DOOM 3
DOOM 3
A Review by Noah Antwiler
The system requirements for DOOM3 are pretty steep, and I know not everyone has the means to afford a ninja computer to play the game at its full extra-crispy high-res ickiness, so I'll share with you the DOOM3 experience in its entirety for the gamer on a budget: Simply pay an annoying sibling or co-worker $20 to have him throw a burlap sack over your head and beat you without mercy from varying angles with a phone book so you can't see where he's coming from. The important part is the burlap sack, really. If you want to save your $20, just put the sack over your head, spin around ten times fast, then try walking around the house.
Mein Leiben!
DOOM3 was one of those games I never seriously expected to see on a shelf, like Duke Nukem Forever or Starcraft: Ghost. Games like that are usually stuck in a perpetual loop of delays and revisions since developers want their game to be on the bleeding edge of the gaming technology. DOOM3 has been highly-touted and very highly-reviewed since it was demoed at conventions, and I'm from the old school of gaming that still remembers when the scream of "GUTENTAG!" from Hans the Nazi in Castle Wolfenstein could drive a primal terror into the hearts of men. The old DOOM games jeopardized our homework, and I remember the elaborate junior high school sneakernet underground where we'd exchange pirated copies of the game along with the Barney Blaster mod like we were dealing for black tar heroin. The old DOOM games were basically nonsensical splatterfests that put you on one side of a giant room, the exit on the other, and about a hundred demon things in between. You vs. The Horde, Joe vs. The Volcano, Ecks vs...lots of Severs. I guess.
This...this is not DOOM. DOOM3 is disappointing on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start. The multiplayer experience is a joke, despite being one of the most talked-about aspects of its gameplay. There's nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing innovative in the least. It doesn't even have modes we've come to expect from multiplayer shooters now. All it has are Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Tournament Deathmatch (essentially one-on-one Deathmatching while other people get bored watching other people play). It's just nothing you'll actually seek out other people to play. Not when you've got infinitely superior offerings out there CounterStrike, Unreal Tournament, Day of Defeat, Battlefield 1942, and about a dozen other games that actually bothered to make their multiplayer interesting. DOOM3's multiplayer experience is best classified as vestigial, real evidence that either the game was rushed, or the designers didn't really care enough to plan out anything more than the bare bones.
But why do I say that it's not DOOM? Well that's simple. This game sucks. I'm actually willing to bet you could have more fun with the aforementioned burlap sack beating than you could with this game, because there you might have the chance to exact revenge on the person inflicting such horrid pain on you. More specifically, DOOM3 is a survival horror game right down to its core, almost the complete opposite of every gameplay facet of the previous DOOM games good. Instead of relatively open areas with lots of enemies, this game is riddled with narrow, claustrophobic tunnels, small rooms, and enemies that prefer to spawn behind you and sneak attack. It's more Resident Evil than anything else, considering its obsession with horror elements and zombies marching about. But I'm being rather unfair to the Resident Evil games, because at least in those games, you could SEE.
Resident Evil 4: Better than DOOM because you can SEE!!
I'm told that DOOM3 is a beautiful game, with astounding graphics and eye-popping visuals. That's probably true. When you can SEE it, which is rare.
DOOM3's biggest problem by far is the absolute, choking, unbearable, turn-the-gamma-up-on-your-monitor-until-your-eyes-melt-and-your-testicles-shrivel-from-the-radiation darkness. It's dark. Really dark. Pitch black dark. You simply can't understand how vastly blackly dark it is. You could turn the lights off in your room-- that's dark. But it's not THIS dark. You could stick your head up a cow's ass while wearing a welder's mask, and it probably still wouldn't be as dark as this game. It'd probably stink less, though. The entire game is shrouded in inky black darkness in order to reinforce the ooky scary horror aspect of it all. You can never see where you're going. You can never see what's in front of you. And most irritatingly, you can never see what in the blue hell is hitting you.
Oh, you're given a flashlight. I bet the developers thought they were really clever in giving you that one pittance, because you'll basically have to carry that flashlight out all the damn time just to see where you're going. Then you'll see a monster, fumble for your gun, and promptly find yourself unable to see again. So you'll aim your gun roughly in the direction you think the monster's at, guess, pray, and panic fire endlessly until you think it's dead. The entire game is a pointless back-and-forth transition from flashlight to gun, because evidently in the year 2145, marines working on a Martian base with notoriously bad light haven't been assigned weapons with lights on them. Nor have they mastered the use of duct tape to affix a flashlight on the end of their weapons. Or uh...just kind of hold the flashlight up against your weapon while firing it. But no, you're either holding the flashlight or a weapon, routinely getting slapped around by everything you can't see. And so you're stuck wandering around the entire game where the lighting is flickering, dim, or nonexistent, getting wailed on by everyone hiding where you can't see them.
Best movie evah!
