Doom³

The Good
The atmosphere, graphics, enemies, almost everything!

The Bad
It's way too short.

The Bottom Line
DOOM 3 is the first FPS that I played using a gamepad. And one of the first games that I played using a gamepad, be it a Xbox one or another. In the end, I managed to handle it quite well if bragging is allowed. :)

Before playing on Xbox I've already tried the game on the PC but after 15 minutes of gameplay everything seemed so boring. Switching from a 17" LCD monitor to a TV with a 94 cm plasma display had a great impact on the overall game feeling for me. Even though PC graphics are way better, the game was still looking damn awesome. I immediately liked just about everything regarding graphics and the atmosphere induced by visual themes and effects.

The game is dark and the sound effects keep you under pressure, especially Betruger's continuous taunting. Enemies look and sound horrifying enough, especially if you're taken by surprise and some are really hard to kill while others seem to be too easy. Anyway, they usually show up in multiple waves or just one with a large amount of targets for you to shoot so you shouldn't think lightly about any of the demons around the UAC buildings.

I have played the game on medium difficulty (the first sentence in this review states as to why I did this) and it was fun enough. Not too easy and not too frustrating, just right. Being a DooM game, its action is pretty straightforward. Go there, kill that, open that door, kill some more enemies etc. The game also features some puzzles, none too difficult. I found one a bit frustrating, it involved a lift and some jumping over a fence of some sort. The puzzles seemed enjoyable to me in the end, a nice pause from the killing.

The main title (also, credits) theme is really great. I'm still listening to it and will surely listen to it occasionally from now on. Unfortunately, there's no other notable music in the game. That's a big minus for it. I'm pretty much a soundtrack maniac and a bit disappointed because of the lack of music in DooM 3.

The weapons available are really interesting and vary from the classic pistol to the DooM Exclusive BFG. The BFG is really easy to find towards the end of the game. More exactly, you pick it up from a dead boos. My favorite weapons are the Shotgun and Plasma Rifle. The shotgun is great for close quarter combat (you get those like, a lot) and the plasma rifle can explode enemy launched projectiles in mid-air while causing serious damage to most enemies making it my favorite long-range weapon.

I've complained a bit earlier about the game being too short. I spent around 8 hours before hitting the end. I really liked the game. I wish there were another 8 hours to play after the final boss (a Cyberdemon, which was really nicely modelled/drawn; something like a space Balrog (Tolkien)). I guess getting the expansion pack won't hurt at all. Maybe it will be just as fun. :)

The Good
Doom is a legend and this fact is well known to everybody. The long awaited third part should be a legend too. And well in some cases it is. Doom 1 and 2 can be today considered as an ordinary shoot'em up game with little or no story at all. To some extend Doom 3 is also similar. Of course game without ANY story would openly express that the story itself is useless (what we all know after playing single player in Quake and many other games) and it's just a waste of money and time to develop it, so indeed from time to time player sees a monitor or hears a radio transmission saying what to do and what's the current situation. But I guess if someone wants great, complicated story, he should rather get Deus Ex, instead of Doom. I enjoyed the simplicity of this game having in mind those great times of Doom 1 and 2.

Some people complain on brightness in this game (or actually on lack of it). Indeed saying that the game is dark surely wouldn't be enough. Situations which in other games would be only temporal (like malfunction of lights or lack of electricity) here are permanent. Sometimes irritating but most of the time it is the darkness which makes Doom so nice. iD Software dispatched monsters in good places, added (or actually removed) lights to make it look really scary. And scary it is! Turn off your lights, sleep during the day and play during the night to get full view on it. Get nice surround speakers and just feel this game. A flashlight on machine gun (Quake 4 style) would be a good way to reduce the lack of light though.

Few months after the release of Doom 3 it's biggest competitor arrived - Half-life 2. However with its stunning graphics it simply couldn't match Doom 3. Not only models are more detailed and lights are better but in my humble opinion the movement of characters is simply better and more realistic. The drawback is that to enjoy this marvelous views one has to have a marvelous computer.

But coming back to the atmosphere, the game offers some really interesting levels. Fear is what level designers wanted to achieve in user. Screams, bloody signs on walls, some neat cut scenes (such as the one in bathroom in the early moments of the game when player looks at the mirror and hears strange voices etc) all make is rather scary. Actually to me, the game can be divided into three parts. The first one (about 1/2 of the game) is monsters-lurking-behind-every-dark-corner style. Next one (1/4 or less) is the battle in hell. Brings back memories from Painkiller. This part of game scares players with its hellish pits of lava, skulls and signs of evil everywhere (well actually this part isn't that scary). The third one, perhaps the most interesting (1/4 as well) is the end. With rooms covered in blood, decapitated bodies, corridors suddenly changing from lab style to hell style level really is creepy. Exactly the way Doom should look like.

The Bad
The game has more or less the same number of pros and cons. For beautiful graphics we have to pay with performance. Comparing to Half-life 2, the speed looks pathetic. In 640x480 with low details Doom 3 is not nice at all and still when encountering even two or three monsters, frame rate drops significantly. Comparing Doom 3 to Painkiller is even more pointless. I am able to play the latter in 1024x768 in high details with about 40-50 fps and Doom 3 in 640x480 in low details with about 30 fps which falls to 10-20 during fight. Of course in this situation Painkiller looks far better than Doom 3. So the cost of nice lights, bump mapping and other fancy things is very high.

Simple story can also be a disadvantage, rarely player can be surprised with something, yet the plot of counselor being seen first evil and then as good seems nice.

Another large problem is that Doom 3 offers no real fun after some time. With almost no multiplayer mode, people can only play single player and that will at some moment simply get boring.

The Bottom Line
Doom 3 is good. Continues the saga in proper way. But it is definitely not a perfect way. Nice atmosphere, great graphics and good models is what makes this game great. But remember - no entry with <2MHz processor.

The Good
History has not always been kind to Doom 3. While it released in 2004, after a long period of delays, to critical fanfare and very impressive sales, it has since been viewed increasingly as a bit of a disappointment in comparison to its predecessors.

It's important to note, especially for folks who weren't old enough to pay attention to it at the time, that the game set out to do exactly what was in fashion for the industry at the time: graphics showcases that showed off lots of shiny real-time lighting and bump mapping and a very tight, on-rails FPS experience a la Half-Life.

The hype around Doom 3 was immense, dating all the way back to the year 2000 with John Carmack's famous .plan update which explained how id's owners had been reluctant to return to the same franchise for yet another FPS, and in return the staff had threatened to walk out if they didn't get to do another Doom game.

I loved Doom 3 back when it came out and still love it today, though I can acknowledge that pretty much all of the popular criticisms of the game are on the nose. It is a mediocre shooter and a mediocre horror game with dated graphics and gameplay mechanics that weren't strong enough to age gracefully, but man does it have some fantastic production values. Part of the allure when it came out was to just see what a Doom game could look like were it to be reimagined with the period's contemporary technology, and on that front the game excelled.

Some of the reasons for the game's drastic shifts in direction from previous entries were obviously decisions dictated by technology concerns. The real-time stencil shadows offered by the engine looked harsh and sharp, so the setting was dark and metallic to lend well to this effect. The engine was not capable of drawing convincing-looking outdoor scenes or areas with natural lighting, so the game barely features any. Most machines of the time couldn't render a scene with more than five or six actors at a time, so surprise, that's what you get. And of course, rendering scenes with wide open spaces and lots of detail was hard on the hardware too, so you're in cramped corridors full of tight corners and doors that automatically close after a few seconds.

The call to take the game's design in a horror-oriented direction would've been the natural one to make. The original games were commonly thought of as being rather scary in their day, even if they seem quaint by modern standards. But in the id Software board room, there were other concerns.

"Well it's a Doom game, so it's gotta have the demons and shotguns! And the chainsaw too! Gotta have lots of shooty shooty stuff 'cause that's what Doom is known for!" Tim Willits says, upping the irons. "Heavy metal and pentagrams! SLAYER!"

"But it's gotta be dark and scary and tense because that's where the technology works best, mmm!" Carmack retorts, his vocal tic aggravated by the lively debate.

Todd Hollenshead leans in to look at the two, brows furrowed, his luscious locks dangling at the sides of his head. "So which way do we go? Big, stupid and fun, or dark, serious and scary?”

"BOTH!" The room erupts into riotous cheering. "Both at the same time!!!”

After watching the opening cutscene, you're given some time to trudge around in a safe place with no enemy threats, filling the shoes of your nameless protagonist (we can call him Doomguy, or maybe we should call him Kevin, since his visage in this game is modelled after artist and id Software co-owner Kevin Cloud's visage, not to mention it's Kevin's arms holding the guns in the original games, and it's Christmas time as I write this so Home Alone has been on TV like fifteen times already this month). Doom 3's increased focus on horror and a slowed-down pace lends itself well to establishing a fantastic sense of place in the environments.

There's no 'use' key, but instead the game offers rich interactive screens. When you approach one, your gun drops away and your crosshair becomes a mouse cursor, that you can click on the screen's elements with. Interactive terminals in FPS games are nothing new, but the implementation of this mechanic in Doom 3 is incredibly slick, maybe the best I've seen in a shooter. Your view doesn't lock into the screen or take you to a menu or anything, you can just walk up to it and start using it just like any touch screen in the real world.

Things like that serve as small elements of what makes up the game’s greatest strength, its presentation. Even in 2019, Doom 3 looks fantastic, and it’s not because it’s got bump mapping and stencil shadows, it’s because the game is a lovingly crafted work of art. The environments are lovingly brought to life with details and movement. Machines run through complex procedures, carrying glowing tubes of blue liquid from place to place. Pistons pound up and down, consisting of complicated arrays of individual moving parts. Often, nearby monitors and terminals update to reflect the cycles of the machinery around them. These landmarks aren’t static meshes that see repeated use, either – they’re handmade, one-offs that you’ll see once and probably never again. Lights flicker, spark and move about from place to place, making the shadows dance along the walls and floors. Computer terminals are crammed with scrolling text, animated graphs and charts, many of which are interactive even if they don’t actually affect anything in the game world.

This isn’t even covering what it looks like when you get to hell, either (sorry, spoiler warning: this is a Doom game, you go to hell). The representation of hell in Doom 3 is fantastic, filled to the brim not just with fire, brimstone, skulls and pentagrams, but also with some truly weird architecture and lots of cool scripted events.

Other games had beat Doom 3 to the market with some of its banner engine features (Deus Ex Invisible War, Far Cry and even fan projects like Tenebrae for Quake already had the per-pixel lighting implemented) but Doom 3 is seemingly built from beginning to end to make full use of its engine’s features in an artistic capacity. Even if modern engines show Doom 3 up with soft shadows and physically based rendering and vastly increased poly counts and texture sizes, Doom 3 still manages to hold its own based on the quality of the artwork alone.

It’s also worthy to note that compared to other titles at the time that ran on bleeding-edge technology, Doom 3’s engine is solid and stable. Aforementioned games like Deus Ex IW and Thief 3 are janky, having significant trouble even running on a modern computer. Not the case with Doom 3. Not only does it run on today’s hardware, you will find performance is consistent, maintaining a good 60FPS rate on most mid-range hardware at native resolutions. It might take a bit of fiddling with the console to get your desired resolution (use CTRL-ALT-~ to bring up the console, set r_mode to –1, then use the r_customheight, r_customwidth and r_aspectratio commands to fix this). For people with a monitor supporting higher refresh rates, it’s important to note that the Doom 3 engine’s tick rate is locked to 60Hz. It will not render more than 60 frames per second, no matter how much power you throw at it, which is disappointing for folks like me who run a 144Hz screen and care about the difference. This also results in some slight audio quirks like how rapid fire guns like the machine gun and plasma gun seem to ‘hiccup’ and miss as they fire, and the player’s footsteps sounding like the Doomguy is occasionally tripping over his own feet. It’s ironic that this had to be done when the Carmack’s reasoning was to ostensibly prevent exploits and cheating in multiplayer games, when Doom 3’s multiplayer is a clear afterthought with very few features. The BFG Edition goes a good way to alleviate this unfortunate quirk by allowing you to double the tick rate to 120Hz.

For a first-time player, the introductory levels are a gripping experience, as you see things go quickly from bad to worse while the demonic invasion takes over. Stuff is blowing up, people are dying or being possessed left and right, imps are crawling out of the freaking walls and your radio is screeching with screams, men yelling orders and gunfire. You heft your shotgun and open a door to come face to face with an imp. He screeches a dissonant shriek at you, rearing up to pounce and take your head off. It’s great. The game throws almost its entire bag of horror tricks at you in the first couple of hours, and I found it genuinely scary at a few points... to start with, that is. More on that later.

The story is hardly any more developed than the original game but the dialogue is well written and well-acted, making use of a wide cast of veteran voice actors to record the various NPCs you interact with (for like, five seconds, before you have to proceed without them or they get killed) and the various audio journals you listen to.

The quality of the level designs throughout is consistently good, and the game maintains a deftly paced, hypnotic rhythm of exploration and combat. Level layouts are less linear than later FPS games, still coming from the boomer shooter school of design, though they are more streamlined than in previous id titles. Like Half-Life, the game knows not to keep you doing the same thing for too long, alternating between corridor crawls, spooky bits, heavy combat, set pieces and the odd breather moment.

The Bad
Doom 3 has a problem being comfortable with itself and deciding what it wants to be, though, and that’s what makes its gameplay the weakest of any instalment in the Doom series.

