Doom³

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
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
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.