You play as an anonymous, nameless idiot who lacks the power of speech and simply walks around nodding at people. Or killing them. Your avatar is big and fleshy with dark hair, with large biceps and a beefy square-jawed face. And so you, Mr. Generic Beefy Dork, are humanity's last hope. Everyone just calls you "Marine," where I imagine this guy's real name is something like Joe Kickass or Krump Bigload. You're here at this Martian colony to investigate the general weirdness in the station. Basically the entire opening segment is a complete ripoff of the opening to Half-Life. You walk around looking dopey, clicking on people who say foreshadowy things, and collect your weapons. What I found funny was that once I'd collected my sidearm, I could wander happily about the base merrily shooting people through the head like a deranged postman, and nobody lifted a finger to stop me, call for help, or fight back. Interestingly, I don't even remember them reacting to the sound of gunfire other than perhaps to say "Stop that!" nor did they appear to get even mildly irritated when I started emptying my clip at their feet like Yosemite Sam shouting "Dance boy! Lemme see yuh dance!" And so I murdered my way through the base and the entire game, killing anyone human before they had anything useful to say, and was never even scolded. You even get to walk outside onto the surface of Mars, which always gives me a hilarious mental image of Arnold Schwartzenegger in Total Recall rolling around with his eyes bugging out screaming "Annnngh! Annnngh!" in his thick Austrian accent.
I also haven't mentioned yet that the second tool that you're issued as a Marine is your PDA. The PDA is basically a waste of time where you download video clips that you don't really feel like watching, audio logs that you don't really want to listen to, e-mails that you don't really want to read, all of which advance the plot which you don't really care about. And while you're doing it, you're free to get your ass kicked by enemies you can't see while you're paying attention to the PDA. The entire premise behind the PDA is ripped off from the System Shock games, which actually HAS a story you care about, delivered through audio logs and voice communications. This only serves to further diminish my enjoyment of the game because it would actually be a pretty good engine for a new System Shock game were it not so frigging dark, and it reminds me how much I would rather be using this time actually playing System Shock. The plot of DOOM3 is of course laughably stupid, so you'll end up ignoring it. But you'll be listening to the inane logs and reading the insipid e-mails anyway, because that's the only way you can get the security codes that open the lockers scattered around each level that contain ammo. God help you.
Whoo. I guess they found all the brains they wanted.
But even this is badly designed, because every time you see one of these lockers, the PDA containing the code is always in the exact same room! There's just no point to it all, no brainpower required. So you're forced to listen to every bloody audio log, listening to idiots bitch and moan about how mean their boss is, whining about how they're about to die, or (most of the time) listen to Star Trek technobabble about the Eigen Converters and the Quasitronic Matrix of the Teleporter Devices, or the reverse polarity proton shield on the BFG rifle. You'll get so bored listening to these painful, hideously stupid logs that you'll either move on and get involved in a firefight, thus drowning out the sound of the log currently being played, or banging your head against the desk until the ringing in your ears drowns out the log.
Even as a survival horror game, DOOM3 strikes a sour note by not really being very scary. The darkness is more aggravating than scary, reminding me of the Dead Alewives every time I got fed up with being confronted with another pitch black room and ended up witlessly attacking the darkness. The sound design is banal, offering little more than monsters that all sound alike, machine-room ambience, maniacal laughter, and weapons that sound like cap guns. DOOM3 fails to set an atmosphere of horror, but succeeds at building one of scalp-clawing frustration. The game's scary for about 5 minutes, until you realize that it has nothing else to show you. This is how the first encounter goes:
Can't...see! Let me dig out my flahslight, HOLY SHIT!!
"Oh man...the lights just went out...I can't see a damn thing. Ok..flashlight. Good. My flashlight will protect me. Trusty flashlight."
*CLUNK*
"The hell was that!"
*MUNCH MUNCH FOOM!*
"Aaaaahh!! Aaaaah! Something's biting me in the ass! What the-- NO I don't want to hit him with the flashlight! Switch back to the gun!"
*tik tik tik!* (pathetic pistol sound)
"Damn it this pistol sucks!"
*brrrrk!* (pathetic shotgun sound)
"Jeeeez that really hurt--"
*MUNCH MUNCH*
"AAAAAH!!! My ass again! I can't see! STUPID flashlight! STUPID STUPID!"
You'll notice that every time something attacks you, it invariably bites you in the ass. This is because the designers decided that you'd eventually get smart and clear rooms in a consistent, safe, professional manner, and realized that this isn't very scary. To combat this, monsters CONSTANTLY spawn into existence directly behind you, typically after the lights go completely out. This is a profoundly cheap trick that the game plays on you in virtually every room and hallway, which forces you to walk through every room and corridor spinning around in moronic pirouettes. Monsters will either appear in a flash of red light (very unfair) or-- and this is the really stupid part-- wall sections just big enough for the monster to hide in will slide away behind you, letting each beastie hit you in the back. That's right, this entire base is designed with seamless, impossible-to-notice hidden wall sections that slide away silently, concealing closet-like alcoves that contain zombies. Throughout the entire vastness of the base, there were technicians and marines sealed helplessly in these hidden compartments at the EXACT moment the entire base was possessed by demons and evil spirits. What kind of idiot do they take me for? It'll sicken you how often walls just zip aside allowing zombies or demons to pile out, where they never could have been in the first place.