With the technological conceits and weaknesses that it is clearly designed around, id had the opportunity to incorporate some survival horror sensibilities into the game. And they did, too, but it’s ultimately the sense that they had to make it an action game too, that holds it back. Doom 3’s horror is only skin deep and doesn’t go into the gameplay mechanics, save for two features: the flashlight and the weapon reloading mechanics. Every other mechanic is standard FPS fare centred around combat, and the combat is never particularly great. Sorry guys. It’s certainly serviceable and balanced, but it’s far from thrilling.

Why? Well, it’s too easy most of the time, for one. Ammo and health are extremely plentiful, if you just remember to look around behind things. Demons may often lie in wait behind some of the pillars, pipes and crates you may pass, but even more often it’s caches of health, ammo and armour that lurk in the dark. And those storage lockers that you have to read emails and listen to audio logs to get codes to? Just ignore them if you like, aside from getting the odd weapon a bit earlier, they almost never have anything that you can’t easily get by without. If you’re playing the BFG Edition re-release of the game, the need to manage your ammo reserves goes from trivial to non-existent, by way of it doubling the ammo received per pickup, and adding even more ammo pickups to each level. Resident Evil, this ain’t. If you're looking for a game offering frantic moments where your blood is pumping while you sprint down the hallways trying to get away from a relentless pursuer after feeling the dread-inducing dry click of your empty gun, keep on looking.

Because throwing too many enemies on screen would be a performance concern, you’re extremely unlikely to ever be in danger of getting overwhelmed. You’ll round a corner. A wall opens up or a teleport happens and a monster comes in. You shoot him dead and immediately turn around to blow away the guy behind you, because it’s been three hours and you KNOW by now that every single bloody time a monster spawns in front of you, they place one behind you as well. Teleporting in is by far the most common way that enemies are introduced to the scene, increasingly so in later levels, and teleport are telegraphed by about almost two seconds of sound and visual cues before they actually appear. When they do, they also are frozen in place for a bit under a second, unable to attack you. Imps, maggots and wraiths, three of the most common enemy types, all come in this way and can be dealt with using the same tactic: make a beeline for where they’re about to spawn in, stick your shotgun in their mouth and pull blow them away before they can even activate. You keep expecting the game will finally catch on to this and maybe try a different trick, but it never does. It just happens more frequently, and occasionally with bigger bad guys as you go, like cacos and revenants. But the strategy never changes and it never fails. It’s boring.

By the way, that’s not to mention the cheap ambushes the game occasionally throws at you. That imp behind the door I mentioned earlier? Every fifth door has an imp behind it, waiting to do that same pounce. You can’t get out of the way, you can’t interrupt him with a non-lethal hit and you can’t back up quickly enough to get out of the range of his leap. Most of the time you’ll just have to take the hit if he doesn’t go down with your first shot. But most of us FPS veterans know to take doors on a narrow angle to divide and conquer the threats behind it... so you stack up on the side, nudge the door enough to open it and... the imp pounces on cue, and warps around the side of the doorway, in brazen defiance of the laws of physics, to hit you in the face anyway! Come on, man!

The weapons feel chronically underpowered, even though they’re actually not. Almost all of the way through the game you’ll be sticking with your melee weapon, the shotgun. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, don’t try and correct me, Doom 3’s shotgun is absolutely a melee weapon, being completely ineffective from any distance outside of three feet, but utterly devastating when used at point blank. I understand that this ludicrous degree of spread is to create situations where other guns are more appropriate, but this method of doing so is not practical and doesn’t even work. Almost all of the game’s combat is close quarters, with most rooms not more than a few metres in length or height, so the shotgun is almost always the superior choice, even with its insane spread. Why not just make it fire way slower, so it’s no good for groups? Make shotgun shells a little harder to come by, so you’re not reaching for it with every encounter? Yes, I know I’m spending a whole paragraph moaning about a shotgun, but when it’s your standby gun for pretty much the whole game, these problems with it tend to compound.

The other guns are better-balanced, each having a particular situation where they can come into their own, but all share the problem of having some incredibly weak audio-visual feedback. They sound like nerf guns, with the pistol, shotgun, machinegun and plasma gun being particularly problematic in this area. Enemies and the environment alike do not react much to being shot by them. I’m surprised that such a core part of the game, the shooting, sounds and so pithy and flaccid when the sound design, in every other respect, is great.

Okay, now let’s talk about the flashlight. Yes, the infamous flashlight mechanic doesn’t make sense and doesn’t add tension. That said, it’s not as bad as people tend to make out – instances where it is genuinely dark enough that you just can’t see at all without the flashlight are extremely rare, and there are actually a few moments where it is played to good effect, where you are constantly being attacked in pitch darkness, with a moving source of light that you must stick close by and defend so that you can proceed without having to put your gun away and expose yourself to attack.

I do believe that having a gun-mounted light with perhaps a more limited cone of light would be a better compromise, and those scenes designed around the sparse lighting could be mitigated by simply knocking your light out (there is already one sequence that turns your flashlight off anyway).

The BFG re-release of the game makes this situation worse by not only providing you with a shoulder-mounted lamp, but it also assigns an ambient base light value to levels, making it so there are almost NO dark areas whatsoever. For a game which tries to add tension by the idea of threats lurking in the shadows, this is a crippling blow to the game’s already hit-and-miss efforts at frightening you.

The other ‘horror’ mechanic I mentioned is probably a total accident: you cannot interrupt weapon reloads, save for the shotgun. If your gun runs dry in the middle of a fight and starts reloading, you have to sit and wait for it to finish while you are getting pounded on instead of being able to switch to another. Mercifully, the ‘auto-reload’ feature for weapons can be disabled, so you can pick your moments to top up your guns. With it working this way, I actually like the way it feeds into the rhythm of the game – after a firefight or before entering a new room, you get into a habit of checking your weapons to make sure they all have full clips before proceeding.

Aside from these two techniques, there really aren’t any horror mechanics to speak of. If you want a first person experience that’s actually designed to scare you, go play Amnesia or Alien Isolation – Doom 3’s horror is, for the most part, a cosmetic affair. You’ll walk down a hallway and a loud CLANG rings out and a panel of the wall flies off. You’ll walk down another hallway and a dead body will drop from the ceiling and a ghostly voice will say “Help me”. You’ll walk crawl through a vent and you’ll see a shadow flicker past the wall. And of course, there’s plenty of monsters hiding in closets that are seemingly designed to do nothing but store monsters in them – you’ll be walking along and the wall opens up suddenly, and yet another spring-loaded imp comes flying out at you. Of these examples, only the latter one is a moment that puts you in any actual danger, and even these are no more than minor threats at best.

While these tactics certainly worked on me at first, the game very quickly gets to the bottom of its bag of horror tricks and doesn’t find any new ways to unnerve you. Once you realise the scary spooky stuff poses no physical threat to you, it ceases to be scary. It will simply keep resorting to the same tricks, becoming less creepy with each use. By the latter end of the campaign, the game has more-or-less given up on the horror angle and devolved to a pure FPS with some spooky atmospheric trappings. By consequence of you retaining your arsenal from the old games, by the end you’re armed to the teeth with rocket launchers, plasma guns and the obligatory BFG, as well as the soul cube that can heal you (and largely supplants the game’s use of health pickups). The only possible way this can go is to favour the combat over the horror, and when the combat is solid but not particularly exciting or tense, that is how Doom 3 becomes as well.

And finally, there’s just one more missed opportunity for making a scary game: character development and story. Doom 3, with its barebones narrative (if well-written), features no clever twists to provoke any sense of shock, disgust or surprise in you. It features more-or-less maybe four main characters. There’s Sarge, your guy who gives you objectives over the radio, Swann, a guy who is always a few steps in front of you, Betruger, the bad guy who laughs a lot, and yourself, a silent protagonist with no history or personality.

The audio logs fare no better, with every PDA filled with recordings and emails of people talking about how the UAC has bad work culture and Mars is very spooky and they have a bad feeling about this or if Bill Lumberg took their stapler again they’d burn down the base. Remember System Shock 2’s audio logs? Do you remember following the stories of Diego, with his submission to the temptations of evil and subsequent redemption? Polito, your ally with a seemingly split personality and packing one of the best plot twists in video gaming history? Bronson, the security chief who chose to stand up for her morals even if she died for it? The lovers Tommy and Rebecca? Doom 3 features none of this kind of characterisation of anybody, despite having more content present in it and a campaign of similar length. It’s a total wasted opportunity, devoting its energies to world building in a world that doesn’t have much that can’t already be explained to you visually.

Sarge is perhaps the one person who you might feel some rapport with, if only for being your only company during most of the game (and even then, only as a voice-over), but it’s not like anybody in the game has a character arc or anything. With developed characters, you can feel empathy and attachment to them, and when they’re thrust into a dangerous situation where they could die at any moment, your fear for their safety can be as real and tense as for your own. Rather tragically, in Doom 3, you won’t ever care who lives or dies and you’ll pretty much never be looking out for anybody besides number one.

The Bottom Line
I find myself holding a weird sense of cognitive dissonance about Doom 3, because while there’s plenty about it to criticise, I still very much enjoy playing it, and have come back to it every year since 2005 when I first got it. Its problems can generally be traced to its attempt to execute on two mutually exclusive goals: to maintain the fast-paced action and irreverent tone of the old Doom games and to create a dark, engaging and deep horror experience. The efforts of each is undercut by the other, a problem that Monolith would also struggle with a year later with their game FEAR, and garnering similar results (though FEAR perhaps fared a bit better by being a new IP with no baggage, and keeping its combat and horror largely compartmentalised).

Id Software’s final parting gift has been with the open nature of the game engine and assets – Doom 3’s mod scene is surprisingly still rich and active, boasting several mods that hint at what it could’ve been if it had gone for a full horror direction (and the other way). I particularly enjoyed ‘Overthinked Doom 3’, which while in need of significant polish, shakes off Doom’s action roots and ratchets up the tension by making increasing the rarity of ammo and the lethality of enemy attacks, while also making weapon handling require increased concentration.

The rebellious spirit of id still lives on in this title, although it certainly isn’t what it used to be. With the legacy of the Doom brand looming large over it, Doom 3 is in many ways afraid to go all the way in any direction and that works to its detriment. Its spectacular 2016 follow-up serves as a perfect counterpoint when id decided to fully embrace the spirit of the old Doom games without any compromise or shame.

While I did touch on this here and there in this review, I cannot recommend the BFG re-release of Doom 3 from 2012. In its misguided attempts to reconfigure Doom 3 into an action game, it strips the horror elements to the point of total ineffectiveness and removes all the tension from the combat by making an already-too-easy game even easier.

Doom 3 is not particularly important in the pantheon of first-person shooters, it’s certainly far from id’s best game and yet I love it all the same. The A+ presentation, lovingly hand-crafted world and solid core gameplay elevate Doom 3 above its confused identity and fundamentally compromised design goals. There are no rough edges here – everything in the execution is quality and polish, all the way, and it’s absolutely still worth your time in 2020, even if it’s just for a single run.

The Good
2004 was, at first glance, a fantastic year for the first-person shooter genre. Spring gave us the unlooked-for treat of Far Cry, summer brought the release of the long-anticipated DOOM³, and Valve finally completed their work on Half-Life 2 by the winter. While all these titles made significant advances in graphical rendering, they represented more of a technological advancement than an evolution in gameplay. But first, let's look at what's right about DOOM³.

The first thing that stands out is the atmosphere. It is dark, but the lighting is dynamic and very realistic. In fact, superior lighting is the biggest advantage that DOOM³ has over its main rival, Half-Life 2. Now, John Carmack, the brains behind id's game engines, has said that in order for DOOM³ to run properly, the basic color scheme of the gameworld needed to be black, black, and more black. And this is the dominant feature of DOOM³ -- the levels are dark, claustrophobic, and poorly-lit. After trapezing around on bright sunlit tropical islands in Far Cry, the dark, tight corridors of DOOM³ are more than a little disturbing. But the DOOM series is all about fear, dread, and horror, so all this gloom is both appropriate and immersive. But, if you like things bright and cheery, this is not the game for you.

Moving on: the gameplay is solid, though it lacks any innovation. The run-and-gun philosophy behind the prior DOOM games has been tempered somewhat. Instead of blasting your way through a dozen demons, DOOM³ requires a more cerebral approach. You'll need to move forward slowly, patiently, listening for every sound, checking in every corner, creating a mental schematic in your head in case you need to turn heel and run away from some horrific cybernetic demon-dog.

The bosses are impressive but for some reason lack the personality of their counterparts in DOOM. I really hated that Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind in classic DOOM, but the bosses here are just too menacing and overwhelming to give me a chance to loathe them. I just frantically pumped round after round into them, loaded time after time after getting wasted, and eventually polished them off. Still, they are quite memorable. Regrettably, though, the final boss is more of an RPG encounter than a real challenge. You can only hurt it with one weapon, the SoulCube, which is homing. So you just strafe around in circles, keeping your distance from various yard trash enemies, and the boss (a different incarnation of the Cyberdemon) will never hit you with his rockets. Your homing SoulCube takes four or five deployments to kill the big meanie, and that's it, game over.

