n many ways, Doom 3 recreates the two previous games in the series. Players take the role of a nameless space marine grunt, and then single-handedly defeat the forces of hell. The monsters of the first games, the imps, the zombies, the cacodemons, etc., are all back with newer, more detailed, more grisly looks. As the marine, the player fights these menaces with the same collection of weapons, including the BFG and the trusty shotgun. The designers did not add minigames, side quests or plot decisions to the game; they stayed faithful to the first-person shooter formula that Id mostly invented.
Doom 3 does differ from its predecessors in some interesting ways. In previous versions of the game, interactions with the game world consisted of pushing large buttons to open doors and activate elevators. In D3, players can actually push around chairs and boxes, plus interact on various video screens, triggering equipment, opening lockers and reading files. Information about the world (some of it critical to advancing the game) and the plot is given in cutscenes and in a PDA that the player accesses by hitting the tab button. There is also an audio track that contains radio chatter of other marines fighting and losing against the forces of hell.
Network deathmatching was one of the things that made the original Doom the hit it was, and D3 allows deathmatching over a LAN or the Internet. As it is, out of the box, the game supports only four players at a time, but mods to increase this number are already on the Internet. Lacking in D3, however, is the cooperative multiplayer mode that let up to four players fight through the single-player game together. On the other hand, D3 does allow the player to save at any point in the game.
Reality has gone to hell
In interviews before its release, Doom 3 developers admitted that the computers that can run the game on its maximum screen size with full details are not available yet to consumers. Even players with pretty good, relatively new systems will find themselves running the game at 800 x 600 or even 600 x 480 in an effort to see the game in full detail. And yet, even at these lower resolutions, D3 looks absolutely great. There have been games with more stylized or interesting looks, but there has never been another game this sharp and real-looking.
The cost of both the beauty of the graphics and the fluidity of the animations in D3 seems to be room size and number of villains. In contrast to the previous Doom games, D3 is claustrophobic. Gone are the open courtyards and big chambers. Most of D3 takes place in corridors narrow enough to touch both walls, and in rooms small enough for the villains to cross in the time it takes to reload the shotgun. This isn't a bad thing, per se, but it is a large difference not only between D3 and its predecessors, but between D3 and its competition in the FPS market.
The single most frustrating thing in D3 is that the Marine can't hold his flashlight in one hand and his gun in the other. The game insists on switching between them, which the player controls by pressing the F key. This is frustrating because the levels in D3 are dark. Really dark. Need-the-flashlight-almost-constantly dark. The darkness and the claustrophobia of the levels work together to create real tension during gameplay; enemies are constantly leaping out at the marine, usually so close that the player barely has time to switch to his gun.
Overall, Doom 3 is a gorgeous game that will keep players on the edge of their seats, when they aren't jumping out of them in surprise.
Unlike a lot of games, I found I had to play Doom 3 in small doses. The longer I played, the tenser I got, until finally I'd have to shut it down and do something else until I was relaxed enough to come back and play some more.
— Eric
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