Enjoyable experience, if you know what to expect.
Doom 3 sets you as a nameless marine in a research lab on Mars. The main character doesn’t have any personality what so ever and he has absolutely zero lines of dialog in the course of the game. In time player notices that the research team in this marsian lab has been conducting some sort of teleporting experiments and apparently opened a gateway to Hell. Soon something goes terribly wrong and so it’s time to take a shotgun and blast some demons.
Graphicly Doom 3 is an absolute eye candy, the lighting is great and life-like. All the claustrophobic corridors are very detailed, but after a while player may wish some sort of variety. Luckily near the end our nameless marine gets to Hell, which from an artistic standpoint reminds me a little of the movie Hellraiser.
Gameplay is extremely linear, repetitive and predictable. Almost the whole game takes place in tight corridors and the enemies spawn right behind you, which is a cheap way to raise difficulty and it becomes predictable after a short while. It takes somewhere around 18 to 20 hours to get through, but the experience doesn’t change very much in the course of the game and has very little variety. For this reason it’s very important to approach this game bearing in mind, that it plays in the same way in the same kind of environment pretty much the whole way through.
Doom 3 can be a scary game, but not because of its graphics, but because of its sound. Nearly all the time there will be some sort of noise in the backround and the player really feels like he or she is in this marsian base. So turn of the lights and turn on the speakers.
The thing that every player will remember afterwards is the darkness. This game is really dark and after a while it gets annoying. It also doesn’t help, that for some unknown reason the player can’t use a flashlight and a gun at the same time. But I have to admit that the darkness also helps to create the atmosphere.
Doom 3 is absolutely worth to experience, but it’s also important not to expect anything revolutionary in terms of gameplay and variety in the course of the game.