In development in some capacity for the better part of nine years, the new Doom is all set to release this Friday, May 13th. Ordinarily, that would mean reviews for the game would appear around the same time, including on Polygon.

However, this is not to be with Doom.

Publisher Bethesda informed Polygon and other outlets in the middle of last week that they would not be providing advance copies of the game for review. Their explanation appears below.

DOOM is comprised of a single-player campaign, online multiplayer, and SnapMap. After discussing, we believe all three elements are important parts of the complete DOOM experience, and are meant to be experienced as part of a complete package. As DOOM’s SnapMap and multiplayer modes both require access to a server that won’t be live prior to launch, review copies will arrive on launch day.

This is, of course, Bethesda's right as publisher of the game, though we had hoped to provide some launch impressions of the game with Bethesda's assistance. However, while we expressed our desire to Bethesda PR to at least play through the ostensibly offline singleplayer component of Doom prior to the game's release, we were not able to convince the publisher to provide early copies of the game.

As such, our plans for review timing on Doom are somewhat in flux. We will provide you with impressions of the game as quickly as we are able. At the very least, we'll begin playing the game on Thursday evening when it becomes available digitally with our initial thoughts Friday morning Pacific time. After that, our review will publish as soon as we're reasonably confident in our ability to publish something authoritative and fair to the game.

Doom's E3 teaser