The Rock needs duct tape.
The entire game is predicated on you walking into a dark room, the lights abruptly going out, and monsters unfairly leaping out from unlikely directions to tear you a new asshole. I'm not exaggerating. Every. Single. Room. DOOM3 is a one-trick pony, and the trick is to kick you in the nards every time you enter the room. It gets old quicker than an episode of The Gilmore Girls. This just isn't DOOM. I picture DOOM as having balls-to-the-wall action, with awesome metal music wailing in the background as the dead of your enemies are literally piling up over your head. This is just a repetitive experience in paranoia, with wearisome controls, badly-designed gameplay, a plot you don't care about but it consistently rammed down your throat like mom trying to get you to swallow NyQuil, and unfair level design.
There's no horror in this game; it's all based on the cheap scare since the game fails to set any kind of horrific atmosphere. Cheap scares are the lowest form of horror, because they don't work more than once. And they don't work here. You can always tell a bad horror movie because of it's over-reliance on the cheap scare. Simply put, a cheap scare is when something leaps out in front of a character accompanied by a shrieking orchestral sting to make us jump. They are indeed scary, in that same way that walking into a room and having someone swift kick you in the kneecap is scary. But, to continue the example, such scares get old very quickly and almost never work when done more than a few times. After a while, you just want to hit the game back and wring the money you wasted back out of its neck. If it had one. And we're talking like 20 hours of gameplay based entirely on the worst kind of cheap scare: the UNFAIR cheap scare.
Like in Alien, when the cat would leap out at people, the orchestra would screech out a shrill note, and we'd all scream "AAAH!!" like idiots. That's a cheap scare. An unfair cheap scare is something like going to your car only to have Morrisey leap out of the trunk and slug you upside the head with a folding chair. I mean what the hell? There's no way you can see this coming. It's just not fair to expect crap like this. It's the horror equivalent of Lucifer popping out and giving you a slug bug every time you open a door. Startling at first, but after a few minutes of this, I'm beginning to understand how violence in video games can carry over into real life. I'd like to find John Carmack and dig my thumbs into his EYES!! AAAAAAGGGHHH!!!!
The rest of the game is the same, wearying drudgery that forms the staple of every other FPS that preceded it. Wander around, flip switches, get keys, handle the odd jumping puzzle. I was promised a great game here, and all I got was a visually-awesome headache of a game, which ceases to be visually-awesome because I can't see it. The weapons are mundane and unimpressive, unbalanced and unremarkable. All you need to know is that the new gun you have is better than the last one you got. The controls are simplistic and blasé, leaving you to do anything other than move forward, jump, and crouch. The plot is pointless, doubly so since your character is Biff Stonecrotch, Anonymous Mute Dork. The entire package feels like a pathetic System Shock knockoff.
I simply question the design decision to take everything that was good about DOOM, examine it carefully...then kill it.
{ 97 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
It would be wonderful if someone made a movie for this game.
I loved the PC game, hated the Xbox port. But even when playing the PC game it starts to get lame and boring. They keep doing the same scary parts that they all used in the first part of the game. I have to admit that I did jumped when I saw one of the first Imps crawled out of the staircase to pounce on me. But after the other 50 times of that and the fucked up demon babies. It just went to a cycle of kill on the station and kill in hell and then fight your duel wielding BFG human/tank commanding officer that orders you to die. It just got stupid.
i got this game for $3 dollars. seriously. no joke. for my pc. it worked very good my cd code worked. i don’t feel ripped off at all :D
i got the game for 5$… AND THOSE 5$ BIT ME IN THE ASS! I could have spent that money on some thing good like a big mac! i hated this game and i’m happy that some one has the same feelings as me.
Yea, I mean to me Doom 3 was a regular FPS game, nothing exciting with a lame story line. The biggest beef I have is that Doom 3 didn’t look or sound at all like Doom or Doom 2. I mean for god sakes, put in some music and why going into rooms killing only one or two monster?
I agree with you. I want to be slaining hell beasts and zombies why getting jacked on awesome metal music.
So download the mp3s of the original dooms and crank the sound on your computer with doom music in the background or just play the original Doom.
My personal favorite is to have a few shots of jag and maybe a little red bull and beat shit some monster on the original doom with the sound cranked up! Try it, it won’t disappoint you.
Geez, enough with the typos!
I didn’t even complete my thought about entering a room with only one or two monsters. I meant that I want to entering a room with the minigun pwning 10 or 15 monsters at a time. Now that’s a fair challenge too.
Supposedly, the reason the game is so friggin dark and claustrophobic is because otherwise the graphics engine would slow even a beastly machine (at the time of its release) to a crawl. Carmac needed a way to cut down processing and the easiest way to do that was to remove light and enemies. So, Doom 3 is a case of the technology driving the gameplay, which is always a bad idea. Well, it’s a bad idea if you want to make a good game; for what Doom 3 is, it’s great.