The Bad
The plot of DOOM³ is a bit muddled and uninspired. I get the feeling that id was far more concerned with creating a graphical masterpiece than a dramatic one. Still, three years after Bungie released the compelling and story-driven Halo, it would have been nice if id had aspired to create a more coherent and sensible storyline. Perhaps they did aspire to this: but the bottom-line is that they failed. The demons of Hell don't appear to have any reason or purpose to their existence: they are just mean and ferocious and aren't driven by an intelligent force like the Spider Mastermind in the original DOOM.

Furthermore, the chief antagonist of DOOM³, Dr. Betruger, appears to be such a wicked and hateful human being that he'll sacrifice the entire human race in his quest for power. I find that a bit unrealistic -- nobody is that evil.

The Bottom Line
DOOM³ is a graphical triumph, but it offers little in the way of gameplay innovation. Still, if it ain't broke don't fix it, right? DOOM and its sequel were big hits, so I don't blame id for keeping it simple and just focusing on their technology.

The Good
The graphics are simply awesome. Yes, if you stick your nose on the wall you will notice some low-res textures. Indeed. However, the models are several levels above anything currently on the market. I don't mean to rain on your Far Cry, but the models in Far Cry and Painkiller look funny in comparison. And the engine is comparatively lighter than both Far Cry and Painkiller. I'm using a Radeon 9100 card and both games gave me much grief (especially Painkiller which simply refused to go on after a particular level). Sound is simply the best I've heard in a game

As for the AI, frankly I don't see what the problem is. It is simple and straightforward, but effective. The marines are especially good: they execute rolls, make slight sidesteps, take cover behind obstacles and it is VERY hard to hit them without being hit yourself. And they are not inhumanly accurate either. There were several occasions in Far Cry where the "revolutionary" AI just sat and stared at nothing while you shot them to pieces. That never happens in Doom 3.

In a few words, Doom 3 is atmospheric, scary and offers simple, yet enjoyable shooter gameplay.

The Bad
There isn't much interaction with all the items, but I suspect that the engine would become too heavy if there was. Plot and characters are relatively simple, but this is a Doom game, after all. I suppose it had all the story it needed.

The Bottom Line
It is a worthy sequel to Doom I and II and it is good. This is NOT Half-Life 2 or Far Cry and it shouldn't be. It is a straightforward horror FPS game with excellent production values. Not perfect or groundbreaking as its predecessors, but an excellent game nonetheless.

The Good
Ahhh... Doom is back among us. After years of alpha leaks, mouth-watering promo videos and assorted demos the game that change the face of pc gaming returns once again to set the standard. And believe it or not, it didn't do a bad job at all!

The importance of Doom as a videogame landmark cannot be underestimated even by the most jaded old "grandpas" in the scene. Thus it made perfect sense for id to ride its golden pony once more as a way to promote their new graphic technology by way of a remake (or "reimagining" as Tim Burton would say) of the greatest game ever (sic.). Once again you are placed in the shoes of the ever present Space Marine (tm) who has to fight his way through a demon-infested colony in Mars fighting for your life through many dark corridors and hellish landscapes and once again the technological boundaries have been pushed further.

If the original Doom became famous for being the first game to really bring home the sci-fi tension and suspense of the Alien films, Doom 3 will be remembered as the game that took that feeling and made it actual physical reality (in your monitor of course). There's no overstating just how well the graphics in the game work. I saw most of the demos and was determined not to let them impress me by the time I got my hands on the game but as soon as I found myself exploring the dark corners of the station I forgot all about the pixel-shading effects, motion blurring, specular shading, bump-mapping and stuff like that. Because id pulled me once again in their dark sci-fi world this time thanks to a level of graphic realism never before seen on a videogame. The living quality of the environments is simply amazing. Not only do you get the gritty feel of being on a dark space colony, but also you get the feel that the place is entirely "man-made" as it were due to the fact that very few places are made of "just" textured walls and instead feature all sorts of modeled pipes, panels, wires and moving gizmos. The detail poured in the level design is simply amazing and coupled with a superb photographic direction that maximizes the engine's ability to dramatically light scenes (complete with true 0-light darkness) and an amazing sound design filled with eerie sci-fi cues and sfx that take full advantage of surround setups, the end result is an experience like no other. I vividly recall hooking the computer to my 29" TV, shutting off the lights and cranking my stereo with 4 friends the night I first installed the game and blabbing nonstop about how cool everything was until we got to the infamous "mirror scare"... boy you could hear a pin drop after that let me tell you!

And that's before you start meeting the nice denizens of hell and make a trip there yourself. Fans of horror games will be happy to know despite the imposing brimstone and lava intro to hell, that the game has let go somewhat of it's heavy-metal band inspired inferno and now favors a more Clive Barkerish design, which means more brutally dismembered corpses, ritualistic stuff and trans-dimensional horrors a-la Lovecraft. By far Doom 3 will remain in my mind as one of the most impressive depictions of hell ever, if only for the visceral effect of it all. As for the monsters themselves they are all reworkings of the same baddies featured in the original games only with the same Barker-inspired updates. For the most part all of the creatures gained with the changes (particularly the Imp, who looks far more menacing, and has gained an Alien-like agility) although the revenant looks far too "plastic-made" for me. One of the most impressive creatures in the game however, is an original creation whose name escapes me, but which looks like a cross between a moth and human baby... yes, a cute human baby. One of the most deliciously shocking and disturbing moments in the game is when you first hear the crying moans of a baby approach you and you later see his chubby face and bright eyes coming for you... with no legs...!

Anyway, moving from the visual design of things for a bit we have the gameplay. Let's see, where you betting on it being a straight up, simpleminded shooter? Well good for you! Here's your cookie boy.

Yes Doom 3 is a straight-to-the-point action-heavy visceral shooter just like the original games, but that's not to say that it hasn't picked up a few new tricks itself. While the gameplay revolves around shooting baddies and collecting keys the game plays as a unified whole (without any "levels") and has you following a distinct set of objectives and even asks you to make a choice a couple of times along the way. The game also uses darkness and poor visibility to augment it's emotional punch and believe me that it works. Few things bring such a primal fear to your heart as not knowing what's out there in the darkness, and the limitation of not being able to hold both the flashlight and a weapon at the same time while irritating at first makes sense in the context of the game and adds to the thrill factor.

Doom 3 also makes heavy use of scripted events to increase the survival-horrorish feel. Interaction with the gameworld is, as expected, paper-thin but it's there. I remember cringing in fear of another "Quake" when word got out that Carmack had decided to do away with the "use" key yet the end result is far more classy and innovative than I could have imagined. Basically you interact with computers, panels, etc. with your mouse, the way it works so charmingly simple and well-thought that it's a wonder nobody thought of it earlier. You just walk up to the screen and once you enter the correct "use" distance you loose control of your mouselook abilities in favor of controlling a pointer on the screen. You interact with the thing as in your basic flash-made web interfaces and once you got what you wanted you just walk away! Simply beautiful! I can't wait for other games to start including interfaces like this.

All of these nice features also help the game from a storytelling point of view. Sure, all of us well-adjusted individuals understand that we really don't need a story to enjoy Doom, but there's no denying that it enhances the experience quite a bit. So yeah boys and girls, there's a story here! Yeah! Can you believe it? It's no masterpiece of literary fiction as you might have guessed, but it's still pretty entertaining fare and par for the course as far as fps storytelling goes. id also made the right choice of forgetting about some of it's design mantras and adopted some ideas from previous games like Half-Life and System Shock. With a long-intro in which you can chat with npcs, explore your surroundings before all hell (literally) breaks loose, a few surviving npcs and scripted events that move the plot along as well as clues and logs which you can save in your PDA and which expand the gameworld and help build the atmosphere as in SysShock.

The Bad
There is no point arguing the finer technical flaws in the game because they take us to a level of anal retentiveness reserved only for film CG talks. The truth of the matter is that the game is technically brilliant and a landmark of 3d gaming. Trolls everywhere in forums make it a point to pit D3's engine against HL2's Source engine but while it's true that the later can push more polys (Doom 3's models when closely inspected are revealed as quite blocky) the overall shading quality in D3 far surpasses any shortcomings in its modeling. If there is one real shortcoming with the engine is that it really requires a monster system to play with all its bells and whistles. I can play Riddick: EFBB and HL2 at max detail and 1024x768 but D3 still chugs like a bastard if I attempt to go over 800x600. Physics are adequate for the game, without the overkill that is playing through Half-Life 2 and with just enough to satisfy the average player (with such hallmarks as bodies falling down and realistically piling over each other). The AI has taken some flak from some people and I agree that it's pretty predictable at times, but quite frankly I can understand hellbound monsters acting like you know... uhm... monsters, instead of spec-ops operatives!

If there is one flaw in the game that really annoyed me was the heavy-handed use of scripted events. It seems id really loved those moments in Half-Life, System Shock and similar fps where you walk down a corridor and as soon as you step on the correct place a monster falls down from the ceiling instead of just being there. However instead of carefully planning each encounter and set-piece as in those games, they filled the maps with dozens of cheap scares which work in the same manner: walk down a corridor, hear a door opening behind you and wham! See a monster emerging from a secret room! Ha-haaa, got me there id! The first 100 times at least, then it just becomes boring not to mention incredibly stupid as you start wondering just what the hell was the monster doing waiting for you to pass by while stuck in a closet? There are some nice, original scares but they get downplayed by the cheap-o "Peekaboo!!" scares that literally haunt the entire game, and that's a real shame.

As a minor bitching note, I could have used the double-barreled shotgun and the Mars surface areas are extremely well done (those are actual rocks I tell you!!) it's a shame they are so short.

Oh and yeah, it doesn't exactly "evolve" the genre into any direction and if you want multiplayer action D3's flimsy 4-player deathmatch mode doesn't exactly cut the mustard. D3 is, for what it's worth, a singleplayer game.

The Bottom Line
Intellectual bitching aside (duuuh!! It's just a shooter, there's no character development and you just kill things!), techie-geek bitching aside (duuuh!! I already saw stencil shadows on "X" and engine "Y" gives better framerates with comparable looks!) there's no denying that Doom 3 is one hell of an interesting game.

Yes, when you look at it closely it's a game that takes incredible technology and adds to it some already explored (and better realized, really) design ideas to try to rejuvenate its stagnant gameplay, but does that matter if the end result is one of the most intense and thrilling experiences in recent memory? We all knew Doom's shortcomings even before we played it, and the fact that even after that it manages to be a fun experience to play is proof positive that it's not even close to being a bad game.

If you have the computer and nerves to play it (I myself avoided playing the game for more than 30-40 minutes straight due to the intensity of it all) you just have to give Doom 3 a try. It's not the second coming or anything, but it's one hell of a good ride and really, that's everything Doom has always been about.

The Good
What can I say about Doom? Its easily one of the best shooters ever and revolutionized the industry. Every PC gamer worth his or her salt has played Doom, so I don't think I need say anymore.

When Doom 3 first came out, our eyes popped out of our sockets. Then again, that is what ID has always been good it. Each new engine they pop out looks incredible and has some new graphical feature never featured in a game before. In Doom 3's case, its new technical marvel was "Unified lighting," essentially a trick that means every square inch will have a realistic shadow with constant real time alteration and realistic flow. The game looked great, and even now despite the age the lighting is incredible.

Gameplay, for better of for worse, isn't changed much from the old Doom games. Its pretty straight forward stuff: You have a gun. Satan just haphazardly dumped a bunch of demons from his evil bucket o' monsters and with your trusty gun you are going to put those demons back in the bucket, but when they go home they'll be twisted flesh and full of holes. The game does use a more directed level design to make the UAC complex seem like a real place and it does work out, while there are majour problems (more on that later) with this world there are various things strewn about them that will catch your attention assuming you are into science and as a nerdy science geek I was pleased to stop occasionally and stare at some cool scientific doohickey and listen to some surprisingly logical and believable machines.

While I can't say much about the monsters as they are mostly run of the mill, I can say this: The new PinkyDemon design kicks ass. Y'know, those pink dudes with the giant head that liked to bite your ass off? Well, they're a bit different in Doom 3 and their design is creative and cool. I really enjoyed it, because their design really fits the whole "Demonic flesh mingling with future tech" theme that has always permeated the Doom universe. Plus, their mechanical legs justify why they were so friggen' fast despite their physically strange bodies in the old games. The Pinky's in Doom 3 have become one of my all time favourite game monsters.

Betruger is damn creepy and is a good villain, even though it would've been nice to see his motif for opening the gates of hell and how he got so many demonic powers.

Although it doesn't last long, the games trip to hell is memorable and a majour mind f**k, and really breaks up the monotony for a little bit because of how trippy, sinister, and scary it is.

The plasma rifle is still awesome, same with the BFG ^^

The Bad
The problem with Doom 3, is that while it is a competent shooter and it does have the simplistic style of its elder games, the game tries too hard to be scary. If a game is truly scary, a slow pace and building atmosphere will be forgiven because you will be so deep in the game your heart will palpitate and you will dread the time that a monster finally comes. While there are a few good creep out moments in Doom 3 and when the atmosphere does thicken, it is done well, but all in all the game simply isn't scary which means that the slow pace isn't justified and ends up making the game sometimes dreadfully boring.

The game tries to mix two types of horror: Haunted house horror and System Shock horror. Both fail. The haunted house effect works once or twice with something jumping out of the shadows, but then you'll find it happening every second and you'll often stare at a wall with your finger on the trigger and the second the monster jumps you'll have already fed it a healthy dose of shell pellets because you knew where it was going to jump from.

