Doom 3

"Atmosphere and Darkness"

Years in the making Doom 3 has finally arrived. It has been hyped beyond belief, and that is why many seem to be disappointed with it. Any game that is hyped like Doom 3 has needs to be revolutionary, genre defining experience. Doom 3 is not a revolutionary, genre defining experience. It is in fact lacking some of the more recent innovations in the FPS genre. It instead has a an old-school style feel to it, all the guns have only one firing mode, no fancy alternate fires in this game. But that is exactly what the original Doom was like, and iD does what it was trying to do very well, and that was make a game that played like Doom.

The gameplay in Doom 3 is both slow-paced and fast-paced. By this I mean you often slowly move around, you won't be sprinting around corners or randomly going through doors, you'll creep around, checking every corner and shadow. But once you run into a demon the combat itself is very fast-paced and fun, you'll fight many enemies at once.

The combat is tense, when you get hit by a demon you will get knocked around and your vision will be distorted, so if you get hit once you'll often get hit several more times as a result of that. The demons themselves are not as varied as they could be, the fire-throwing Imp, which is a staple of the series, appears far to often, it appears twice as much as any other enemy. As a result of this by the end of the game you are so good at killing Imps that they no longer pose as a threat or do anything to frighten the player. A better spread of the monsters would have kept the game from getting repetitive.

Repetitiveness is what hurts Doom 3 the most. The game seems to dip up and down in terms of fun. At the beginning I loved every second of the game, by the half-way point I was getting a bit bored at parts, but then you get a change of scenery and the game is great for the last third or so.

You will get scared in this game. Or at the very least you will be tense while playing it, and that is why the game is fun at all. You'll be moving slowly and whipping out your flashlight countless times during the course of the game. Now when you have your flashlight out you can't have a gun out, so you can choose to be able to see, or you can choose to be able to fight. Since the recent trend in video games is to be as realistic as possible, not having flashlights on your guns as caused many complaints, as you'd think that at the very least you could tape your flashlight to the gun(and you can thanks to many mods). However people seem to be missing the point, the game would not be fun if you could see all the time, the darkness makes the game a tense, and interesting experience.

The gameplay is enhanced by topnotch audio and visuals. Doom 3's graphics are just as good as everyone says they are, they may very well be the best graphics in a video game ever, from a technical standpoint at the very least. Audio isn't amazing, but its still very good. There is little music but that makes whenever it is used far more interesting. The rest of the soung is made by backround noise, fans moving, vents blowing, computers whirring, and the like. The silence adds to the atmosphere of the game, so when you do run into a demon the sudden noise and movement often scares the player.

The basics of the story are this, you land on Mars as a new security officer, soon after you get there you witness the failure of some experiment and all hell breaks loose, literally. Now you have to survive and escape. The story is average fair but done in an interesting enough way. You collect audio logs and e-mails off the ground from your recently dead co-workers. These are often just reports of their daily activities, but slowly they form a whole picture that explains what happened to cause the disaster. Its story is a more detailed remake of the original.

The game isn't horribly difficult but its no walk in the park either. You will die time and time again, and reload time and time again. If you beat the game and unlock Nightmare mode you'll get even more of a challenge. The bosses in the game range from really easy, to pretty hard. Don't worry about breezing through this game in a night.

The greatness of Doom 3's singleplayer is non-existent in it's multiplayer. You have a standard deathmatch, and a couple of other modes, and thats it. All in all Doom 3 has very little replay value, you might want to play it again on the nightmare mode and screw around with some mods, but aside from that there is little to do. The singleplayer campaign is long though lasting over 20 hours.

Doom 3 is worth 55$, period. The game may be repetitive but its style is different from most FPS's, it takes a bit from the survival horror genre, blends with an old-school shooter and then turns off then lights. The game will be fun while it lasts, and nice to look at. While it may not be revolutionary, it does what every good game should, entertain.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/30/04