Doom 3 isn’t a game. It’s a 20 hour tech demo that they hoped would get other companies who DO make games to license their engine. It was never meant to be entertaining. It was only meant to showcase the technology.
Though why the entire Mars base looks like a sub-basement, I’m not sure. Why is it that IN THE FUTURE, all high-tech research facilities look like sub-basements of a decaying project building in New York City?
Wearisome controls and badly designed gameplay?
Ha ha, I freeloaded this game off my friend, I think he did too, so I didn’t have to pay anything. I’m not really too critical of most games when I play them, I tend to give some leeway. This game isn’t too bad but it isn’t great either. It can be somewhat fun to play, for about 2 hours straight anyway, then you’ll want to have a rest from it for the day. It is also hella repetitive in how it is designed: go down corridor, be somewhat surprised after you hear a monster is spawning from somewhere, do a 360 turn all around to find the source, then shoot at monster. The whole flashlight and weapon switch is the worst thing about the game though, I agree they should’ve just put a suit flashlight on the marine, use gun lights, or possibly nightvision. I understand they want to preserve the scary dark nature of the game, but at least give the player a better, more versatile flashlight which permits simultaneous use with guns, and runs out of energy after a short time perhaps, then forcing the player to use the shitty hand held light until they find more energy or batteries maybe. I guess someone would be pretty angry after paying quite a bit for this game and not liking it, so if possible try to freeload this game or just pay a real cheap price for it. Or just play Half Life 2 or Farcry instead.
The marine’s name is actually “Asskick Broadchest” and he makes an appearance in “Resident Horror” by X-Strike Studios.
I AGREE SO MUCH
I hate what id have done to their series. Not just Doom, but Quake as well. (Seriously Quake 4 multiplayer sucks balls, which is the ENTIRE POINT OF THE SERIES)
id, you are good at making things explode when we shoot them. You aren’t good at storytelling or scaring us, try going back to making things explode when we shoot them. Please.
While Classic doom was obviously (and still is with the help of SkullTag) a wonderful and famous game with some multiplayer, Doom 3 DID try dude. It was not perfect but i swear your review is a bunch of crap sir.
If its THAT dark, your blind. I could see the ENTIRE GAME even when the lights went out. I didnt even have to use my flashlight. My trusty shotgun is all I need to take down the enemies THAT DONT ALWAYS APPEAR BEHIND YOU. The levels are fair enough and the “cheap scare” is often but thats only for people who either enjoy them or are just pussies when it comes to survival horror. And its freakin DOOM. Duh the story sucks, and is unwanted. Here is the REAL story: your some random guy and has to blow shit up. Happy?
Sorry Spooney, your my fav, but after reading this reveiw makes me doubt your taste of games BIG TIME.
Wot?
How can you complain about the excessive darkness and narrow corridors? Yes, it makes monsters a bitch to fight, but that’s the bloody POINT. A horror game is supposed to be desperate and intense, and that’s exactly what ID went for with Doom 3. The darkness, the constant monotonous hums and beeps of machinery and occasional screams and bursts of gunfire that can be heard through the walls (especially early on, when there are still people around who haven’t had their intestines pulled out and jammed down their throats) all added to the atmosphere, which created tension, which made the player constantly dread running into any enemy from the lowly, shuffling zombie to the greasy, corpulent, missle-toting Moloch. The Cherubs as well; I’ve played through twice my share of horror games, and I still consider the Doom 3 Cherubs (the flying baby monsters) some of the creepiest motherfuckers ever to be put into a game.
The story isn’t horrible. It’s not Silent Hill 2, but it’s not Final Fantasy 8, either. It’s more like Resident Evil 5. It’s not a clusterfuck of confusing events, nor is it straining itself to express some tired cliche of a moral. It’s straightforward and leaves enough ambiguity to keep you going forward, if the gameplay and scares alone aren’t enough.
I know what disillusionment with a favorite game series feels like. Play Resident Evil Remake or Code Veronica, then play Resident Evil 5 immediately after, and you’ll know my pain. Despite the heartbreak it may cause old fans when the developers decide to feed a game’s original winning formula to a herd of boars in favor of a new one that appeals to the widest market, it’s important to judge a game by its own merits. You have to look at it for what it was trying to be, not what you wanted it to be. Otherwise you’re not reviewing the game at all; you’re just a fanboy and a tosser, ranting about how much you hate the developers for making alterations to their prized opus that you held as an important part of your past. Not to say you can’t hold grudges against ID, I welcome you to do it. I hate Capcom for the same reason (whores). Actually I hate them for a number of reasons, but the big one is the Resident Evil thing.
Doom 1 and 2 were retardedly simple programs, like every FPS game of the era. Any mouth-breathing social dullard with a class or two of programming and graphic design under their belt these days can pump out an equivalent or better in a weekend. It was a shooting gallery, nothing more. Doom 3 is a bit more complex, obviously, because it has more of a story and has so many survival horror aspects they’re spilling out of its bodily orifices.