The System Shock horror doesn't work because the audio logs/emails are often stupid and cliche thanks to bad writing and bad voice acting. It bogs the game down, and unless you like taking naps when playing video games, you'll grow tired of it and the worst part is that sometimes you can't progress unless you listen or read all of the logs.

The sound design is awful. Imps make sounds ripped directly from "Aliens," and various monsters make silly or strange sounds that aren't scary. The worst of them all though are the guns. The pistol sounds like a wet fart. The shotgun makes this wimpy little "Poof" noise which is quickly drowned out by a tinny "Thunk" sound effect as the shells hit the wall. They all sound weak, and save for the chainsaw, bfg, and plasma rifle all the weapons are extremely passe and not very interesting nor fun to use. There's no music, and save for a few creepy ghost sound effects the game sounds lame.

The graphics may be great technically, but the artistic department is lacking. Doom 3 suffers from a severe case of Browninitis. Maybe its because its related to Quake, and Quake has always had the illness, but this is one of the worst cases of Browninitis ever seen and after this games release Browninitis became much more common and is practically a plague.

The multiplayer is dull. Out of the box only four players can play. Are you bloody serious? 4 players? ID, if you did that just to try and be nostalgic and make an exact remake of the original Doom's multiplayer.. congratulations! You are extremely thick. I mean, OUCH. Doom only supported 4 players because it was the first shooter to support multiplayer, so of course it was limited, but almost every game after it has supported more than 4! Quake alone had 16 players which was revolutionary, and 4 is pathetic! Maps are small and cramped, and save for Edge 2, none are really worth playing.

There's only one Hell level, and its short :( Also, congrats on making the cyberdemon, one of the most feared and twisted monster badasses to appear in a video game a complete and total wimp. Hes big, he looks scary, but throw a cube at him 4 times and he explodes. If you tried to throw a stupid cube at the original cyberdemon, he'd shove that rocket launcher so far up your ass you'd split in half!

No Co-op. Co-op would've really livened the game up. Co-op in Doom was always chaotic, stupid fun. Hopping around shooting bullets and trying to out do each other in demon slaughtering was always good, mindless fun that really brought more reason to replay Doom's single player. Co-op could've helped Doom 3; big time.

The Bottom Line
So yeah, Doom 3. A disappointing reboot of the franchise. That's not to say its awful, it is competent and at times fun, but it has no replay value and if you've played through it once you've seen everything it has to offer. It focuses on horror, something its not particularly good at, instead of action and this makes it often dull, boring, and repetitive. It has its moments and is fun in short bursts, but simply cannot live up to the legendary Doom name.

The Good
The original Doom is on my all time favorites list, as I suspect it is for millions of other people who have, say, touched a PC within the last decade or two. So needless to say that Doom 3 is (or rather, was) going to be a big hit no matter what anyone said about it. Of course, when ID Software has their mojo on (as opposed to Quake 1, where they didn't) you are in for a fine time, and quite fortunately they were in top form for Doom 3.

I rather like the "Episode 1" style of Classic Doom level, and though John Romero is long gone from ID, the braintrusts in Mesquite took that "Techbase" format (used for about 80% of the game) to the next level. While normally I would consider the persistent use of a certain theme or style repetitive, the architecture is so skillfully planned in Doom 3 that you really don't even notice that the textures are vigorously reused. Every area has a different feel, a different atmosphere, and looks suitably constructed and destroyed. Later on, Hell (sorry for ruining the "surprise", such as it was) takes things even further, and is one of the most effective depictions of that locality I've seen in a game. Certainly better than Episode 3 in the first game, at any rate.

The gameplay is pretty solid, about what I would expect from ID. Responsive controls, quick movement, and intuitive key placement. The difficulty isn't too bad, though the health sapping on Nightmare can lead to some tight situations at times (but hey, it's Nightmare). The arsenal, a combination of weapons from Quake 2 and the original Doom games, is quite varied although the lack of a double barreled shotgun is a conspicuous absence.

The storyline is actually pretty good, something ID put quite a bit of thought into for this release - a big step up from "blow up the Big Gun, plus some other things" from Quake 2, let alone the 'avenge your bunny' plot from the end of Ultimate Doom. Atmosphere is also a strong component in this release; while I personally was not scared by this game at all, I knew some people who had nightmares stemming from this title.

The graphics, amazing upon release, hold up to the test of time incredibly well half a decade later. The use of the hard (real-time) shadows really heightens the horror-themed experience. The sound production is also excellent. Though there isn't a whole lot of music, the title theme is appropriate for the series.

The Bad
There's a lot to like about this game, but (and this will sound a little strange) Doom 3 isn't as "solid" or "legendary" as the title that spawned it. Don't get me wrong; it's been in my Top 10 favorite games, so it is by no means a bad title. But despite the fact that is an excellent game, it just feels a little...mechanically predictable, in a way. In the original games, while the AI perhaps was not as sophisticated, the action was fast and you were ambushed frequently. Outside of roughly knowing where the monsters were for the most part (if you were a veteran mapper), you could still get thrown a curveball every once in awhile. Here, when you get used to the tactics of a monster, opponents of that monster type generally start to present no challenge, even with inferior weaponry. Despite the big writeup, though, I really don't consider it a major problem, just a noteworthy thing to mention.

I also have some minor quibbles about plot sometime falling to cliche's and the aforementioned lack of music, but nothing I feel like writing at any length about presently. Although I will mention quickly that, in reference to the review title, that sometimes its a little too dark in some spots, making it harder to navigate through some areas (in normal situations where darkness shouldn't be a factor, mind you; I'm not complaining about the scenes where you have to follow a light source to a destination, those are generally fun).

The Bottom Line
I really can't think of any reason why you wouldn't buy a copy of this game. It's good fun from ID, with a lot of meat on the bones with which to chew. If you are looking for a classic swarming monsters experience then perhaps you would be better served by the Serious Sam series this time out, but if you want a nice solid game that you can cut through in a few days time, look no further.

The Good
Doom 3 has great sound. Even though there is no music, the environmental sounds are of good quality and positioning is excellent. If I had to name one area where the game succeeded that would be sound. It's not without its problems, though. The weapon sounds are widely agreed to be crappily weak and need to be replaced by one of the mod packs. The scary noises are quite pointless really, especially in a room where you just killed everyone.

Speaking of graphics, there actually is one great aspect - the modelling and animation of the monsters. It's probably good - probably because you don't have a chance to see them - monsters are either in the darkness or disappear after their deaths.

A nice feature is the interactive displays - I was happy to finally see decent quality video and interfaces on the ingame displays. Unfortunately, it is not used to its full potential by id.

The Bad
Once the initial aural excitement is over, the problems rear their ugly heads. And there are lots of them.

First, graphics in Doom 3 are overrated. The technologies are not really revolutionary - polibump was done before, physics was done before and even stencil shadows were done before, even in budget titles (Secret Service from Activision). Perhaps, when the game is run on X800 or another top-of-the line card the engine would shine, but on everything else it looks like crap. No, the picture is somewhat nice, but only before you consider the quality of other games such as Far Cry and Painkiller. Those games managed to create extremely beautiful and detailed environments while still running at acceptable framerates at high quality settings and in hi-res. Another fault of Doom 3 is that it uses very low-res textures for no apparent reason. The sad thing is that 95% of what Doom 3 shows us could have been reproduced on CryEngine or any other recent game engine much better. The unified lighting is great, but the same scary atmosphere could have been done with traditional lightmaps and individual character shadows.

This leads us to the second problem. Doom 3 atmosphere is not a result of good lighting, but lack thereof. Levels are very poorly lit, leading to many jokes about the most powerful corporation in the world failing to install adequate lighting on its base. You also can't use the flashlight with your weapons, adding to both scariness and annoyance, and leading to another joke about duct tape missing on Mars.

The gameplay is very boring after some time. Yes, it's scary, but in a very bad sense, like when playing an old console platform arcade where you need to repeatedly execute pixel-precise jumps or risk falling to lava and starting over the level. Monsters are constantly teleporting in around you and jumping from secret rooms. Coupled with the pitch black darkness that makes your heart beat faster, but after a few hours you start questioning whether it's worth it and whether it's actually fun.

All levels are completely linear and your missions are too. Very often you don't really understand why you are going somewhere and need to "use interactive controls" (press buttons) to do seemingly random things, because the level designers failed to introduce you to the problem first (such as having you close a valve before you realise there is a leak somewhere). The world is completely non-interactive and there are almost no objects that have physics enabled. All other modern FPS games, including Max Payne 2, Far Cry and Painkiller (presumably Half-Life 2 too) used physics much more extensively and creatively.

There is no AI in the game to speak of. The monsters are completely stupid and rely on spawning behind you and quickly jumping on you. They do not walk or do anything else on their own - you come only to find them waiting for the scripted event to start. The NPCs are almost non existent and the only thing they usually do is die right after you find them. This is extremely annoying and you quickly stop caring about "the rest of the team", despite constant radio updates. Alien vs. Predator 2 did it much much much better.

There is some story in Doom 3, but it's quite boring and the designers didn't really make an effort to make you care about it (unlike Half-Life, for example). Because of this, they had to lure you into reading the e-mails and listening to audio logs by inserting there codes unlocking ammo cabinets. Quite stupid, actually. Speaking about ammo, another annoying practice is throwing some ammo beside your path and scripting an enemy appearance when you pick the ammo up. Stupid and utterly predictable, because the element of surprise is taken away after the first 30 minutes or so.

The Bottom Line
Get this game if you have the latest video-card and need to justify the money spent on it. Get this game if everyone around you plays it and you want to fit in. Get this game if you are just curious and want to see for yourself how bad/good it is (but you better rent, download or copy it, to not be disappointed later). But don't get it expecting to see a masterpiece. It's quite average, actually.

The Good
Even in 2009, Doom 3 still is visually impressive. There are a lot of great shadow and texture effects that make for a great and often scary atmosphere. The game does a good job of making metal surfaces and fleshy surfaces look quite real. There is a good variety of weapons to blow demons back to hell with. Doom 3 will provide you with some new types of monsters to kill as the game progresses so you never get bored and will have to develop new strategies to fight. Often something would jump out of the shadows and scare me and I would be swearing out loud. That might sound like a bad thing but it was fun in the end. There is much more health and ammo in this game than you will likely need, giving it an almost arcade like feel.

The Bad
There were a few things that I did not find so hot about Doom 3:

• Eventually you get tired of the enemies popping out from hidden rooms that make no sense to be realistically.

• Your character moves very slowly and you have a limited amount of stamina for running.

• There was no native widescreen support. I had to edit the games system files manually.

• You can not wield a flashlight and weapon at the same time... And some rooms have you in complete darkness.
  
  The Bottom Line
  Having purchased Doom 3 as part of the ID software Super Pack on Steam, I would say it was worth every penny. ( The package also includes the expansion to Doom 3, all the older Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D Games, and a lot of other games). 5 Years later this game still looks great and was a blast to play. At times it might have been a little TOO scary, but i took my courage pills and finished it. I would have liked some Co-op multiplayer but I hear that it is only in the Xbox version. Overall, its a great shooter and lots of fun.

The Good
The engine and graphics are great. Except maybe for the upcoming Half-Life 2, no other game out there can match the graphics this game puts out.

The Bad
The whole game had a "been there, done that" type feel to it. 2/3rds of the so called revolutionary game play elements were previously utilized in System Shock 2. PDAs? Used in System Shock 2. Emails from dead staff members? Shock 2 had audio of the emails, which added a whole new element to the game. Anyone whose played System Shock 2 will tell you that Doom 3 more or less ripped off these game play elements. The sad thing is, System Shock 2 did it better. The lack of music in the game was a disappointment.

The Bottom Line
For all the hype this game got, Doom 3 failed to deliver. Sure it has a great graphics engine, but who cares. The gameplay itself felt lacking, due to Carmack and company ripping off System Shock 2. Hopefully in the future, Carmack will put more thought into building revolutionary game play from scratch, instead of ripping it off from a 5 year old game.

The Good
The graphics engine is awesome. There's hardly anything original as far as visual effects are concerned, but it's definitely something never seen in a computer game before. The human heads and the lighting engine is particularly worth noting.

Level design is superb. While there's not much room for fantasy (most of the game takes place in a high-tech labyrinth filled with computers and other hardware equipment), there is a lot of high-quality architecture work, strategically positioned pentagrams, blood splatters, dead bodies, and some kind of spooky demonic protoplasm seeping through the walls. A short trip to Hell is a welcome break from steel and plastic, but I'm sure you'll be glad that you got out of there eventually - I was expecting a boatload of hell knights to drop on my head every moment.

Old foes are back, with only a couple missing; the weapons have been mostly redesigned, and their design and balance is completely different, but that's okay (BFG's here and it works the same, so I'm happy).

The Bad
Scares get old really quick; most annoying ones include an imp jumping at you soon as you open the door, and a steam jet blowing in your face as you pass by. There are a few good ones, but you'll be very unlikely to get scared as soon as ten hours into the game.

There is hardly anything that you haven't seen in Half-Life or System Shock 2. In fact, the game feels like a complete rip-off of that stellar pair. I know it probably won't bother a lot of people, but when similarities are so blatant, you start to get annoyed.

The game is so dark it's hampering the gameplay. Sure, a dark room here and there is cool and fun, but when it's dark ALL THE TIME, you throw up your arms in desperation. A flashlight is helpful, but not by much; besides you can't fire with a flashlight on. A common "close quarters encounter" means switching from flashlight to your primary gun, firing a few rounds in the dark, then turning on the flashlight to see if it's dead, and moving on. That darkness and repetitiveness annoys a LOT of people I know.

