Z-Reviews || Games || Review

Doom 3 has been a long awaited sequel to the best-selling and hugely popular Doom II that came out in the early 1990’s. So has the wait and the $50 price tag been worth it? If you’re a fan of first person shooters then I think so. The game sports breathtaking graphics, a suspenseful environment, and straightforward game play that’s easy to pick up and master as you progress through the many levels. However, the game does have a lot of shortfalls that will prevent it from becoming the groundbreaking game that its predecessor Doom II was. After hearing me mention Doom II so much, you might be wondering if you should play it in order to understand Doom 3, however that’s not really necessary because Doom 3 is basically a retelling of Doom II. In fact, fans of the previous game will be pleasantly surprised that almost every weapon and monster has been transplanted into the new game. So suit up, get your shotgun ready, and we’re off to Mars to try to stop an invasion from hell!

Without a doubt, Doom 3 is the best-looking game out on the market right now. It’s sporting a brand-spanking-new 3D graphics engine that is capable of rendering very realistic and atmospheric environments. The levels look absolutely spectacular on a fast pc with a good video card. There were moments of lag that I experienced on my pc when I would open a door to a new room, but I believe it is largely an effect of the amount of system memory I have. Doom 3 has some other great features including the ability to manipulate computer terminals by simply walking up to them and clicking your mouse. Although this may not seem like a big deal, it’s actually quite groundbreaking because most games require you to switch to a different screen in order to manipulate text within the game. Doom 3 also features very realistic physics for the movement of its monsters and with the objects that you can manipulate, like boxes and oil drums. However one big drawback of the game is that despite the awesome graphics one cannot truly appreciate them because the game is so dark. There is rarely a moment when your entire field of vision is not shrouded by a thick black shadow.

Playing Doom 3 is somewhat of a scary and suspenseful experience. As you walk through the dark corridors, flashlight in hand, you’ll suddenly hear a chilling screech or groan. Whirling around you switch to your weapon and desperately try to see signs of movement. The action unfolds quickly and violently as monsters lurch at you from total darkness. Your fist instinct is to just blast away into the general vicinity, but after playing a few levels you quickly learn that you must conserve your ammo and try to make every shot count. Health packs are also scares so flushing out your enemies in the most efficient manner is the games primal strategy. Once your enemy is killed, their bodies instantly disintegrate into ash. This is a nice effect, but I personally prefer to leave a trail of dead corpses behind as a mark of my accomplishment - and so I can tell where I’ve already been. However it doesn’t stop there. Just when you think that you’re done another monster will usually spawn right behind you to give you a good scare. This is very suspenseful at first, but after a few levels these traps they become easily predictable. Overall, the game-play is not difficult but there are certain parts that will require you to repeat them over and over again until you’re able to fend off the multiple attacks without loosing all your health.

Doom 3 is a fairly long game that will take somewhere between 15 to 20 hours to beat. While the first half of the game is somewhat annoying and tedious, the last few levels are quite fun, especially with your new weapon called the “Soul Cube.” Unfortunately, the rest of your weapon arsenal is quite bland with some weapons that are totally useless like the pistol (which is too weak), your grenades (which are too bouncy), and the chainsaw (which is only useful when you first get it). None of the weapons have a secondary fire, which make game-play simplistic and dull. Another annoyance is the voice recordings and e-mails that you have to sift through as you pick up disks and PDA’s throughout the game in order to get codes to open certain doors and cabinets. While the e-mails have a lot of little jokes, the voice recordings are very boring and take too much time away form actually playing the game (although you can listen to them while running around in first person mode). The three big bosses that you face in the end are, for the most part, challenging and require you to figure out a special little trick in order for you to beat them. Once you finish the game there is very little interest to play it over again so you’ll probably move on to the multiplayer part if you have not done so already. Unfortunately, the multiplayer part of the game is dismal. With only 4-5 multiplayer maps and a 4-person maximum limit per map it get boring fairly quickly. Hopefully the Doom and Quake community will make some more maps and mods for this game. On the positive side, the game never froze or crashed in either the single or multi-player game mode.

Some game players will tell you that graphics are everything while others emphasize game-play as being truly important. This is where most gamers will disagree on this game. While Doom 3 is quite possibly the best-looking game out on the market, with a brand-spanking-new 3D graphics engine that creates an extremely life-like environment, the game-play is unfortunately somewhat tedious, predictable, and obsolete. While I applaud the Texas-based developer id Software for making such a great graphics engine, I wish they would spend more time on trying to make the game more interesting and enjoyable.