Doom 3 isn’t bad. Anyone who’s into horror games should be required to play through it at least once, because it’s a really, really creepy game. It’s not a one-trick pony. It’s got cheap scares, but then EVERY SINGLE horror game does. In addition to the aforementioned atmospheric tension Doom 3 creates like a champ, there are plenty of things that happen specifically to disturb the player, regardless of whether or not they serve as precursors to combat. The rasping fat dude hanging from the ceiling with his stomach opened up in one of the early levels? That wasn’t a cheap scare. Even after killing all the little crawling buggers that came out of the vents shortly after his cutscene, the effect stayed with you. The crying woman whose sobs can be heard from the beginning of the level, whose head explodes shortly after pleading for help? That sure as hell wasn’t a cheap scare. I could go on, but I have a feeling that at this point, you or anyone else reading this will have already made up his or her mind about the game regardless.
I’m disappointed, Spoon. You gave no valid reasons as to why Doom 3 sucks, other than the fact that it was lightyears away from what the old games were. All this is is an example of trolling.
*Cough* Doom 3 Sucks! *Cough*
*Cough* Not Scary! *Cough*
*Cough* FEAR is better *Cough*
…What?
i thought it was a funny read and i agree cause you cant have a gun out and the flashlight out at the same time which is a pain when you see an enemy and switch to a weapon you cant see your enemy that you want to kill and have to wait for it to hit you or shoot and give you enough light for about a millisecond. Oh yeah and the end boss has a lot of health its like his health bar is an oh henry bar and your allergic to peanuts.
Awful, horrid game, I just downloaded (read: pirated) it today…and I can honestly say everything you’ve said in this review is true. You failed to leave out another extremely annoying aspect of the game though:
Knockback. Fucking EVERYTHING will knock you back in this game, being shot at, being clawed at, being hit with a steel pipe (or something, I couldn’t see). Good luck aiming, you’ll be bouncing all over the place and will waste half your damn clip. A fucking shotgun will literally bounce you through the air and across the room…WTF. And if you’re out of ammo and need to use your fists? Have fun trying to get close to something.
Horrible, horrible game. I think I managed about 20 minutes of it (once everyone got possessed) before I finally got fed up with and deleted it. Oh, and you’re right about the sounds. The guns sound like toys, and the demon shrieks are just plain annoying.
Yea, they did release a successor to the doom series years ago with wailing rock and stuff. You may recall Nine Inch Nails did the sound track and we played it at school in our latter years. It was called Quack… err Quake and it was ok. I still have a soft spot for the grenade launcher. I don’t recall Doom3 being that bad, although I played co-op on the xbox version. Really I don’t recall a whole hell of a lot of the game. I know I played it through, but nothing stuck out either way. I know it only took a couple of hours to complete, but it was just like I was there in front of my TV with no idea of what was going on… maybe I was brainwashed =P?
I would however recommend tracking down the older games (more specifically the wad files) and trying the newer interpretations like ZDoom or Risen3D. I’m kinda fond of ZDoom just for the nostalgic look of it. And oddly enough the old graphics don’t bother me so much on this game as it has on countless others.
In my opinion, Doom 3 was a bad game. But it wasn’t a horrible game. It’s entirely true that in general things were annoyingly dark, the weapons were uninspired and monster-closets were hideously overused. But it wasn’t pitch black (even without the flashlight, except for a few locations there were obviously designed around using it), the weapons did their job in a fairly visceral manner, and there was obviously a good deal of effort into giving the game an enjoyably creepy atmosphere.
I think the biggest mistake was giving it the name ‘Doom’. It would be like making a real-time strategy game and calling it ‘Civilization’, it doesn’t matter if the game is good or not on its own merits, people are going to judge it by its predecessors and obviously be unhappy because it isn’t based on the same principles. Not to say that Doom 3 is good on its own merits. I’m especially lenient and I consider it to be, at best, tolerable. Uninspired action, but with some very pretty scenery which managed to hold my interest through the majority of the game. So yeah, it’s bad, but not enough jump up and down, beating one’s chest and screaming, “Raargh! This game is the worst thing ever, see how angry and scathing I am?!”
The sheer crap-tastic majesty that is DOOM 3 falls flat on it’s face when you realize something. Every remaining infected human is a wuss, and every other hell alien baddie falls victim to some really bad and stupid moves.
The biggest one being, Duck And Strafe. By clicking the duck key as you move to the side you will dodge any ranged shot coming at you from 90% of the things that spawn behind you, their shots will literally go right over your head. What’s better? Their attacks light themselves up like the fourth of july! Add in this tight confines and you could likely go through most of the game with a single box of shotgun ammo, if they didn’t cheap themselves out.
And even the BOSSES fall victim to this. What happened to those big greater daemons that would make you crap your pants and run for it, trying desperately not to die? Sure, the Duck And Strafe trick doesn’t work, but other stupid tricks work even better on them. I mean seriously, one of them you get in the face with the chainsaw, another has you just shooting down the drones he sends and rocketing the “Big Glowing Sign Saying Weak Point!”
