A substantial change from the Doom Tradition. Nevertheless, a beautiful, entertaining game whose flaws are forgivable.
The beginning of the game involves a few minutes of walking around on Mars City. You can see scientists and technicians hard work, hear side conversations, check out a few information kiosks, and explore an actual world. This is a bold if somewhat dissappointing move away from the simple demon blasting and the surreal, gorgeous settings of previous games. The game also involves a PDA which can contain email, videos, and audio logs. One finds the PDA's of personnel at mars city and they download to your own, allowing you see everything on their device. While the writing and voice acting on these is good, the only reason to bother reading anything is looking for 3 digit codes to storage lockers around that contain ammo, armor, weapons, and health.
While this certainly adds credit to the games attempt at immersion in a real
world, it's highly oversimplified. That no delicate PDA's were scratched
despite the gunfire, fireball-throwing demons, and metal falling everywhere is a bit too convenient. Furthermore, despite the technology to colonize mars,
produce plasma based weopons, one of which fires an actual computer chip that target enemies and not friends, your marine has a flashlight. This is not just any flashlight, but a weak flashlight with unlimited energy. Your weapons do not come with lights on them, a luxury that law enforcement and military personnel have been enjoying for years in our present day, nor is your marine competent enough to hold a flashlight and a light pistol at the same time, a technique that law enforcement and military personnel have mastered for decades.
Despite how comically preposterous this is, the need to sort through the
ever-present darkness with a crumby flashlight and then frantically switch to a weapon provides a lot to the atmosphere. One can only imagine what neat things might have been done with night vision technology, and the potential for making the games lusciously crafted demons look even creepier while utilizing that technology.
This, of course, leads us to the game's creatures, for which the game receives outstanding marks. The creatures are richly designed and move wonderfully, giving a weight and believability that makes this game truly great. There are a wonderful variety of them, too. All the way from the simple, but well done zombies, agile, fire-throwing imps, to insectile human infant things that have an ambient child-like laughter and then screeching, insectile cries in combat to human heads with spider legs that come after you from nooks and crannies. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of the time one is faced with imps. Hoards and hoards of imps. Imps everywhere. While they are well done, one is dissappointed that the more artful and disturbing creatures are so rare.
No FPS game is truly good without good weapons, here Doom 3 does well, but the one-dimensional nature of the weapon system is a bit stale. There is a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, plasma rifle, chaingun, grenades, rocket launcher, BFG, and chainsaw. Sadly, the machine gun, plasma rifle, and chain gun are all basically varying power-level of the same thing: rapid fire weapons. Doom 3 is in sore need of a some kind of distance rifle with a scope that might add a stealthier distance fighting element to the game, also, the scope would allow one to get a good look at baddies, which almost never happens. It's a shame not to be able to get a close, imtimate look at such beautifully done creatures. The grenades and the chainsaw largely go unused with the exception of a few creatures, and given that creatures typically spawn right on top of you, grenades are suicide if not cautiously used in the game. All of this said, the weapons that you do have a very well done, with realistic, satisfying sounds. The only real strategy that comes in using the weapons is the fact that ammo is limited. One finds oneself most often using the first 3 weapons one gets simply because of limited ammo. This does add a good element of challenge to the game, requiring the need to make each shot count
The environments are like futuristic catacombs: dark, metallic, misty, low,
glowing ember-like lights. While this is a substantial change from many of the otherworldy, wide open lanscapes of the game's predecessors, they are never the less very well done. They leave the player with a deep feeling of suspense through most of the game, knowing that horrible baddies can crawl out from underneath rubble and out from little nooks and corners at any time.
Doom 3 stretches out with substantial length of game time, and the action is paced appropriately to provide both suspense and mayhem. Despite the slight shortcomings in the attempt at world immersion, some of the simply silly incongruence points in technology and equipment, and the initial trouble one might have with the fundamental differences in gameplay between Doom 3 and it's predecessors, the game is very well done overall and it's a definite must have for any fan of either horror or action games.