[PC] Doom 3

[Andre S. Veteran]

This review is more of a retrospective since Doom 3 came out 4 years ago now, in 2004. I only played through seriously this year, though, and despite having experimented more recent titles like FEAR or Crysis, I was very impressed with Doom 3. This first-person shooter is a great artistic achievement of the gaming industry, and a blast to play.

The premise of Doom 3 is simple: the Union Aerospace Corporation, a scientific base on Mars, is invaded by demons of hell; you are a marine and must try to drive them back. As you advance throughout the game, you’ll find that this simple story is appropriately well developed. The scientific base is huge and divided into many facilities with different purposes; Doom 3 uses loading screens as the main device to feed you this information. The demons have been the subject of extensive research as well as the teleportation technology that ultimately enables them to break loose onto Mars. At the root of all is an ancient mystical civilization that sacrificed itself to create an artefact capable of defeating the demons, the Soulcube, which becomes an important asset of your arsenal later in the game, and the only weapon able to destroy the final boss.

Doom 3 uses an innovative interface to provide you with emails, audio logs and videos of members of the UAC. You can actually listen to an audio log while continuing your exploration, but you’ll usually want to stop in order to focus on what is being said. This provides significant breaks from the run-and-shoot action, and in fact, way too many breaks. Most of this information is optional, but you might miss on access codes to supplies and secrets, so you’re either forced to go through all of them or open a real web browser and get the access codes on a cheat site. I chose the latter option as I don’t get much fun from browsing virtual documentation. All in all, the feature is quite obtrusive, but some of the videos and logs provide interesting story elements, so I would listen to at least those that look the most important.

The gameplay is quite simple and similar to previous Doom games. In each level, you are required to find items such as access cards and eventually get to the next level trigger. Between you and your objective stand various demons of hell, which invariably try to kill you, and which you must invariably defeat. Doom 3 provides variety through different monster attributes, appearances and behaviours, different weapons with various tactical advantages, and various settings encompassing the geometry of the environment, the lighting and other such devices. You start by battling zombies with weak weapons, and end up battling Hell Knights with enormous weapons.

In contrast to previous Doom games, Doom 3 features very little puzzle-solving and running around, which is an immense relief. If a door opens it’s probably where you’re supposed to go next, otherwise it’s a small storage room; with a few exceptions, you don’t backtrack a lot after finding a key or other objective update. Doom 3 also features almost no jumping puzzles, which is also a relief. Encountering a monster is much dramatic because of the insane amount of audio-visual detail, but you might miss the large-scaled battles featuring dozens of enemies from the previous games. With Doom 3, such battles would create serious performance problems, and monsters feature such crazy amounts of visual effects that too many of them would be confusing to the player. So the most you’ll ever fight might be 4 or 5 monsters, with an average of 1 point something. In other words, Doom 3 requires no crowd control skill at all, and encounters are rather short. Prolonged encounters usually mean you lost control of the situation, are losing life very quickly and will probably reload. Do not expect anything like Serious Sam. In fact, Doom 3 doesn’t require much skill at all.

From what I have described until now, Doom 3 must look like a pretty lousy game: boring audio logs, short, small-scale battles, no-brain objectives, simple story. But I believe Doom 3 is primarily an artistic achievement and not so much of a game. If you can get into the right mindset, you’ll be thrilled from start to finish because the artwork is so good. There’s not much in terms of interesting gameplay, but Doom 3 makes up in the audio-visual department.

Doom 3 looks so good that it compares favourably to games released 4 years after it, which is an eternity for high-tech first-person shooters. Animations are so varied, natural and convincing that you’ll never think about them being animations and will assume all these monsters behave intelligently. Every monster is a sight to behold. The imp, one of the most common enemies, is a highly strong and agile beast, able to climb onto walls, ceiling, jump at you from great distances, create and throw fireballs, and rip you to shreds. His body is finely textured, bump-mapped and shaded, giving him great presence. When he appears, the environment turns dark red, a glowing high-detail pentagram is drawn on the ground, bursts of energy are projected, and he bends forward, screaming in rage. The first time I saw this, I could feel the sweat on my back. And the imp is simply one of the most common and weak enemies. When he throws a fireball, the heat distorts the surrounding image, and smoke partially covers your vision. When he lashes at you at close range, your aim is disturbed and streaks of blood are drawn across the screen. As you may now begin to see, fighting a single monster in Doom 3 can be an intense experience.

Environments are also rendered in glorious detail. The greatest strength of the Doom 3 engine is its ability to render sharp contrasts between pitch black darkness and neon-lighted rooms. Every shadow in Doom 3 is amazingly clean and dynamically rendered according to source intensity, direction and surrounding geometry. As a result, fighting even slow-moving zombies in dimly lit rooms can be extremely scary.

The visuals, although glorious, are not without their flaws, however. Most monsters are uniformly gray and their skin looks like leather. Imps and Hell Knights for instance, are similar in appearance, which is weird given that one is a weak monster and the other is a mini-boss in itself. I think monsters from hell should feature fur and more varied colours, like the original Doom sprites suggested. Also, you’ll mostly fight in industrial corridors and laboratories. They look much more interesting than, say, FEAR’s industrial corridors and labs, but it still gets repetitive and less creative than the levels of Doom 1 or 2.

