The whole principle of Doom 3 is that scientist on Mars have found some sort of ancient civilization. With that civilization they found ancient artifacts that unlocked the secrets of their world. Unfortunetely that wasn’t the only thing they unlocked. It seems that in their research they accidentally opened a portal to hell (insert big whoops here). You being a rough and tuff Marine, must battle your way through the hordes of demons and close the portal. Sure it might seem like the same old, blow them up story, but wait there’s more! This time around, id Software did a great job of creating a background, and even a story. You now have characters, voices, and a story that seems, dare I say, interesting?

Just as in Doom 1 and 2, Doom 3 consists of blasting your way through each level while finding specific access codes and card keys to unlock parts of the level. Now that might sound like your typical first person shooter and for the most part it is, but with one slight twist. In creating Doom 3 there was a lot of emphasis on surprise, fright, and scare tactics. This is where Doom 3 becomes more than just another good looking FPS. Having over 500,000 lines of script code, Doom 3 becomes more than just a game; it’s as almost as if you’re watching a movie. Everything from an innocent piece of wall crumbling, to a demon crawling across the ceiling will have you spooked. This is probably the best usage of scripts that I’ve seen in a long time and it’s what makes Doom 3 so fun to play. Going through each level just knowing that something is going to pop out at any second adds to the already high tension you’ll have while playing. Even though there are some times where the surprise is expected, there are plenty of other occasions where you’ll feel yourself twitch your trigger finger.

Besides the scripting goodness, FPS fans will love the amount of gore that flies throughout the entirety of the game. With your shotgun, pistol, plasma rifle, machine gun, chain gun, and yes, even your BFG, you’ll be placing some well drawn bullet holes into your enemy. And if you don’t, you’ll be treated to one of the less talked about features of the game (or any FPS game), which is when your point of view gets jarred in all sorts of directions. Though it might be annoying from a gamer’s perspective, it really does add to the sense of pressure when you’re surrounded.

One tiny problem that I’ve been hearing people complain about is the lack of lighting. Most of the time you’re going around with a flashlight equipped in order to see where the hell you’re going. For some odd reason it seems that the scientist can open up a portal to hell but can’t create a gun with a flashlight attached to it. So you’re placed with the situation of un-equipping the flashlight and firing (blindly at times) into the darkness. At times it was annoying, but later on it just helped me appreciate the light a bit more.

So for gamers who aren’t fans of FPS, you probably won’t be digging Doom 3 and that’s because, it’s a FPS at its core. No matter how good it looks, or sounds, either you like blasting baddies into nine different parts, or you don’t. Doom 3 doesn’t revolutionize the FPS genre, but instead, continues where it left off when Doom 1 and 2 came out. And that is trying its best to scare the hell out of you. On a many number of times I can say they succeeded. Does that make me less of a man? I’m not sure. But what I do know is that the scripts involved in Doom 3 are what make it so much fun to play.

We’ve all seen oodles, upon oodles of pictures over the past four years. Now that the game is released I was able to witness so much more. First off, I would like to say that I never really had any frame rate issues, though I wasn’t running the game with anti-aliasing on so I did see a few jaggies here and there. That all being said Doom 3 is probably the best FPS out on the market to date. Half-Life 2 is going to have a hard impressing me after this. Everything from animations, bump mapping every bit of metallic texture, and freaky shadowing are here to amaze us.

Doom 3 is a game where not only will you notice shadows and lighting, you’ll grow to appreciate them. In a game where you’re covered in darkness 70% of the time, you’ll learn to love you’re flashlight. Your ability to see even the tiniest details of shadow from afar will increase. Even though there are times where I couldn’t see much I still got my flashlight out to see all the realistic looking textures. Since the complex is more of a research and development complex than a colony, the entire place has a very heavy accent on metal, technology, and stone. This is your basic template for most of the levels and even though that might not seem like a lot, the artists did a spectacular job of making every level and room unique. Sometimes I might look at some wires hanging down from a ceiling, other times it was a blood stain on the floor. Regardless at what I was drooling at, I was in awe from start to finish.