***Spoiler***
Hell, the last fight isn’t even a real fight. You kill him by killing the minions around the area and using the Rubix Cube Of Death on him. It’s not even really a fight. There are God of War quick time events that are more satisfying than this entire game, and I think I speak for everyone when I say quick time events can suck it.
Bad Plot, Bad atmosphere, and even a bad concept. Their original design was to revisit the original game. Yes, DOOM 3 is a remake of DOOM 1, a sad attempt at adding plot to what was classical perfection, and messing it all up in the process. The entire game from the get go was a cop out because their didn’t have the collective brain cells to think up a new concept, and instead had to go back and ruin one of the greatest joys of ancient gaming so they could have their wet dream.
Now, if DOOM 3 hadn’t been suffering a hideous case of Achilles Heel and there was atleast one thing in there that would be scary to face down and make you pray you had enough ammo and health to get through it, to the point that you would go back and redo the entire level in a more cautious manner just to survive that one point, then it would have done better with what it was trying to do. But instead, if you know what you are doing, you can dance your way through the entire game without pause.
Well, the PDA system didn’t work well, Dead Space does it better, but I have to say I think this is quite an overreaction.
I mowed down every single enemy in the game and had some fun with it, it’s fine really.
Heh, the game has nothing to show you?
I mean, Phantasmagoria 2 is much more entertaining, more purposeful, easier to figure out, and has tons more to show you right?
This game came out about the time I FINALLY obtained a decent gaming rig…and I think that’s the only reason I made it through this game was because I was just happy to be playing something at medium/full settings. It really isn’t that great though, but I thought the last fight was somewhat cool…then again maybe that was just still the awe factor of me owning a computer that didn’t chug while running Space Quest 2.
@RDmonkey. You do realize that a lot of it is put in as exaggeration for a good laugh right?.. Seriously chill out lighten up and laugh a little. He never said you had to agree with his taste. His reviews are partly for comedy so keep that in mind. Honestly though dark maps suck. If he had to tone it down why didn’t they just tone down texture detail, a little texture detail loss is better than darkness. The review was hilarious man great job as usual.
Again to RDMonkey and all others who would make a post like that. It’s exaggeration for a good laugh. Lighten up, chill out and laugh. Reviews are good but funny reviews are better. So some witty jokes through exaggeration keeps it interesting. So please think a little bit before you attack someone. The jokes in the review are very well thought out. You would realize this if you calmed down and stopped to appreciate the time it took to make the jokes and convey them interestingly.
Pitch-black darkness is scary, especially when filled with demons out to eat you. However, while sounding good on paper, there’s the not-night-sighted audience to consider. There is a terror in not being able to see something sinister and murderous out to get us, but remember that in a horror movie most people in this situation die, while in a -survival- horror game the objective is to live and play through to the end. Because of this, endless hallways of infinite darkness serve as an unavoidable, omnipresent obstacle rather than a terror-inducing environment.
Darkness is almost like a natural enemy to humans, containing god-knows-what inside of it, yet has that mystery about it that sucks us in via morbid curiosity. It’s that tension of the internal push/pull humans have with the dark, that can lead to true terror (if manipulated properly).
In short, if a visual storyteller wants darkness to be horrifying, it has to be used right. Doom 3 does not do it at all properly, just assuming that dark = creepy without understanding why and tripping up the gameplay, the audience’s only means of navigating through the game, in the process.
Also, Vredesbyrd: Your argument is flawed for several reasons:
1) The reason I listed above
2) The main character is established as a no-name, no-personality space Marine with lots of guns. Since there’s no telling how he’s reacting to this mess and we can readily assume he can defend himself easily, there’s no tension. The darkness doesn’t work, because the character has a viable light source on hand and any player with half a brain would question why he can’t find SOME way of using the flashlight and gun simultaneously. Especially since this is the future and we have that kind of technology NOW.
3) This game isn’t Silent Hill, which was made to be a survival horror franchise. This is Doom, which everyone is familiar with as a mindless fragfest (even me, and I’ve always hated shooters). We’re given every reason to assume before the game starts that this is going to be a normal Doom game, what with the characterless marine and the big guns and the demons from Hell, and the attempts at genre-switching simply don’t work, certainly not well enough to overpower the game’s reputation.
You can argue that it’s unfair that Doom’s reputation alone keeps it from breaking any boundaries (and you might have something there), but Doom 3 tries to add depth (like survival-horror aspects) to a game concept that simply isn’t designed for it. You can try and pour all the water you want into a shallow puddle, but all you’ll do is flood it out and get your shoes damp. Besides, the original Doom at plenty of scary “Oh shit!” moments just as it was – it may not have been as classy or as deep as a Silent Hill game, but it got the heart racing nonetheless.
