Doom 3

"Pretty darn good, if you have a $180 videocard for it..."

Foreword:

Doom, for a lot of people, was a first entry into the realm of computer gaming. I was only about ten when the first Doom came out, so I wasn't computer-savvy enough at the time to witness the publicity the game received. It wasn't until middle school that I found the Ultimate Doom and played the hell out of it. There were other first-person shooters, such as Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, and the original Wolfenstein, but they all paled in comparison. Doom didn't do it first, but it did it best.

But Doom got sucked into the "Rehash Wormhole" that possessed any and all popular titles of the 1990's. Doom ran to Doom 2, which ran to Final Doom (all used the exact same engine), and that was it. Every other Doom game was just a port to other platforms (with the exception of the N64 version). When the 2000's rolled around, and Id began to realize that newer titles such as Quake 2 were gaining steam. Any gamer knew that Doom wouldn't rest forever, not in a technological age where the real and surreal blur on the computer screen.

Gameplay -

At its core, Doom 3 is a lot like Half-Life, in that you guide your nondescript character through one long mission to stop some sort of invasion. It begins in a futuristic complex, and then carries on in an otherworldly locale. Along the way you'll pick up weapons and items, converse with the few remaining survivors, and blast enemies to kingdom come.

Doom 3 is a very slow game, especially for a first-person shooter. Unless you're suddenly swamped by enemies, you'll pretty much do nothing else other than wander around. And don't think you can charge through an area, either, like in the first Doom; for most of the game you face a massive amount of enemies that'll prop you up against a corner and wail on you to death. So you will most likely force them to come at you single-file through a doorframe or take baby-steps and force them to spawn in front of you (as you know they will). Couple that with the height and breadth of the area you have to cover, and you have a pretty sluggish game at times. The game actually gets harder the second time through, just because you want to hurry everything up, and thus get swamped with enemies.

The problem I had with Half-Life was that it didn't even make an attempt to be cinematic. There were no cut-scenes or mission parameters. You have that here with Doom 3, with cinemas, in-game cut scenes, cinematic pauses, along with finding old emails and vocal recordings of long-dead scientists. These serve a dual purpose: 1)to create a sense of depth and atmosphere to the game; and 2)sometimes the messages help you with access codes to weapon lockers and the like.

Much of the runaround from the original Doom, with the searching for keycards, is still existent in Doom 3, although not as noticeable. To unlock doors, you have to find scattered PDA's and read the security codes, or copy the security clearances from them. But the average person won't notice this redundancy early on; it blends in too well with the game structure. I noticed this the most after you get back from your first trip to Hell. The game often turns into a hub, where you have to get to one extremity to get a PDA with security clearance and then go all the way back to open one door that was previously locked (and yet two paces from the first door).

This betrays the structure of the Mars station as incredibly linear. Logically, a facility would not be constructed as a (more or less) straight line. There is no way anybody would build a structure that takes two hours to get from end to end by foot.

A problem I have is that certain enemies cannot be killed while they are in certain physical stances. For example, if I unloaded a shotgun shell right in an imp's face, it would kill him outright. But when the imp summons a fireball and goes back to throw it, there is a tiny expanse of time when he cannot be killed. So I waste two shells instead of one, and probably get damaged to boot. Not fun, nor realistic.

The only way most players will get killed is from behind. Like Half-Life, enemies have a tendency to spawn behind you, or pop out of hidden alcoves and sucker-punch you. Now, whenever an enemy spawns in front of me, I automatically turn around and wait for something else. And 99% of the time, I'm right. I have almost never been killed head-on in Doom 3--most of my deaths stem from either getting ganged-up on from the rear or the awkwardness of jumping, which sends me careening into a fiery pit.

And for such a visually realistic game, you'd expect enemies to stagger a bit when wounded. But no, they often don't, especially when they're up close. If two enemies are in front of me, and I fire my shotgun, only one will take the brunt of the blast, and neither will show any sign of pain or damage. But, of course, when YOU get hit, your screen flashes a seizure-inducing red and throws your aim off considerably. You'd be surprised how often you'll get juggled from one enemy to another in this game.

I've only seen perhaps two distinct enemies dodge weapons fire; the rest will charge directly (and stupidly) into the barrel of your gun. You'd think that they'd be smart enough to at least try to avoid it.

Honestly, a lot this game's appeal is based on its visual detail, not the gameplay. I realize you can only go so far with first-person shooters, but when a game is done by the creators of the genre, and it seems like it's derivative of other FPSers, you realize that reciprocity breeds monotony. Everyone uses the pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, laser gun and big-time explosive firearm; just because Doom used them first doesn't mean that we'll always praise id because they did.

Graphics

Total Recall meets Diablo, with a smidgen of Aliens thrown in.

