting aspect of the game is the potential for modding. Considering that it’s a PC release, I imagine that the game’s community will quickly find a way to upload their own songs to the game in no time. While the developers don’t have specific plans for custom tools at launch, they seem to support that potential wholeheartedly.

A robot stands with a gun in Gun Jam.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

What Gun Jam will launch with is a story mode and an arcade mode where players can focus on setting high scores on individual tracks. Based on my brief time with it, I’m excited to dig into those modes further and hear what else the game has to offer. The developers say there’s still tweaking to be done (like adding better feedback to tell players when they’re on or off beat), but the core loop is already satisfying enough. It’s a literal symphony of destruction.

Gun Jam doesn’t have a release date yet, but it’ll launch on PC first with a potential console release later.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Giovanni Colantonio
Giovanni is a writer and video producer focusing on happenings in the video game industry. He has contributed stories to…
The best console emulators (NES, SNES, Genesis, and more) in 2023
Mario narrowly avoids a Chain Chimp in Super Mario 64.

The best emulators allow you to replay classic games from systems like the Super Nintendo and PlayStation 2 on modern hardware -- and usually with some enhancements to boot. Because emulators often meddle in a legal gray area, it can be hard to find emulators that run classic games consistently.

Thankfully, there's one go-to emulator for most platforms. In addition to RetroArch, which covers a large range of retro consoles, there are also several standalone emulators that can fake more recent hardware -- even the Nintendo Switch.
One to rule them all: RetroArch

Read more
The best Xbox Series X headsets
Controls on the SteelSeries Acris Nova Pro headset.

There’s nothing that can enhance your gaming experience quite like a good headset. In addition to bringing the game right to your ears, a good headset will offer spatial audio — allowing you to pinpoint sounds around you — a solid microphone, and excellent comfort, especially for long gaming sessions. Whether you're rocking the newest single-player experience or fighting for your life in multiplayer, our six best Xbox Series X headsets satisfy all these conditions and more.

Read more
The leaks are correct: Dragon’s Dogma 2 launches in March
A sphinx in Dragon's Dogma 2.

During a Dragon's Dogma 2 Showcase Tuesday afternoon, Capcom confirmed the worst-kept release date secret of recent weeks: Dragon's Dogma 2 launches on March 22, 2024. The livestream also revealed a lot more about the sequel, including the fact that it takes place in a parallel world to the original game.

We first noticed that this highly anticipated sequel to a cult classic RPG was launching in March 2024 earlier this month, when a PEGI game rating with the release date was spotted. While there was potential that this was just a clerical error as the listing was taken down, a release date around this time was again affirmed on Tuesday morning when that same date was listed on the game's Steam page. Capcom finally confirmed the release date itself at the end of the trailer that started the showcase, as Capcom's Hideaki Itsuno had promised on X on Monday.

Read more