Gun Jam unlocks the natural rhythm hidden in Doom

digitaltrends.com:

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.

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.

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