When I wasn’t looking at blood stains or rusty pipes, I was having another eye candy feast with character models. Even though when I first looked at pictures I thought they were made from grey clay. I can now say that pictures do not do this game justice. I can recall watching a zombie from behind a protective piece of glass. He was pounding his head against the wall, his stomach moving in and out as he breathed. I was captivated, and spooked at the same time. While zombies have a slow movement, it’s not until you see the bigger guys up close that you really get a sense of how fluid the animation is. Whether they were crawling, leaping, or climbing up a rail, I would always watch to see what they would do next before I tainted them full of lead. I think it’s also a nice touch that blood and bullet holes cover their bodies even before you’ve killed your enemy.

Though it’s taken quite some time to complete and you might need to upgrade your machine, Doom 3 is one of the best looking titles to date.

I suppose I should first complain to everyone about how I had a problem in the sound category. For some odd known reason, every piece of sound and voice over had a tendency to skip. Why? I don’t know. In order to cut back on the skipping I had to turn my hardware acceleration on my Audigy card down to basic; which means no surround sound pleasure. After that the sound would only skip for the first 3-5 minutes. Quite the odd problem and as you can tell, pretty frustrating.

With that out of the way, and the skipping to a minimum, I could hear all the shrieks, hisses, clicks, and thumps that go bump in the dark. I can’t tell you how many times a door closed or a pipe burst and I thought I was going to jump out of my chair. This is one game where sound plays a huge part. Another plus are all of the voice-overs you’ll listen to on your PDA throughout the game. These audio and video logs help bring the pieces of the story together and give a little insight of life on the complex before you arrived. Some audio files give clues to security access while others are people complaining about their working conditions.

Music in Doom 3 is subtle with an eerie substance to coincide over the sound of your heart beat. With the sort of music you’ll get from a stealth game such as Thief, Doom 3 tries to draw you in with slight scores here and there. Once it draws you in the sound takes over and lets your imagination run wild.

Edited August 8th: After some more time researching my sound problem, I stumbled across a solution that gets rid of the stuttering completely. All you have to do is right click your hard drive, click properties, go to polices, and turn off write caching. The sound is smooth and doesn't skip at all. Hope that helps other people as well.

There are a few neat things Doom 3 incorporates throughout the game which I found pretty engrossing. The first is the use of your PDA, which is your primary tool for accessing email, video, and audio clips. It’s also the thing that gives you security clearance during the game as you download other employee PDA’s onto yours. Though it might just be a simple tool, using it to listen to audio clips or read employee mail brings you further into the game. What’s even better is that you can listen to audio clips even while you’re running around the complex. It’s as if you have a little earpiece in your ear specifically for audio clips; a simple, yet effective feature.

The rest of the GUI is placed at the bottom of the screen and includes your ammo, health, gun selection, stamina, armor, and even the current room you’re in. All numbers and icons are small enough to give you maximum room for the rest of the screen. The interfaces are slick and smooth and give off a technological aura. Lastly I really liked the way interacting with computers, terminals, switches, and buttons were carried out. When you go up to a terminal or computer that you can interact with, a little mouse button comes onto the screen and you can easily move it around to click buttons. Definitely something new and I wouldn’t be surprised if you start seeing other games mimic this feature. In Doom 3 you’re on a semi-futuristic colony in Mars, where technology is at the forefront (think Aliens the movie). The interfaces you interact with just add to that fact.

For FPS lovers Doom 3 is definitely worth the wait. With heavy emphasis on a single player story that will take around 15 hours to beat, you can expect id Software to throw every scare tactic you can think of. During my time I didn’t run into any real problems, other than the sound issue. Though for gamers who just can’t seem to muster up enough CPU power, now might be the time to upgrade.

Although the game might be a bit too dark for some people, I never felt overwhelmed with it. As I said before, you learn to appreciate the light which in turn makes you a little bit more hesitant when heading into the dark. Sure it might be a cheap scare tactic, but I’m not complaining.

With graphics to die for and that good old Doom blast through anything that moves style, how can you want anything else?


As a sidenote, the game was reviewed on the following machine:

AMD Athlon XP 2500 Barton Chip
712 DDR 2700 running at 333 MHz
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 Ram
Sound Blaster Audigy
Maxtor 7200RPM Hard Drive
Windows XP