The Bottom Line
Get it if your computer can handle the graphics and if plagiarized gameplay doesn't bother you. If you want a scary shooter, look for System Shock 2 instead.

The Good
Doom 3 is basically a remake of the original with added spice. Id software took a classic game and tried to basically fit it in with modern shooters. What they did was add some good small time innovations. For e.g. You can walk into a usable screen or elevator and your crosshair turns into a mouse pointer where you can interact like u were using a computer. Other additions include taking the basic plot of the first game and expanding it by adding more depth to story not forgetting some key characters. A PDA which you use to check your missions and audio/video logs you pick up.

The story is quite simple. You're sent to Mars to work with the UAC, a very advance technological company which deals with weapons research to teleportation. On your first mission, things go bad and hell invades the base possessing most on-board.

The game's major selling point was it's hyped up graphics engine. Doom 3 would have been the best looking game that year (2004) but it was surprised by long time friend Half Life 2 and new comers Painkiller and Far Cry.

But when it came to lighting Doom 3 takes the crown here. Even other aspects like Character modeling and animation were done well. The animation of the monsters are well done from the creeping walk of the imps to the run cycle of the Pinky demon. The game heavily relies on it's dark lighting reflecting shadows all over the place, it creates and interesting approach to environment design.

As for the levels they're not close to being excellent but passable as good. There are some good details here and there especially when it comes to creating a dark and creepy environment. This can be seen in the Hell level and also in the levels at the latter half of the game. You tend to travel on the surface of Mars to reach the other facilities. You don't get to see much though since you need to run across before your oxygen runs out.

The Bad
This is where the review really starts.

Doom 3 as a game overall is terrible. It faces a multiple personality disorder. They've taken run and gun and mixed it with something out of a Silent Hill game. I'm facing dozens of monsters and I'm not really in a mood to open up a PDA and listen to a freaking audio log for key-codes to open a cabinet for ammo.

My point is it's very hard to mix these 2 formulas together. Doom is not Deus Ex nor is it System Shock, it's Doom. It's about blowing up monsters and making it fun doing so.

The game first and foremost follows the new Id Software rule of making everything bulky and macho looking. The weapons look like toy guns and are a snooze-fest except for the chainsaw and Plasma gun. To top things off the sound effects of the guns are weak, so weak that they have mods to replace the sounds. As for balance? Well let's say you'll never find use for the pistol after an hour of playing.

Another ridiculous idea is your light source is a flashlight. Now Doom 3 is extremely dark most of the time. In fact you don't need to play the game to even know that, it's like the symbolic figure of Doom 3.

Now the problem with the flashlight is not because you need to put down your weapon or that you can use your left hand to hold it up. It's just that it does not make any sense at all with the plot. You're in one of the most advanced facilities in the world. They manufacture teleports and advanced laser weaponry and they can't even make a gun with a attached flashlight on it? Did I mention the UAC have set up a facility on Mars where humans can reside that's to produced oxygen etc?

You can even use the Flashlight as a weapon, yeah bonk a monster on the head with it. But as a trained marine I would be embarrassed to do something like that even with half the base dead and not watching.

Getting away from that, you collect PDAs which contain peoples emails and audio logs. You need to listen to them to get a grip on whats going on as well as cabinet key-codes which normally contain health and ammo. You'll need to stay in one place to listen to these as the next room will spawn a dozen monsters and you'd be distracted.

It also lets you know you're objective which in the early half of the game was find bravo team. And when you reach them they're dead. From there it's get from point A to point B. It may say “Activate backup power supply” But if you're smart enough you'll know it translates to get from point A to B and hit a switch over there.

The main aspect, that is the action is terribly dull and boring, leave out a few moments. You're faced with a lot of monsters in a very cramped up environment. After finish them off you hear that sound “Ashawashabasha” and boom more of them spawns. There is a huge array of monsters but 80% of the game is you fighting Imps.

Speaking of which most of the monsters lack the scary attributes they did as 2d sprites in the first 2 games. Imps look and sound like aliens instead of demons. The only good revamps are the Pinky demon and Hell Knights. In fact these 2 were the only monsters which made me use the backpedal key, coz they actually were intimidating. Some in fact remain quite true to their original appearances. These being Revenant, Mancubus and my Doom 2 favorite “The Archville”. Sadly i can't believe the 2d sprite had more personality than this incarnation in Doom 3. I remember the Archville had a creepy as f**k sound when he spotted you. And when he's searching for you he gave out this sinister soft laughter only to have one of the most epic attack animations ever. All this is as usual not present here, he walks slowly summons Imps instead of raising the dead and shoots a small firewall. There are some new creatures like Cherubs, Trites and Ticks. None really interesting. Boss fights were terribly boring except for Vagary which had some interesting way of attacking you. This idea was probably suggested by someone not in the development team like the Game tester as Id Software don't have creative brains anymore. Look at the last boss, the ever famous Cyberdemon. I almost fell of my chair laughing at him. What happened to that Baptomet like massive creature which had a torn, morbid stomach? This guy is just huge and has some strange hunch like walk with some backpack kinda thing on him. Seriously Id what were you guys thinking?

There's also some “plot” in the story which involves a weapon created by the ancestors of Mars known as the SoulCube. This special weapon is a terrible addition here, you kill 5 monsters and you can fire it to drain the health from a monster and give it to you. Berserk power up makes it's way back and it's honestly represented quite well.

Finally the main reason for failure is that even as a horror game Doom 3 has absolutely no scare value leaving out the first 15 minutes of the game which is actually interesting. Throughout the game you're face with mainly cheap scares. Pick up gun and a monster jumps out, pick up ammo same thing. You then tend to wonder if it's really worth picking up anything in the game. To make things worst, the sound effects are abysmal, the scary sounds end up cheesy. Good example is that laughter which is supposed to be sinister but ends up sounding like someone coughing with his mouth closed into a mic. Room turns red in color some weird screaming sounds or laughter and once everything goes back to normal some idiotic Imps spawn. Trust me you get tired of these things. Getting to the point, sound is an important aspect of Horror games. Also Doom 3 lacks those depressive and energetic action tunes which were present in Doom and Doom 2, no music here just ambient sounds. This was obviously done because of the modernization of the game.

The game tries to act cute by throwing in 1 or 2 puzzles....and I'll just leave it till there.

The Bottom Line
So what to make of Doom 3, A game I've been anticipating for years? Well it takes 2 formulas that need a lot of good planning in order to work well together and butcher both of them quite well. This can come off as either a fancy tech demo or a really bad attempt at action horror. The game doesn't keep things interesting, boring shooting mechanics, overdone spawning of enemies and trying to fit the whole adventure style game-play of reading and listening to logs which really didn't work well with the games overdose of action. It's really boring to stay still in one room until the freaking audio stops playing. Doom 3 also has some good innovative features like using screens and consoles real-time, clever use of lighting. The lighting makes you forget that they've used low resolution textures almost everywhere. Not to forget the fluid and quite authentic looking character animations.

But the problem is the game is nothing more than a run and gun trying too hard to look like a deep shooter. I wasn't play Doom the game about destroying the army of hell in the isolated Mars base, I felt i was playing Doom: The not so scary alien shooter with NPC. Id software stick to engines, let other people handle creativity.

The Good
I've been a huge fan of Doom ever since the original came out back in 1993. For me, the Doom experience was always about just a few points:

• Visuals to rival everything the market has yet seen
• Sky-high production values
• Solid level design
• Thousands of challenging monsters and locations

Ladies and gentlemen, it took 11 years, but Doom 3 delivers. Oh boy, does it deliver. The shivers of excitement started the second I clicked on New Game and didn't stop for a minute. Doom 3 owns.

Visually, the game is not merely beautiful, great or even amazing as Half Life-2 was; it's nothing short of astounding. It's been well over half a year and I haven't seen anything even remotely close to the level of visuals I experienced in Doom 3. Everything looks so astoundingly detailed, right down to the rubble around the caves and the prickling hairs on the marine's fingers; the character models compare favorably to that of any game out there with the exception of HL2 - but whereas in HL2 the only genuinely impressive characters are the chief ones (Alyx, G-Man and three or four others) all character models in Doom 3 are extremely detailed and convincing. Despite claims to the contrary the locales are actually very varied (industrial-horror constructions, offices, dig sites, alien caverns and of course two kinds of hell) and all of them are ridiculously well-modeled and textures. I also readily state that the stones that comprise the final levels of the game are certainly the most realistic I've ever seen.

While I readily admit taking Doom 3's side on the classic "Doom 3 vs Half-Life 2" debate, it still astounds me that a lot of the HL2 proponents cite Doom 3's "lack of variety in enemies" as one of their chief arguments. While I always wish for more variety, Doom 3 definitely has a huge range of enemies: two kinds of marines, five or six types of zombies, imps, cacodemons, lost souls, arachnids, maggots, bosses and more (full list); the enemies inevitably become stronger and more varied as you progress in the game. Adherence to the classic FPS dogma is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly not in an oldskool game like Doom.

Another aspect of Doom 3 that resulted in a lot of consternation is its generous use of dark areas, so much so that Glen created the so-called Duct Tape mod for the game a few days after it was released. I first played the game with the duct-tape mod, and let me tell you: it detracts from the game horribly. I just finished playing the game a second time, this time at the highest difficulty level and without the flashlight mod, and it is so much more fun this way: more challenging, scarier and also quite a bit longer. The first time I played through the game I finished it in two 6-hour sessions; this time instead of taking less, it actually took me about 30 hours to finish the game. Do not play the game with the duct tape mod! Instead, put on your headphones, turn off the lights, crank the volume way up, make sure no-one disturbs you and play into the night. You'll enjoy it far better, I guarantee it.

The architecture and level-design is extremely impressive. A lot of the areas are obviously specifically designed to give a sense of urgency and claustrophobia; the open spaces are even worse (Doom games always tended to make you fear the quiet even worse than the turmoil). The various types of architecture make sure you never get bored with the surroundings, and if you're anything like me you'll find yourself spending minutes just staring out windows, or reading miscellaneous text off monitors, simply because it looks so damn good. The variety I mentioned earlier also means you have to adapt to various kinds of combat with various enemies: mostly shotgun and chainsaw for close quarters combat; automatic weapons outside; be extremely conservative with the way you waste ammo, use grenades judiciously, always use the least powerful weapon for any given task. At the high difficulty settings the game does pose a challenge (although not as difficult as I'd prefer) so it's important to get a feel for the game rather than running around shooting at things randomly: you may survive a couple of battles that way, but the next time you'll be facing a hell knight and you're out of ammo, well, sucks to be you.

The sound design is amazing. The music (though there is relatively little of it) is very appropriate, the constant background noises are simply magnificent: machinery hums, electricity buzzes, and certain areas that are obviously references to levels in the original Doom games even sound the part, albeit that much more detailed and spooky. Weapon sounds are minimalistic but appropriate, the monsters sound as you'd expect. Voice acting is surprisingly good, even (and maybe particularly) for the background characters - some of the voice logs are downright eerie.

Also, the plot does work. Yes, it's simple. Yes, it's minimalistic. But it works, and works well at that. The various PDAs and monitors are loaded with background information to help you get a feel for what's going on around you; admittedly I found it unnecessary in the original Doom, but in Doom 3 it really helps build an atmosphere.

Lastly, the game captures the Doom spirit perfectly. I was worried (particularly considering the rumors that the monster count has been drastically decreased) that Doom 3 will not feel like Doom; it's difficult to explain the distinction, but the way things behave and the game "feels" is absolutely Doom, which is absolutely a good thing. Playing Doom 3 has been one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I've ever had.

Here are a few final tidbits I couldn't really build a paragraph on:

• Considering what the engine does, it's astoundingly fast. It runs very well with antialiasing on my machine (AthlonXP 2800+, Radeon 9800XT, 1GB RAM) and with slightly reduced details it runs impressively well even on older machines (and even a friend's Radeon 9600-equipped laptop).
• The loading times are not awful, and a 30-second level load will last anywhere from 10 to 90 minutes of gameplay, which is damn good considering the immediate competition... *cough* HL2 *cough*
• I have seen ZERO bugs on the game's first release. I bought it as soon as I could, played the first version start to finish and it was absolutely stable (both technically and as far as gameplay is concerned).
• The game is certainly every bit as linear in nature as Half Life 2, but still "feels" a lot more open-ended; you never have to blast your way through a hardly-visible wooden barrier, or run through a corridor with 9 locked doors out of 10.
• Doom 3 is not actually scary. Yes, there are a lot of "jump out of your chair" moments, but it's not genuinely claustrophobic nor genuinely scary. The only game to ever rate that in my scale was System Shock 2.
• AI is weak, but is not expected to be anything else. Check out my response to A Gamer's Manifesto which goes into this in more detail.

The Bad
I have very few qualms with Doom 3. The primary concern is with its length; the first time I played the game it felt very short, but if you read this far you already know that turning off the duct tape mod has considerably increased replay time. The only issue that remains is that, because of the somewhat abrupt ending, the game feels more like Episode 1. I haven't played Resurrection of Evil yet so I can only hope the extension is appropriate.

The double-barreled shotgun is sorely missing, which also proves my previous point that the game feels more like the first in a series; another shortcoming that's supposed to be remedied by RoE.