If Doom 3 looks good, however, it sounds even more impressive. This is hard to describe, though, but I’ll try. First, there is no music, except the menu music; everything is atmospheric. Doom 3 makes extensive use of high-pitched intense-breathing-like sounds as the base material for a lot of what you hear. Sometimes you’ll jump at the sound of a door opening or an air vent because it sounds so similar to an imp spawning. Doom 3 makes all your weapons sound small and rather underpowered, but in a good way; in a way that emphasize the relative strength of your enemies. After all, they are in fact all easy to defeat, so they have to put up a good show. Mancubi produce powerful low frequencies that shake entire levels; you’ll often hear monsters long before you face them, and this had me truly afraid of going forward more than once. Doom 3 makes great use of monk chants slowed down, distorted and with lots of reverb, sometimes in reverse, to achieve cool atmospheric effects. In fact, there’s always some kind of drone in the background, either machine-like or hell-like. In one of the early levels, namely Delta Labs 1, three low-pitched, muffled bell tones loop in the darkness, transforming what would be a drab zombie fight into a cinematic experience. The game also has very special sounds to completely spook the hell out of you, which seriously can’t be described without sounding overly ridiculous; just hear them for yourself. If you own the game, you can find the sounds in the Doom 3/base/pak003.pk4 archive, which can be opened by IZArc or WinRAR; hours of delight. They are all in wav or ogg format. I think that no game has achieved such a coherent, sustained and refined audio experience as Doom 3, to this date; it’s perhaps the greatest breakthrough made by Id in this century.

I strongly believe in games as a form of art, and Doom 3 shall remain a long-standing example of how a game can shine by its artwork alone. Turn off the sound, play Doom 3 in low-resolution, and it’s not the same game; this is designed to be enjoyed on the best systems available. There’s nothing very interesting in Doom 3 if you don’t let yourself be captured by its beauty and atmosphere; this game is like music.

[qdave]

very good review :) 5/5 :D

[+shift. MVC]

Did you **** your pants at anytime throughout the game?! :laugh:

Good review though, more pictures would have been nice. I don't have much trouble reading big blocks of text, but other people might :)

[Draken]

Great Review (Y) I'm installing the game again :)

[TCA]

i have this and the EP and i play it a lot it's fun imo

[rage710]

That was a VERY fun game! It was the ONLY game to make me scared. The kind of scared like after watching Aliens for the first time and being young. After watching Aliens (I was young though) I took a flashlight whenever I went into my garage, as it was dark...

[Starbuck84]

Very nice review you got there, congrats. I agree, this game is awesome. One of the few games that got me really scared. I remember playing at night with only my monitor as light source and my headphones for the sound. When I walked across this hallway nothing happened. Until I opened the door at the end of the hallway and an imp jumped right in my face. I screamed "What the hell!" so loud, waking up several people in the house. :p

[Dotdot]

Great game and review :)

[Elliot B.]

Great game and review :)

+1 :)

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

it still amazes me how the game looks so good after 4 yrs. great game, but im past the horror genre now... i cant take the pressure anymore!

[LOC Veteran]

I don't know why everyone hated on Doom 3 when it came out as it was quite a good game. Sadly though the multiplayer was a complete let down. I don't think there are more than like 10 people playing it right now :(

[Andre S. Veteran]

Thanks for all the comments ! I simply can't review games decently even when I try, most of the time, but Doom 3 was too powerful an inspiration and it just came out naturally.

I don't know why everyone hated on Doom 3 when it came out as it was quite a good game. Sadly though the multiplayer was a complete let down. I don't think there are more than like 10 people playing it right now :(

At the same time came out Half-Life 2, probably the best first-person shooter ever made. It featured innovative gameplay mechanics, advanced physics, AI, a new incredibly cool graphical engine (Source - still used this day to power some of the best games!), such a great variety of levels that it was like several games in one... it had epic scope, advanced technology, and Doom 3 looked like something of the past in comparison.

While I must recognize Half-Life's 2 superiority, Doom 3 is a fascinating experience in its own right. The gameplay is very straightforward, but I think that helps the player get immersed, and while Half-Life 2 was about dazzling you with all the new possibilities of Athlon 64s and Radeon X800s, Doom 3 was about forgetting that the outside world existed and feel that cold sweat running down your sides.

[Hani]

I finished the game + EP. The main issue with D3 is that it tends to be repetitive. It has about 25 long levels, and after the first 10 you'll get really bored. You'll be fighting monsters constantly, don't expect a decent storyline.

[Ayepecks]

I was never that impressed with Doom 3, personally. The gameplay just felt so dated. The graphics were great for the time, but it just felt like "shoot this monster, have one more pop out routinely" type stuff. Good review, though.

[Budious]

When does Doom3 engine go open source? I'll be waiting for OpenDoom3 or ioDoom3...

[Argote]

I remember this was a great game, nice review too.

[Shaun N.]

This is the only game so far that has had me scared to play it lol

[NoLiMiT06]

I played this thourgh on the original xbox when it came out and it was prob one of the best looking xbox games. But for some reason the PC version was alot more scary and I am not sure why... :p