So after all the excitable yelping coming out of last year's Quakecon, after that damnably exciting, damnably brief teaser trailer, we've now seen Doom 4 (or just plain Doom, as it's currently calling itself), by way of a couple of hefty E3 demos. And you know what? The Quakecon converts were right. The new Doom is incendiary.

Faster, harder, gorier, funnier, and altogether more brutal, Doom stands out from the swathe of its bullet-happy contemporaries with a fresh, unique, damnably satisfying-looking combat flow that nevertheless feels 100% authentically Doom. It also looks incredible, has a gloriously horrible sense of humour, and is bringing some seriously unexpected but very, very cool additions in its community-focused customisation tools. Click on, and we'll tell you all.

Shotguns. Super shotguns. Machine guns. Plasma rifles. Chainsaws. Chainsaws that carve up demons at a variety of interesting angles, often changing direction mid-hack in order maximise artistic expression. Rocket launchers. The goddamn BFG. Whatever weapon pops instinctively into your mind’s eye when you hear the word ‘Doom’, it’s in the new Doom. And when it fires, it fires like the end of days.

But there are a few new ones too. We’ve seen – in snatches – a new lightning rifle, and a couple of longer-ranged scoped weapons too. But don’t worry. Mid to close-range, rapid fire slaughter, with Doomguy sprinting through swathes of arterial spray, looks to be the order of the day, 100%. That’s because…

It’s fast, it’s ferocious, and it never, ever stops moving. From the industrial environs of Mars, to the wide, open-air killing fields of Hell, Doom’s combat is a whirling, ever-shifting carnival of weapon-changing, demon-mulching violence. On top of his expected speed (which sees him walking faster than some games let you sprint), Doomguy also has a neat new mantle move, which, alongside his double-jump, opens up a raft of verticality and on-the-fly strategic options.

You’ll never be hiding weakly behind cover, but you can duck behind a crate, climb swiftly over it, and then leap off to retaliate with a surprise shotgun burst as you hurtle through the air toward your previous attacker.

That’s how it looks right now. The combat is too fast and kinectic, and flows with too much momentum, to make static recovery any kind of an option. And the levels and multiplayer arenas we’ve seen are positively littered with health and armour pick-ups. Certain enemies will spew them out too, once you’ve burst said enemies satisfactorily all over the wall.

But that’s not to say Doom is too generous. In terms of game balance it looks more like a case of ‘keep moving, keep killing, keep healing, or die quickly’.

Taking the occasional hint from Doom 3’s more ‘realistic’ monsters, but swinging far closer to the early games’ more colourful, expressive take on biotech body-horror, the new Doom’s demons are a totally faithful, modern recreation of the same, line-up of enemies that have underpinned the series – and in fact FPS archytypes in general – for over 20 years.

Zombieman is in. Imps are in. Pinkie Demons are in (and returning as the chunky, bipedal melee-bastards we all know and love, rather than the wheel-assisted rhino-dog of Doom 3). Barons of Hell are back, as are Mancubi, Revenants, and Cacodemons, all fulfilling the same roles and behaviours they’re supposed to in Doom’s complex, quietly cerebral ecosystem. Oh, and there’s this really big demon guy too. He’s got a massive gun instead of an arm, so he’s cybernetic, as well as a demon. He’s… I don’t know, some kind of a Robodemon, I suppose you’d call him…

We’ve seen around 15 minutes of solid Doom gameplay so far. And you know what? Not a break in the action. Not a line of dialogue. Not a single pleading NPC or objective-dumping audio diary. Just Doomguy, a lot of monsters, and a lot of guns. All momentum, all the time, without a moment to look back at the trail of gore heaping up behind.