Doom 3 is a very visual game. In the world of computer gaming, though, this is a double-edged sword. Unless you have a monster video card, this game will chug, regardless of how low you set the graphical detail or how strong the rest of your hardware is. "Low" on this thing is lightyears beyond Quake 3's highest level of detail. So those who have more than $180 to blow on a card that'll play this game well will have a better time than those who can't afford to upgrade, and thus their experience will suffer for it. Doom 3 is beautiful...if your computer can crunch all of the pixels.

These heavy graphics are in complete conflict with what the original Doom was. The original had an acceptable limitation to its visuals, which allowed a broad spectrum of computers to run it, even with minimal capabilities. This allowed the average gamer to pick it up and enjoy all of the nuances. Doom 3, however, will only be played by the Doom-centric gamer and other high-tech whiz-kids. The average gamer, realizing they have to either shell out two C-notes for a video card, or not play it at all, will probably choose the latter and head for older, more graphics-simple games.

Dark. That's the best way to put it. The problem, though, is that it's so dark that you have to play this game in a room devoid of any and all light. Even pulled curtains on a mildly cloudy day won't cut it. And if you turn up the brightness, everything on the screen fades together. The environments AND the enemies are hard to see, so they blend no matter what brightness your monitor is set at.

The enemy designs, for the most part, are fantastic. The only enemy that pales against the rest is the two-headed mite. The baby-like Cherubs will freak out the unwary gamer, just as the behemoth Hell Knights will force you to run. There is some graphical overlap to enemy design, as the Revenants and the Arch-Vile look very similar unless you're up close.

Finally, from such a beautiful game (what beauty we can see, anyway), Id really gave a half-hearted effort on the ending cinemas. It stretches maybe one minute long, and is the typical "go and take a breather...but we'll probably release an expansion pack in a bit" ending that we've seen a million times. How about not a happy ending for once?

Sound

There are some audio nods to other ID games in Doom 3. The pickup sounds for ammo and health are straight out of Quake 3, and there are some musical cues in the later complex levels that are most likely sampled from the X-Labs in Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Sound is difficult to comment on in this game merely for the fact that there isn't a lot of it, and when there is, there's a lot of it. Sound is either nonexistent or coming at you from every whichway. They may have been some mood-setting music, I'm not sure. The weapons do pack a realistic and sizeable audial punch, as do the enemies, even if they become redundant after a long while. And for such a cinematic game, your character has no lines of dialogue whatsoever. A shame, really, considering 99% of the other voicework is top-notch.

Replayability

Who will play this game through again? Doom fans, or those who ran it on a cruddy computer and later upgraded, just so they could see what they paid for in the first place. Single-player allows for little variation (but what FPSer does?), so there's little to miss the first time around.

Multiplayer is, to put a point on it, difficult. Should your computer be able to run Doom 3 well, you have to find several others on a LAN to connect to that are just as heavy-duty as your machine: almost impossible outside of a college campus network. Playing online is undoubtedly a nightmare, because the level of detail is so great that you need at least DSL to play without severe lag.

That, and the lack of a co-op mode. It would have been amazing to run through the complexes on Mars with a human-controlled buddy, but that won't happen. Oddly enough, the XBOX version of Doom 3 does have the co-op feature (although you need to link two separate machines--pretty dumb, if you ask me). This is the same issue that plagued Halo: co-op on XBOX, but not on the PC.

Final Word:

Is it the best videogame ever made? Probably not. It had more than its fair share of hype, and it lives up to the Doom name, and is certainly more enjoyable than other late-day FPSers (Unreal 2, Halo 1&2). But Doom 3 doesn't win by default just because it's better than the rest. This game has many of the same irksome qualities as Half-Life, with one long mission and almost no down-time, but it is far more entertaining (and MUCH less overrated).

Is it my favorite FPSer of all time? No; that's reserved for Quake III. Still, Doom 3 is a fun distraction for a couple weeks. Multiplayer will extend the playtime, if you can get past all the hiccups I've mentioned. There are stores that still sell this title for upwards of $35. You'd be better off going to Sam's Club--they slashed the price to $18.

Is the game worth the money? As it stands when I paid for it ($18), yes. But for those of you who paid upwards of $50 when it came out (or preordered it), and those Xbox owners who shell out the same right now, I pity you. Most of that money paid for the visuals; the gameplay is nothing we haven't done before. Ask yourself this: if you were to take the graphics and bring them down to the level of Quake 2, would it be as unique as Quake 2? I doubt it. This is a game with superb graphics on top of an average (although tried-and-true) play method.

Doom 3 is, in truth, like a GTO with a V6 or, an easier metaphor, Jessica Simpson--nice to look at, but with nothing ingenious running under the hood.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/17/05