Doom³

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.