The one concession to ‘narrative’ we’ve seen comes when Doomguy fires up a data file and runs it through his mobile hologram drone, which projects a recording of previous events in the room he’s in, in a manner akin to Dark Souls’ phantoms of the fallen dead. The real-time, 3D playback shows a previous Marine dragged away by a Baron of Hell. Follow the unfortunate grunt’s final path, and you’ll find his body, and the soon-to-be-severed hand required to fire up a fingerprint lock. That’s it. No slowing of pace, no loss of control, and all information delivered in economical and gleefully brutal fashion. If Doom is going to have a story, that’s the way to deliver it.

File this one under ‘Don’t-you-dare-screw-with Doom’s-core-gameplay-Oh-actually-hang-on-yeah-let’s-have-that-new-bit-actually-because-oh-my-God-it’s-incredible’. While the new Doom looks entirely, spiritually authentic to the fast, furious, freewheeling open combat that Doom Just Is, the new melee execution mechanic is an incredibly exciting addition. It’s new, it’s fresh, it transforms things just enough to make Doom feel unique again, but crucially, it’s so well implemented that it feels like it was always there.

Do enough damage to an enemy without completely killing them, and they’ll start to glow. Get in close before they recover, and you can fire off a hilariously, triumphantly violent hand-to-hand takedown, the kind of thing that makes the earlier games’ Berserk power-up look like half a can of Redbull, watered down with camomile. Heads are twisted off. Jaws are wrenched away from heads. Entire limbs are snapped off and used to stove in any heads that may miraculously remain intact. And being delivered by Doomguy, these ‘little’ takedowns, however intricate, happen fast and furiously enough to never, ever slow down the pace of the combat. Seeing a theme here now?

This is no straightforward corridor shooter. Even the enclosed sections set in the, er, corridors of the Martian UAC base are wide, rangey, multi-levelled affairs, filled with a multitude of only semi-linear options and lines of attack at any given time. Yes, you’ll move loosely from A to B, as you always have in Doom, but when the fights break out in between, it’s going to be sandbox slaughter all the way. As it always is when Doom has been at its very best.

Beyond that, we’ve already seen some suitably twisty, turny, multi-layered level designs set in Hell, with a couple of Doom’s traditionally obtuse, explicitly teased, ‘hidden’ power-ups clearly on show.

Doom is going to have multiplayer. And it looks nuts. While the core mechanics of the campaign alone would have delivered the online game of ‘skill, fast, vertical movement, and awesome guns’ that Bethesda has promised, there’s much more than that going on here.

Domination and Clan Arena modes are joined by ‘90s classics like Freeze-Tag (a brilliant, off-kilter favourite from our Quake 3 days), and the claim of ‘very unique power-ups’ definitely seems to ring true. Grabbing a pentogram to transform into a flying, rocket-hurling Revenant, anyone? Yeah, thought so. Oh, and teleports are back, so we should probably take that to mean that telefrags are as well. Delicious.

Okay, it already looks brilliant, but this is the thing that pushes Doom over from ‘exciting’ to ‘potentially essential’. Doom has an immense history with the modding scene. Hell, the original game, and its easy-to-tweak file system, is pretty much responsible for modding being a thing in the first place. Only problem is that more recent id games, such as Doom 3 and Rage, lost the scope for all those customisable fun-times when they moved over to console. We know that Fallout 4 will have mod support on the Xbox One, by way of a natty deal between Bethesda and Microsoft, but Doom possibly has an even better solution, right across the board.

SnapMap is Doom’s in-built suite of level editing tools, and presents a dizzying number of things to build, modify, tweak, and model, all with a couple of clicks. Environmental layouts, hazards, enemy placements, game logic, event triggers… there are even a bunch of single and multi-player game mode presets, all of which can be adapted and reworked into any shape you see fit. See it as LittleBigPlanet, only in 3D, and pissing gore from every hole.

So far we only have a release window of Q1/Q2 2016, but that doesn’t mean things are going to go quiet any time soon. Quakecon at the end of July should throw up even more footage and details, and Bethesda always goes big for Gamescom in August. Expect more news throughout the summer, and probably something big around Hallowe’en. Because Hallowe’en. And Doom.