Doom³

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
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
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.