The Bottom Line
The long-awaited sequel to Doom delivers and more so. It is one of the most enjoyable games I've played in ages, not to mention the most visually astounding game yet seen on the PC. Play it.

The Good
When id software released the original Doom, it soon caught the attention of gamers for its frenetic gameplay and great graphics. Rumour has it that some people bought computers just to play it. Call me crazy, but Doom struck me as being way overhyped, its immense popularity more due to a clever marketing plan by id than merit on the game’s part. Its brain-dead, million-kills-a-minute gameplay and a “story” that you could write on the back of a postage stamp might not have impressed me, but Doom’s still-large fanbase must have convinced id that doing a third game in the series would be worthwhile. So, after four years in development, we find ourselves looking at Doom 3.

The game is a remake of the original Doom. Just as a recap, you’re a crack space marine in the 22nd century, who has been sent to Mars with a rapid response unit to help protect a research station there. The research station is tampering with the very fabric of space and time, and a rift between our world and somewhere else has opened. Soon, monsters are pouring through the portal, and and the station is utterly decimated. All of your buddies are killed (and turned into zombies…we must not forget that), and it’s up to you to stop the tide of hellspawn before it spreads to earth.

On all levels, the game is graphically stunning. Surpassing even Far Cry in this department, Doom 3’s unfalteringly dark, claustrophobic enviroments are a treat to look at. Blood-splattered walls and eery dripping pipes crank the mood up considerably. Both humans and monsters (you’ll see far, far more of the latter category) are rendered well and look almost real. The game also has a good physics engine, you’re able to push stuff and throw it around the room. And don’t let anyone tell you that you need a top-of-the-line graphics card to play. I was able to play quite satisfactorily with a Rosewill Radeon 256MB card on the highest resolution.

The level of player interaction is superb, especially for a shooter as generic as Doom 3. You have a thing called a PDA on which you can receive voice mail and instructions. The PDAs of slain personnel can also be viewed for more information on the backdrop story. There’s a good deal of black humour in many of the PDAs, which have messages from employers pompously asserting how “immune to attack” the research station is, and how they are ignoring the deaths of workers near the portal to hell. Some PDA messages are irrelevant but funny, such as spam advertising for online RPGs and sexual adventures. Talk about satire.

The Bad
Doom’s graphics might be cutting-edge, but its gameplay is at least eight years out of date. Doom is reminiscent of the early days of the FPS genre, where no game passed its beta testing stage without the required quota of blood and gore, gameplay consisted of running around shooting heaps of enemies, and the “story” was a paragraph somewhere in the manual. Doom fans would probably say that id is trying to recreate the feel of classic Doom. Doom haters would probably say that the game’s simplicity can be chalked up to laziness on the part of id. Actually, I think that it’s a bit of both.

On one hand, it’s refreshing just to play a run and gun shooter without having stuff like a story impede you. On the other hand, it stands at variance with the whole atmosphere id has tried to weave into the game. It is hard maintain a scary claustrophobic aura and a chillingly realistic setting when the player spends most of his/her time shooting at tomato-headed monsters.

Doom 3’s story is IMMENSELY unsatisfying. Not that id has ever placed much priority on a game’s plot, but this time around it’s different. Id has obviously tried to create an interesting story, tried but failed miserably. At least the original Doom had no pretensions about the experience it meant to deliver, but Doom 3 starts off with cleverly-plotted cutscenes, an ominous atmosphere, and a number of interesting developments that leave the player wanting more. But as the game progresses, the game turns into a generic kill-‘em-all shooter and the plot is left largely undeveloped. It’s as if id intended to do a story-based game, but halfway through they lost interest in the idea and just turned Doom 3 into a mindless monster fest.

Critics are hailing Doom 3 as “a masterpiece of horror” and “one of the scariest games ever.” Humbug.

Doom 3 relies heavily upon the “BOO! Scared ya!” kind of thrill tactics that have been done to death is countless Resident Evil clones. Sure, you might be shocked the first two or three times a pink, jelly-like monster lunges at you from out of the shadows, but shocked is all you’ll be. The trouble is, there are so many monsters in Doom 3 that you spend most of your time pumping iron into them and hoping you don’t run out of ammo. It becomes extremely easy to predict where monsters will next strike. “Okay, see that extra clip lying over there? I bet that if I go to pick it up the door over there will burst open and a zillion monsters will attack me.” The monsters themselves look so downright absurd that they elicit laughter more than fear.

It’s things like this that spoil the atmosphere id has so painstaking added to the game. And for a game so bent upon realism, id apparently hasn’t done their homework. Come on! You’re a crack soldier in the 22nd century for Heaven’s sake! How come you’ve got such primitive armour? Shouldn’t you at least have a helmet? How come the marines have brought chainsaws to Mars? Why can’t you hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time?

Multiplayer mode was clearly added only as an afterthought. It supports four players (by comparison, it is fast becoming industry standard for 26 and even 32 player support in mid-range FPS titles), and while several fan-made mods hope to fix this, the game out of the box definitely is definitely not going to please Quake III fans.

The Bottom Line
Dare I say it, but Doom 3 is but another continuation of id’s trend of placing visuals ahead of playability. Once the wow factor wears off, it is actually a pretty mindless and generic shooter with not a lot of content.

The Good
I already realize that I have gotten to Doom 3 a lot later than most others. Doom 3 is not a game that you just simply “miss” on the store shelves like a fresh remake of Defender. No, I decided to forgo purchasing a copy of the game for the same reasons I forgo all games: I’m simply not interested in a game OR I do not have the green pieces of colored paper to fork over for such said game. In this case, both the former and latter reason amply persuaded me to invest my money in a different game. The time arose, however, when a good friend of mine got the game and decided not to open it. I supposed this was my time to strike, and that night I got home with a borrowed copy of Doom 3 in my hands, and soon after, on my hard drive.

In all honesty, Doom 3 originally surprised me because…well…it didn’t suck. All honest expectations for this game braced me for a game rife with terrible dialogue and an experience on par with Turok: Evolution. However as far as games go, Doom 3 descended me into a world that was, by all means, creepy, atmospheric, and impeccably well done.

As I got off the transport to my unfortunate post on Mars I noticed tons of things right from the get go. First of all, this game is well-done and has amazing production values. It’s polished, and it’s got all the workings for a great atmosphere. Doom 3 has a way of making you feel like you’re in an abandoned Mars compound. Not just looking at it through a monitor, really being there. The sterilized architecture of the buildings, the empty silence of the halls, and the destruction of the facility make it feel all too real. The lighting also plays a major part in this. The swaying of a single ceiling light as you traverse down a ransacked and blood-soaked hallway does so much more to add to the gruesome scene. Wall shadows and dynamic lighting aren’t just thrown away as a simple mechanics; they’re actually part of the game’s design. With every step you take in the game it feels like a real step you take in real life. The tension and fear is in the air, and at many times, it feels like you are too.

The characters also mimic the attention paid to the atmosphere. The NPC’s, while they’re there, have a certain…vividness…about them. This vividness is not so much a lively feeling but a real feeling. The looks on their faces mimic the tension of the air. The NPC’s have an emotional tension about them. All around everyone is worried about all the strange things going on at the facility. People look and feel on the edge, just more evidence of a carefully constructed universe set up by developers. It also adds to the atmosphere. Not only does the design of the place feel creepy, but everyone is so paranoid and worried. Besides this, NPC’s have a lot to say: they don’t actually repeat themselves over and over again like a typical game. Many have tons of lines of dialogue regarding everything.

And as I traveled on to my assignment, it seemed like not only the atmosphere and characters were there, but an entire universe as well. Besides the odd events around the compound, I found the denizens of Mars not only talking about the strange events, but about others as well. A TV in the lounge with the news station on revealed more about the Doom 3 universe and things going on outside of Mars. I could use computers and terminals to find out cargo deliveries and meeting schedules. I found out that I could pick up others PDA’s, which I admit is one of the cleverest things the game does. While it also revealed many secrets like door and locker combos, one my favorite things to do were to read their emails. Like everything else, it revealed a well-constructed universe. I discovered the innocent civilians of Mars chit-chatting over new members, parties, quiz nights, bad workers and bosses, and just work related stuff like power blow-outs or deliveries. It’s something that convinced me I was not the only major part of universe, and there are other things going on around me, and that this station was fully functional before I arrived.

The level design also must be noted here. Shockingly, the Mars facility had real-life architecture. Unlike most games which have one-way facilities that seem like they are made solely for the player to traverse, Doom 3 has carefully laid-out levels that make it seem realistic and man-made. It has hallways laid-out that make it look that if it weren’t in complete ruins, it would be a real building. Many times you will return to places through a different route, more evidence to this point. It has functional and practical architecture and infrastructure that, again makes it seem like a universe is present with me in the game.

Doom 3, as it promised, is a dazzling display of technology and lighting. The graphics on the game are absolutely amazing. Simply put, this game is beautiful. Every level has tons of detail poured into it. Just one room has so many tiny details that it’s mind-boggling. Every room has pipes and gadgets jutting in and out of the walls. Every monitor has something displayed on it. It’s a splash of detail that games these days really fail to put in. Just one room has a lot, and yet they do this throughout the entire game which is great. The graphics are also nice and crisp, and go with the lighting well. The lighting is one of the greatest parts of the game. It is so much better to feel the tension of the scene by watching a slithering spider shadow crawl up the wall. Even on my poor computer I was able to enjoy high-quality graphics, which in my opinion, enhanced the game greatly. Darkness never looked this beautiful.

And so I descend into the depths of Mars city to go on my first assignment. People are even more on edge here, with people telling of horror stories and voices in the dark. All around you can tell the paranoia in people’s voices. And as I venture on, the more twisted the game becomes. I myself even become pretty nervous as I stray farther from people and go deeper into the underground. By this point, I am shocked by the game. It had exceeded all of my expectations and made me feel so immersed into the game. I felt like I was part of this game and its universe, and was feeling just as terrified and paranoid of the areas around me as the civilians who occupied it. And of course, the moment comes where all Hell breaks loose. I scramble myself to fend off the ravenous demons from beyond as I rush to get back to Mars City. Armed with just a pistol, I can hear my friends screaming over the radio. Everything is in utter chaos, and I am totally freaked about this game. The game had so far lived up to its glorifying hype. As I dodge demons and fend off the undead, I finally make it to the elevator. I take it back up to Mars City, anxious for more and prepared for what this game had to show me….

The Bad
…However what Doom 3 has to offer is easily finished within the first half hour of the game.

The farther you play, the farther Doom 3 descends into a repetitive, mindless shooter with absolutely nothing to offer. The farther you go, the father this game reveals that it is rife with stagnant gameplay and boring mechanics. When I entered the sixth level and discovered it looked exactly like the past 3 levels I’ve played, it become obvious that Doom 3 is filled with more problems than a guest on the Jerry Springer Show. But dear God where to start?

I think its important to lay down some of the basics before we go on, which is why I will first bring up the game play. Doom 3 is an FPS, and nothing more. It is one of the most mind-numbing games I have ever played, starting with its repetitive, tedious, and unforgiving game play. It is the stereotypical FPS recipe: lots and lots of shooting people, combined with key finding, and mixed with few boring and easy puzzles. That’s it. Doom 3 stays the same all throughout the game, and in my opinion, never once throws you a fresh or interesting challenge, save for one large platforming level in the middle of the game, which is nice to see a new challenge but is also very frustrating.

Doom 3 is a game that relies solely on run n’ gun shooting, but what’s even worse is that it fails to even do this. The enemies appear so often and are so overused that it comes to the point where they appear every 5 seconds. It seems that the game can’t let you go down a single hallway without expecting you to encounter another enemy. Enemies are used almost entirely too much that you pray that you are allowed to go just a bit more before having to stop to exterminate another. In the end, the only thing these enemies serve to do is impede progress and slow you down from finishing this dreadful game.

Another major part of this is how terribly linear and similar the levels are. A staggering fraction of the 27 levels within the game look exactly the same, save for a few like the Hell levels. Doom 3 requires you to pass through four levels of Alpha Labs (a total of four hours), all which look completely the same, to try and meet up with Bravo Sqaud, only to have them die in a cutscene. Then they change the objectives around, and require you to go through even more divisions of the compound just to achieve some minute objective. Nothing about any of the environments makes them unique. The horrid monster AI makes it worse, as enemies use the same Robert E. Lee suicide cavalry rush that failed them so many years ago! Doom 3 is so remarkably boring to play that it is painful to go on after about an hour. I could go on with this, but to do so any more would be redundant. To put it simply, Doom 3 is the epitome of generic, bad FPS’s, and utterly fails to be anywhere near as appealing as other games.

Doom 3 also manages to fail to scare me after the point where every enemy jumps out of the walls surprisingly. Remember in the original, when you were supposedly walking through an abandoned room and then all of a sudden…ZOOP…a bunch of enemies pop out of the walls and blow you to bits? Yea, they brought it back. And while it brings a nice bit of nostalgia to the game, it is absolutely annoying because they don’t stop using it- EVER. About 25 levels into the game they still use the mechanic to try and surprise you. You walk into an empty room. You go over to a switch to open the door. A bunch of demons pop out of a secret compartment and attack you for the 400th time that’s happened. Scary! As well, when you’re in the middle of the game, a problem arises in that more times than not the game makes you more bored than scared. After 4 hours of overused mechanics and a shoddy plot, you are too bored to even be remotely paranoid.