I must agree with Faulkon and apparently restate what i’ve previously said. Keep in mind it is a review but some of it is also used for comedy. And to point out i map for id games. Making a dark map is ridiculous that’s like something a new mapper makes as a mistake. Woops i forgot to put light in! Dark maps are inexcusable really.. It leaves the game visuals very bland and visuals while not the most important thing do still retain impact on the game. The darkness can indeed hinder your game play experience. Now to be fair the effect they used for the darkness was more similar to there black fog shader in q3 in the sense it’s not pitch black. But still that is really annoying in terms of fighting. There’s only tension if you allow yourself to get sucked in, a lot of people will however just become annoyed. In conclusion they really should have left the horror game aspects to the experts. Doom is known for, as Faulkon said “being a frag fest” and i agree that’s how it should have stayed.
I liked the game. It made you feel on edge. I think a point has been missed cos i loved the fact that i knew i was gonna get something coming out at me which would be part of a scripted sequence so i was frantically searching for the thing . . . in the dark and actually squinting. I thought it did the best job of putting you in the situation. you know your guns are shit . . but where is the fucker gonna come from???? This game was good. To try and over analyse it IS pointless. People always expect a story . .why? Why cant we be ACTUAL GAME FANS and assume the doom story? we know doom is about a portal to hell . . .what comes out of hell . . .fucking monsters . . . do we need to know why . . .NO . . .cos we are in this shit right now and theres fuck all we can do about it. Deal with it. Its a good game.
Oh just to add. You are on mars . . no atmosphere, no reflective surfaces of any kind in the sky so in the dark its fucking dark. Your only source of light is artficial so once thats out . . then thats it. And the whole point is that the base is being fucked over paranormal shit. Man. double post. I cant believe ive reacted this way. I need those pills spooney . . and i need them now
I could only play DOOM 3 once because,as many have stated,The game was just WAY too dark, I mean darkness is my thing (Sleeping the whole day,and awake all night…VAMPIRE INTERNAL CLOCK |*w*| ) and I just could not stand playing a game that just ruined itself because of lighting problems.Its like DOOM 3 became self-aware and decided “Hey lets piss of some gamers!!!”.
now I do have to say the graphics was great they sure delivered there but Graphics can only do so much for a game,Graphics are a big part but not what makes a game fun…I mean Hell look at pong almost no graphics and is still as addictive as Resident Evil 1:Directors Cut/Uncut,as long as you have a friend to play with.
Fusa Out…
I agree with your analysis of this game.
Its how I felt about it also. The cheap shocks (they’re not scares), the monotony of eventually being able to predict every single enemy (right behind you, or right in front of every door you open) etc.
I honestly dont know why you can’t have flashlight + weapon either. It makes no sense.. you cant even havea flashlight and pistol? they’re both one handed items!
I never understood why the flashlight was so crappy either.. its supposed to be the future. I have LED flashlights better than that thin on my keyring.
Sadly, I think Deadspace did Doom better than Doom3 did, and even it was terrible.
I was so excited about DOOM3 that, after a day I sold it and used the 5 dollars to get myself a bottle of Coke and a Coffee Crunch. At least the latter were good and actually enjoyable.
You know what’s worse than Doom cubed (if it were doom 3, the three wouldn’t be in superscript right next to the name)? The XBox version had an intro that YOU COULDN’T SKIP!
you should right text reviews again
iono, i got pretty tired of the phoned in horror about an hour into it. how often can you go into a room, see glowing life sticks, and actually think nothing is going to jump out of the walls when you go to pick it up?
though there was one part of it that actually freaked me out, and that’s cuz i set the horror scene myself =P i played in the dead of night, with big ass headphones on, the volume cranked, in my haunted basement, alone. even then it was by chance that i heard a girl whisper “over here” in the left speaker. turns out there was a hallway i missed and every 10 steps or so i’d hear the same voice saying “over here, its just a little further” i get to the end of the hall to a door, the door jams, the control just stops, the screen goes blood red, while at the same time a woman lets loose a blood curdling scream of ” MY BABY! THEY TOOK MY BABY!!”
i about shit myself.
when i asked around though, turns out most people either didnt hear the girl whisper, or just skipped it.
I remember a interview with Carmack where he basically said that his first intention with the new Doom games is to make a good looking tech-demo. So that alone makes it mediocre.
I felt that this game wasn’t that bad, but it drags along and the envirement is dull and doesn’t vary much at all. I’d give it a 5/10.
By the way; that cover-art is the most ugly piece of shit I have ever seen. What happened to the epic coverart of Doom and Doom 2??!
I played this game, and it is scary and challenging, it is meant to play in dark with headphones, believe me, when I 1st played it I was about to crap my pants… I looked over my sholder every freaking 30 seconds… After a while u get used to it, but damn, Doom3 used entirely different concept as previous 2 parts, previeous epics were just shootemup from 1st person view
Someone mentioned that 1st part had a storyline, yeah, I liked story there, aliens killed his beloved bunny, and he went to awenge it… It made me laugh so hard at the time.. :D
But game was good, very goos, to walk around in a abandoned Mars base filled with demons and other stuff, it is just great, and thing that u need to switch between the lights just makes it perfect.. and if u r bitching about it, then u r pussy ass bitch, that’s what you are… and you know it… ]:>
As I said it is completely different concept as previous parts were, this is survival horror, Like Dead Space. and it wasnt dark because many PC’s at the time were not strong wenough, but because of thrill, there are many places where it is full of light and details, so you can’t bitch about that….