And even so, the idea of being scared in a Doom game is utterly impossible. The reason for this is that they give you a fine assortment of weapons to defend yourself. Picture this, you are running down a hallway being chased by demons and your afraid for your life. Then all of a sudden, you realize you have a shotgun, mini-gun, rocket launcher, and laser cannon. You turn around and blast the demon down to a fleshy pulp. Don’t be surprised that this occurs A LOT in Doom 3. May of the times when I became genuinely worried was when my weapons could not handle it, like in the Hell levels when I had no weapons, or when there were too many enemies on the screen. Id, if you want me to be afraid, then please dear God don’t give me weapons to defend myself with! That defeats the whole feeling of being helpless! It starts off scary because all you have is a pistol, but a few levels in I’m packing more heat than a Republican at an NRA meeting.

Doom 3 even manages to destroy what it had set up in the beginning of the game. The character development set up by it disappears because after the infestation of demons, there really aren’t anymore characters to develop anyway. Sergeant Kelly, the person who gives you commands in the game, is utterly devoid of a personality or emotion. Other individuals in the game are few and far between, and are usually there only to lend a temporary helping hand like unlocking a door, furthering the story, or giving you a useful item like a key or weapon. Even the main character seems empty or devoid of life. No other NPC in the game is capable or surviving as long as you are. To put it simply, the excellent characters I saw at the beginning of the game, pretty much ceased to exist. Besides that, the superb atmosphere and universe it sets up is still there, but it eventually wears off. Like most things in video games, the game will remain tense and suspenseful for a day or two. After that, boredom overshadows your curiosity to find out events from the game, and the level design ends up becoming a trifling factor in the game. Exploration is practically impossible because of all the enemies impeding your way, but is also discouraged by the game’s mechanics. Exploring an area and finding a new weapons or health or secret is almost always coupled by a trap being set off and a million monsters coming to get you.

I did not try multiplayer, over fear that it would be another crappy counter-strike type of game, but I have heard that it is useless since really no one plays. Good choice guys, I wouldn’t play it either! As it turns out Id wanted to focus on single-player, which is ironic, since it turns out to be another crappy shooter anyway. The game becomes a horrible experience, one you will never want to play ever again. And even if you wanted to replay the main one player game, it would be pretty much the same. In other words, Doom 3 lacks any bit of replay value. The levels remain completely linear, having very few detours thrown into the mix. Puzzles are easily solved, and the game play is repetitive. No new experience can be gotten from even attempting to replay this sorry shell of a game.

The Bottom Line
Doom 3 really brought me up and then really let me down. At first, Doom 3 showcased me with amazing production values (probably best I’ve ever seen), amazing graphics, and a dark atmosphere. But it just goes to show you, that at its core a game must have good gameplay or at least a decent story to keep you entertained, because without it the rest of those contributing factors just don’t make a difference.

Doom 3 claimed that it wanted to be a modern remake of the original game. Well, I guess it succeeded perfectly. Doom 3 is filled with the same mindless, repetitive gameplay that was the trademark of the first. It is further evidence that games are not justified to be fun with just production values alone. Doom 3 even scores extra for setting up a great atmosphere and universe in the beginning, then completely destroying it with horrible mechanics and shoddy gameplay. By the end of the game, I wanted to get the game done so much I pretty much put the game on God mode with no clipping and went through. Even then was not even much fun.

Look up “generic FPS” in the dictionary and you will see Doom 3’s picture. In all honesty, I have found Doom 3 to be one of the worst, most repetitive, boring games of all time. Please do yourself a favor and do not play this game. I hope this review serves as a warning to those planning on getting it. I had to go through the torture of playing this game, but hopefully this review will save many more. Heed my warning and don’t buy Doom 3. This primitive game deserves to be locked up in a warehouse, piled below boxes and boxes, sitting right next to the Arc of the Covenant. Do not invite this hellish game into your house. It will only end in tears.

The Good
Doom 3 is a beautiful game, still after 10 years it looks better than some games released today. The game gives a good challenge for all types of gamer's with the 4 different skills to choose from. side characters are an interesting add and reading and hearing their personal files is very interesting. There are plenty of weapons to choose from and specially the plasma gun and bfg is fun to use. Also the knew weapon soul cube is an interesting add and is good to use against hard enemies at the last levels of the game. Cut scenes are a nice add on and gives the story more taste. The feeling of horror at the beginning gives adrenaline rushes.

The Bad
Doom tries too scary you all the time, this gets a bit boring and actually make you less scared as the game goes on, another problem is the level design, I think the engine could have done more, know there are so many levels that reminds of each other, that it feels at some point that you have been at the same level all the time. The shotgun is only good when enemies are near and useless in long distance. Imps are used way too much in this game, I'm thinking why did they use them so much compared to other enemies? Final boss is a disappointment, being way too easy. Why did they not make him harder.

The Bottom Line
Doom 3 may not remind of classic doom titles, but is still a fun shooter and scary at start. It may not live up to the hype trough whole game, but definitely worth playing trough.

The Good
In the history of the first person shooter genre, the one game that stands out more than any other as an icon is id Software's classic 1993 game, Doom. The game that truly defined the future of videogames, Doom was both famous and infamous for its violent action, demonic images and constant, non-stop shooting of the denizens of hell. The game's sequel, Doom II: Hell on Earth, was effectively more of an expansion pack, with new episodes that increased the monster count per-screen to levels only recently matched and beaten by games like Serious Sam or Painkiller.

Both games were well-deserving of their status as classics, and it obviously was regarded with both joy and immediate skepticism when id Software revealed that it was creating an all-new sequel. A mediocre game would never survive if it had the title "Doom".... Doom 3 ''had'' to live up to its lofty expectations while still bringing back the old-school, shoot 'em up gameplay as the original.

Just the opening of Doom 3 is like the beginning of a roller coaster, as you slowly arch your way to the peak; getting hints from everywhere that something is wrong on the UAC facility on Mars. You advance deeper and deeper down, immediately given a mission to find a scientist in the lower levels. And when you do....

All hell breaks loose. And this is when the game really kicks off.

While it might be hard for some players to believe today now, playing the original Doom back in its time was a terrifying experience, sucking you into the game's universe like no other before it. Doom 3 succeeds amazingly in bringing back this effect while retelling the original games story. While the monster count isn't anywhere near the prior games amounts, the monsters now will jump out from roofs, doors, anywhere and eventually begin teleporting in around you, killing one leading to the appearance of another. The sense of paranoia in this game is extremely well-created, as you constantly look around desperately in corners, vents and examine areas with your flashlight. A lot of this is due in no small part to the game's sound effects and graphics--- while usually I'm not really interested in cutting-edge graphics, its hard not to admit that the realism of the look in Doom 3 is a large part of the scare-factor.

The hellspawn that are going to be on the receiving end of your shotgun are all the same demons you remember from the originals, albeit reimagined for the new game. Imps, Hellknights, Pinky Demons and Lost Souls are all once again stalking the metal halls of the Mars base, the only notable absence being the Baron of Hell. The same weapons as the original games make a comeback too, from the chainsaw to the BFG. In addition to these are new favorites monsters like the Cherub, an undeniably creepy human baby with moth wings and legs, and the "Soul Cube", a new weapon which along with being fun to use becomes very important to the plot and climax.

The majority of the game is in the Aliens-esque UAC facility, which while eventually become slightly repetitive looking is extremely well-created, with background machinery and computer screens everywhere adding to the believability. Through these levels the gameplay is classic Doom, as the main goal is still the traditional "shoot everything that moves", bringing back the feel of the old Doom games in a way no ripoffs or imitations ever have. But the standout level of the game is when the player finally uses the teleporter to plummet straight down into Hell, which probably should have been saved to be the last level of the game because of the way it takes all the tension built up in the game beforehand to the boiling point.

The Bad
Doom 3 could have used several different types of levels to break up a little bit of the slight monotony that going through the UAC halls eventually caused. The few times you were outside on the Martian landscape were terrific--- that could have had potential as a level. Also, the scripted sequences of enemies jumping out at you should have stayed more like they were in the earlier sections of the game, instead of the way they spawn in from hell later on.

The redesigns of the monsters were inspired, but many of the demons were somewhat underused. The Pinky Demon in particular should have appeared more. However, the variety of enemy types does make up for this to some extent.

The double-barreled shotgun, many people's favorite weapon in Doom II, was unfortunately left out as well, but thankfully it returns in the games expansion, Resurrection of Evil.

The Bottom Line
Bringing back all the visceral action, violence and hellish imagery and creatures of the original Doom brought to life like never before, Doom 3 is a proud sequel to its lofty predecessors.

The Good
Doom 3 is a spectacle (I know it's DOOM3 but that's not even English, let alone proper English) . It puts itself forward as the benchmark of its time for graphics, sound, design and presentation. No many games have the gloss and shine of Doom 3 (what with all those spectacular lighting and shadow effects). As audacious as it is, it succeeds where its ambitious lies. It really does look and sound great. As you progress through the levels and admiring at how cool it is, you'll be inspired to continue the drudgery of looking at a black screen for the next cool thing to amaze you eyeballs.

Humanity is respented by the three major races (I didn't see any Hispanics, Jews or Arabs though; maybe they're all getting along on the love planet, Venus), nice to see the future really is a bowl of neopolitan ice cream--though when they become zombies there becomes no difference. The interface with in-game computers is innovative, gets you back into the action quick.

This is definitely a love letter to the first Doom. This act of revisionism will cause us nostalgia-prone 80's babies to live over once again that initial "whiz-bang"-gasm that got most of us into gaming in the first place. For the most part it succeeds in replacing the first Doom in areas like graphics and presentation; however, revisionism is always a tricky thing...

The Bad
Doom 3 is a spectacle, just like the way your aging mom dresses twenty years her junior and tries to flirt with your friends. It's difficult to look away from a car accident, especially when it's the most amazing car accident at which your gawking eyes can look.

Doom 3 simply didn't have to happen. I think I heard a story somewhere about how those id(iot) guys approached senior management after completing Quake IV and dropping a ultimatum along the lines of, "We want to make Doom 3 or else we all quit!" Well, the world or even the world of videogames is not better for this.

The original Doom is a cool game, an influential one that many will remember fondly upon. The operative word here is "remember". I myself remember going over to a friends house to play it into the wee hours of the morning, scared to death at those (at the time) cutting edge graphics. Cool factor MAX 10 vector five.

But you can't go back. What is called "Doom 3" is really Doom 1.5; it's just an updated version that is less than the sum of the first one's parts. When it's the exact same thing done all over again and not the third in the trilogy (not much of a trilogy either, wasn't Doom 2 like an expansion pack idea?) you have nothing new to say. So it becomes 15 hours of gameplay of nothing.

I will clearly say that I like the first Doom much more than this one. Who cares if you can look up and down? Who cares if you can jump? Who cares if you have the best graphics in the world? The first one played so much better than this one. The two crucial gameplay elements to the first one are missing here: puzzles and being in mortal fear of your life.

It's rather sad: there aren't any puzzles of note. This is one brainless shooter that offers you no choices, really. In actuality you're quite simular to the zombies: there's no thinking. Most sad of all is the fact that id designed such a marvelous interface with which to interact with everything; you can hang onto the mouse without breaking up the action. Honestly, there's no point to all this worthless reading of emails and messing about with PDF's.. what a scam. Please don't dress up your aging mom in sheep's clothing.

The wonderment of the first Doom is the realization that there are new places to explore, you just have to be smart (or diligent) enough to find them. You see where that imp is sniping you from that balcony? You can get there... you just have to figure it out. This idea of having secret areas puts in an adventure element that has you enjoying looking around the level and not just looking to flip a switch and advance.

Doom 3 is not a scary game. It might have been back in 1990, but this is the po-mo world that we live in; "Scream" the movie pointed this out to the masses so we can't turn a blind eye to this. Nothing is scary here. When you play through a game where it is dark all the time, this effect of fear is lost. You would get scared in the first Doom when the lights turned off because the lights were on in the first place! No contrast, no effect.

The use of scripted events are very lame. When there is a darkened hallway in front of you, your first instinct is, "hmm, looks like an ambush, better get out my shotgun," and your instincts are always correct. Something will always jump at you from the darkness. Now I know everyone is a genius, but the reason why you know is because id is simply too predicable. This game is exactly the same from start to finish.

There's nothing wrong with being influenced, but shouldn't you game companies try to hide it a little bit, or even try to have different influences? Aliens was a great movie, so great that I'm watching it every time a play a contemporary videogame. (but as unicorn b lynx pointed out, at least the computer screens aren't green). This game is exactly like Halflife, exact that Halflife has the enviable position of coming out about 10 years earlier (speaking of which, yet another game with many influences that doesn't try to hide it--but which also made it everyone's grandmother's favourite game).

By the way, if this is the future and people have money and the ability to build on Mars, why is it so ugly? This is the main thing I think about as I'm squinting at the screen; I try to imagine the place with the lights on and people walking around, but I can't imagine that people in the future share the same design sensabilities as modern Chinese. It looks cool for us "game tourist" who are visiting this world, but it just isn't real.

Making Doom 3 is making a statement that the first Doom never existed, that by updating this game, Doom is finally the game it is deserving to be through use of modern technology. But worse of all, more so than being brainless, is being heartless. Doom 3 has no soul. Besides it being cool, there's nothing to like about it. You don't identity with anything in the game, so you never get past it's superficiality.

In the original Doom you see the marine's face in the HUD, and it worsens to a bloody pulp as you get beat up or grins maniacally when you pick up a chainsaw. No, you might not be this nameless guy, but he's like you. He bleeds when hit by demonic fireballs and likes his weapons pick-ups to be more and more powerful. What's there in this game? He's just some guy, a Gordon Freeman stand-in; you never find out why he does all of this stuff.

This game takes some effort to explain some things but not others. I might understand how a nixup might lead a shipment of chainsaws to Mars, but why can't you put a flashlight on a gun? Why doesn't this guy just go home after awhile? Why is he compelled to fight the Cyberdemon? Who are the ghostly (female) voices in the game? Don't people know when a stockpile of weapons is amassed that one day those weapons will be ineviably used? What happens to this guy in the end? Because our hero doesn't talk, you don't know what he thinks about anything but even sadder is that you just don't care.

The Bottom Line
Doom 3 (or "Dooom" as the Romans would say) is bloated sign of our bloated times. This game happily supercedes presentation and spectacle above gameplay and substance.

The id that made Doom was a bunch of talented upstart rockstar hooligans who dared to mess with the rules.
The id that made Doom 3 is a group of bloated unimaginative millionaires who just want to keep their tenative position as the king of FPS's. It draws exactly the same paralells as Saturday Night Live; once a daring and funny show (remember the "Not Ready for Primetime Players"?) it's now the vehicle of choice where movie and music stars plug their latest movie or CD by reading off a teleprompter. SNL is a 90 minute commercial that stopped being funny twenty years ago.

Most telling is that this game is just like Quake IV. There are some thematic changes (like going to big outside settings and use of group combat) but you still just go and kill things in a splendid way. You're still a space marine who has to endure level after level of the ugliest space stations designed after the first Star Wars trilogy. It's funny, since the demise of the Star Trek franchise space stations have been butt ugly.

I think the bottom line is that Doom 3 is a punishing game that challenges the player to be as macho as the game is but never rewards the player. Doom 3 is the shallowest and longest puddle in videogames

The Good
The best parts of the game are the lighting and the use of the PDA. Sure, those aren't anything new to FPS games, but they are well-done, nonetheless. The lighting from the flashlight works well and is very realistic, though it does light up things further away than it would in real life. The PDA is nice in that you can listen to audio while it is closed or while you're reading through e-mails.

Graphics were nice, but were nothing new. The graphics even work on a GeForce 2 card when many new games need at least a GeForce 3 because of the Pixel Shader feature that isn't available on the GeForce 2.

The game may make you jump now and then if you're playing with a good sound system and no lights on, though it isn't really a scary game.

The Bad
I like games that are challenging, but this game makes it challenging by sticking enemies in places where you are almost guaranteed to be hit at least once before you can get a shot off unless you know they are there. And they usually don't roam around... each time through, most enemies will be in the exact same place when you find them.

The use of the flashlight is a pain. Having so many dark areas is fine, especially with a flashlight... but when it takes time to switch your flashlight on and off and you can't use a weapon at the same time, it just is annoying. It would be nice if there was at least a weapon with a flashlight attached, or night goggles that could be worn as often as you like.

The Bottom Line
It's a good game, but it's nothing new. Graphics are good, but nothing compared to some other new games that are out. Gameplay is nothing new... it's typical FPS game.

If you like FPS games and you're a Doom fan, then get the game. If you're looking for some special, then wait for some other game. This will not give you anything new or special.

The Good
Many years have passed since the first day I loaded original doom on a nightmare amount of floppies on my old clunky 386, so when I heard doom 3 was coming out I just knew I was in for something special, for a few moments I had a deja vu experience of back 10 years ago when I first ever played doom. So fired up the game, was very impressed with the intro screen, at first I thought the little screen with all the mars info was actually some fmv and to my surprise was actually full fmv texture on an object in the game, that’s one thing that really impresses me is the texture detail, full animated fmv's on the screens looks very cool, the bump mapping is superb and objects with specular giving that nice shining look. The game play is what I would call bog standard to what most games play like today, there is only so much u can do with a mouse and keyboard in this type of game, look up down left right and fire. The interface is ok, though first time playing got my ass whipped because even though you are viewing your pda enemies can still attack you. As someone else posted on a review on here I do agree allot has been influenced by system shock 2, to me its like cross playing between ss2 and a first person resident evil clone, with all the zombies n stuff. Performance in general for this game is very good, I have tried this game on lower systems and the frame rate is pretty decent, unlike that catastrophe of Deus Ex 2 invisible war.

The Bad
Far too short, I remember the earlier dooms taking me months to complete, I completed this in about a day. Even though allot of people think this game is a rip off from other games I have to disagree, how can doom rip off other fps, if it wasn’t for doom you wouldn’t have the likes of half life, or all the other DOOM clones, even to this day we refer to fps games as a doom style game, whether it be system shock, deus ex, unreal, etc they are all doom style games, the original doom is just the father of them all.

The Bottom Line
If u want some good scary resident evil-esq in first person perspective then this is for you, if you’re expecting the same doom experience of yesteryear then you will be disappointed.

The Good
Doom 3 starts out well, I have to say. You just can't help not to notice the technical brilliance such as the millions of little details in graphics, great animation and particularly the impressive audio design. I recommend everyone to play this game alone in a dark room with headphones. The calm, action-free opening reminds me of better games such as Half-Life 2 and Escape from Butcher Bay, and even in the beginning, you still get the feeling that something will go down. The game did manage to scare me in some parts and the pacing is somewhat good, with new gameplay elements introduced little by little.

The Bad
But it's just not worth all the hype. Though it's definitely longer than the average fps, most of it is incredibly repetitive action in narrow, dark corridors. Super-detailed graphics and cool lighting effects aside, the game looks rather bland, even Hell seems like a somewhat boring place to be. Okay, demons, flying skulls, fire, nothing we haven't seen before. The gunplay feels monotonous due to extremely underpowered weapons - there are mods to fix this, but to me, that hardly made the game worth of a replay for me. While monsters in the original Doom swarmed in huge numbers, now they come just a few at a time at maximum.

The original Doom invented the gimmick of turning off the lights while enemies creeped at you. Back then, that freaked me out - now, it frustrates me, as Doom 3's flashlight can't be wielded at the same time as a weapon, leading to many jokes. Fortunately, a mod has been made to fix this, too. Speaking of the horror elements, Doom 3 just overuses its few gimmicks: darkness and monsters jumping at you from closets or appearing behind you. What scared you once will just bore you in the end. Even the creepy voices you hear are just looped and you just eventually phase them out.

The single player experience just didn't seem worth the money, not to mention the effort of getting the game to run back then. Even the final boss fight was lame. The story is just a rehash of the original, and while it's good that they kept the forgettable storyline on the background, the fact that you have to browse through logs and stuff to find out what happened seems old-fashioned. This isn't System Shock, guys.

The Bottom Line
A mediocre shooter that's Doom in name only. id tried to make the original, adrenaline-filled fast-paced shooter into a slower-paced horror game and failed, so the whole thing just ended up dull and monotonous. Good visuals and sounds can't hide the fact that the gameplay blows.

The Good
Doom 3 must be one of the scariest games ever, The first time i played, Was at 2 in the morning, with headphones, and nobody at home, The really only time you can play the game :). The game looks stunning, The textures are not great, But the detail in lighting and environments is super, it looks photo-realistic. The story is great as well, Having cut scenes ever so often telling you about the mars and other bits. The sound is excellent as well, With plenty of freaky ambient sounds guaranteed to scare the socks of you! It really messes with you! The weapons are great to, Like the original, You have your fists, grenades, flashlight, chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, chain gun, mini gun, plasma gun, and the BFG!

The Bad
The only thing i did not like about doom 3 was there is no cooperative!, Which would of been great, But hopefully in the expansion they are bringing out they will provide this option.

The Bottom Line
Its like being in a scary movie! Only with demons and Plasma weapons!

The Good
Well, It's basically Doom. Lot's of enemies, ammo and fights. This is a game that revives the old classic in a modern way.

The Bad
A good lightning, but with an excess of dark. It's really boring to walk around all the time with the flashlight... Some really nice enemies make just a few appearances (pink demons) while others appear all time (imps).

The bosses are too easy, and there isn't much more to do once you finish it.

Another bad thing is the usual lack of variety in the levels. When I reached Hell I was amazed, but after that, the game went back to the dark base theme. Pity!

The Bottom Line
Id, more than anything, likes to make engines. Their great blockbusters are always, like some say, tech demos. This game is no exception. It does have a feeling that Id tried to do something better, but it relies too much on their old concepts to be a something different.

Despite that, it's still a good old school shooter and you should be pleased playing it.

The Good
This game has great atmosphere. Fans of movies like the Alien series will not be disappointed. The graphics are remarkably fluid and realistic, even by Xbox standards. I felt like I was interacting with real people and creatures, not just shooting targets. This effect made the first few two or three nights of play fairly intense.

The Bad
Some music would have been nice!!!!! Being a musician, that's my first complaint. There's no music here until the heavy metal played during the closing credits (also the menus screen.) Once the effects of the atmosphere and graphics wear off you're really just left with the same old first person shooter. Also, the game takes forever to load (even on Xbox) and I got tired of loading up a game only to be wiped out in an instant and sit and wait at the loading screen again.

The Bottom Line
Its a solid but very traditional first person shooter that doesn't get too far away from its predecessors. Hardcore fans, myself included, will be entertained but the gameplay is so frustrating that its hard to imagine much replay value. Good enough for a rental, but don't throw down the $45 to own it.

The Good
Ahh, where to start. I must say, when I saw the first screenshots of Doom 3 a few years ago, I was totally blown away! The quality of the graphics rivaled some of the Pixar films (at that time) and they looked just sensational. Whats more, thanks to Carmack's coding genius, the graphics ran smoothly on my mid-range system. Also, I really enjoyed using the weapons a lot. The gameplay is somewhat different to any other First Person Shooter out there, being somewhat slower paced, which was a welcome change. Also, it was nice to see a proper story in a shooting game. The 5.1 surround sound is the best Ive ever heard in a game.

The Bad
Despite all the positive attributes above, the game has a few downfalls. Sometimes, the game feels like just a big technology/graphics demo. Now dont get me wrong, its an awesome tech demo! But it just felt like a tech demo at parts. Also I would have liked to go outside of the base a bit, like actually see a huge expanse of Mars terrain to explore.

The Bottom Line
Doom 3 is a like it or hate it game. If you like the latest graphics/sound design, Doom 3 has the best graphics/sound to date. If you dont like trudging around dark corridors, I would wait till Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2 comes out (which is reportedly being made using the Doom 3 engine.) Although in its infancy, the Doom 3 engine has loads of potential!

The Good
Of course this game owned the best graphics for its time, and the fact that the engine didn't eat a lot of energy, which meant that we could play the game on high settings even on a not so powerful computer for that time, it ran very good. Audio is well done, atmospheric hellish sounds really creep sometimes, though the game isn't scary, and the monsters sound aggressive and brutal. The single player campaign though is mostly boring, it does have a few good moments in it and easter eggs in it make it sometimes funny.

The Bad
The games major flaw was that it didn't keep the atmosphere of the original games - monsters did look cool, but most changed dramatically by design, and didn't look so cool as they were in the original games. Another thing is the audio - when first playing the game, we hear a cool game theme song in the menu, which gives us a hope that we might hear some cool soundtracks in the background of the levels, but hell no! There are no soundtracks, which was one of the main things which made this game boring. But the biggest flaw of the game was probably the level design - about 96 % of the game is absolutely the f@#$ing same! And this also leaves a question - how do some people even consider this game scary? I mean - you always know where the monster comes out from, what can be so creepy then? Multiplayer was probably the last thing the developers came out with to put in it, or maybe they just tried to keep the feel of the original games in multiplayer? The thing is, we only got up to 4 player deathmatch modes, though it is fun for at least some time. Again another unexplainable thing in the game - is there no duck tape on mars? Why cant we attach flashlights to weapons and instead we have to walk only in a flashlight in one hand, just to get our asses owned by a monster when we couldn't swicth to a weapon in the right time. It doesn't make any sense!

The Bottom Line
For those who liked the original games - i wouldn't recommend this boring sequel, but if you are a fan of FPS games with a lot of hellish monsters and zombies in it, and if you love some good old old-school multiplayer, than this might be your game.

The Good
How can you describe Doom 3 and not talk about the engine, the light effects are as realistic as it gets and the overall graphics are incredible.

The dark atmosphere suits the endless hordes of demons that lurk in every corner hiding in the shadows, something that makes the game if not scary at least less predictable.

The PDA is a nice, yet not new, addition to the game since it makes the plot more deep and engaging.

The Bad
I have to admit I was disappointed with the lack of new ideas : You fight the same monsters (imps, demons, hell knights, etc) and you have the same weapons (the only two additions are the machine gun and soul-cube).

I know you are supposed to be in Mars and inside a base, but I really hope you are not claustrophobic because in Doom 3 all rooms are small. For a top 3D engine you would hope they'll make rooms larger. But the base looks like a maze, and when they allow you to see the martian sky you lack oxygen and you have to move back inside.

The Bottom Line
I loved Doom and Doom 2 back in the day, this new game was a remake for a new generation and a tech demo to keep Id as one of the benchmarks in 3D engines.

It's Doom all over again, just for that reason you should get a copy.