I loved this game it is really ghood game, and who the fuck cares about storyline if there are so many things 2 kill, even innocent people.. ^_^ And that is good, One of the best FPS games of all time.. and spoony, u suck…. no really, you suck!!!
You just bitch about every single game you come across, WTF man, I mean WTF! U have some problems or what, you are completely unfair… u act like a bitch in her menstrual cycle. I know that you just try to make some money, but man, I could do a better job… It’s just, that I have different things to do…. ok, that is about it… ^_^
and about character not talking, hmmm, what did it remin you, ah, Half-Life, Who has ever bitched about Gordon Freeman not talking, he kicks ass, and that is good enough, so lean off.. and ducktape something to your head, like brain or something….
I think the difference is that Half-Life has a interesting story to tell, while Doom 3 hasn’t.
Bottom line is Doom 3 is very very very overrated. Its nothing more then a cheap tech-demo with a horror-gimmick.
Hey I actually liked Doom 3, simply because they took a game with I mean a pamphlet’s worth of story and elaborated it to something feasible. I mean sure, the dark spookiness of it is really cheap most of the time and it had all those really dumb jumps but sometimes you like doing stuff like that. It was like going to a really cheap haunted house, and getting to shoot those fuckers who jump out and yell at you. Now it’s not like top 10 all time favorite game, but it’s a decent game nonetheless. To be honest I wasn’t expecting more than just a dark rail shooter but it did try at least. But as bad as the game was to most it did bring about one good thing….the Doom board game. I love that so much, I play it every chance I get! I recommend it to anyone who loves Board Games!
i liked Doom3!!! My mate got it on the day it came out and we played as a group (crank up thye diffilcuty and take turns everytime someone dies) it was a fun game with some creepy moments and gore soaked enviroments. While it was nouthing special it looked awsome and played well. Sure it was darkand claustraphobic but wasn’t that carmak’s intention? Whatever it was cool and using the chainsaw on those fucking cherubs is still satisfying as all hell. Bring on Doom 4 please ID and stop making half ass Quake sequels.
Doom3 is such an awful game. Bad engine that can only support perpetual darkness, half-life knockoff… Half-Life is such a better game in every single way, including graphics, just because in Doom3 you can’t see anything. The idea of firing blindly into the dark is retarded as well as the cheap scares.
Seriously, a kid with Microsoft paint can do graphics just as good as Doom3’s.
hey the reason for the dark is lots of people are scared of it….wouldnt be fitting to have everything extremley well lit, monsters couldnt jump out. Honestly the monsters spawning behind u are normally broadcast pretty well before hand. Strangley unfair review.
I used to be a huge doom fan. I used to be.
Then Carmack desicrated the hardcore, balls to the wall action of Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom.
For me it isn’t the cheap scares, bad story, sad action, annoying music, or the fact that their vents perfectly made for monsters to hide then jump out and bite your ass off that made this game painful to play. It was the fact that they destroyed the favorite series of my childhood by changing to a crappy horror game from total slaughterage.
Ps: Btw shouldn’t Doom 3 be Doom 5? because it went: Ultamate Doom, Doom 2, then Final Doom which had two campains, TNT and Plutonia.
To answer the question before it’s asked, yes, I AM a DOOM fanboy. :p
To #6: Doom was the second FPS game ever made, Wolfenstein 3D was the first, and ID created the FPS genre… Battletanks! 3D was the first First-Person perspective game ever made, and ID was the creator.
To Noah Antwiler:
To hear such a review of one of the greatest games of all time is like listening to someone scratching their nails on a chalkboard.
The game was NOT that dark. Hell, if you couldn’t see like you claim to not have, then you need to seriously consider having a visit with an eye doctor to get some glasses, contacts, or lasik. If you blame it on gamma, then you need to get a new monitor if you played it on the pc… A new tv if you played it on the xbox. About how repetitive the game is, every game in the history of games have ALWAYS been repetitive… always. I have never played a single game where EVERYTHING wasn’t repeated until your eyes/ears bled uncontrollably. Expecting something different walking into every room and hallway is like expecting to never get sick again. It’s never going to happen. The Mario Series, The Halo Series, The Sonic Series, The Tetris Series, The Elder Scrolls Series, The Final Fantasy Series, The Zelda Series, ANY other game or game series in the history of games, ALL of them were EXTREMELY repetitive. Sure they might have had some different monster placements, or they might have had different stories, but they were still repetitive. You start the game with pure bliss at being able to finally sink your teeth into the new game, but after an hour or two you come to quickly realize that it’s going to be exactly the same 10 minutes from now, and it’s going to be exactly the same 10 hours from now… You can’t avoid it, you can’t control it, that’s just how games ARE.
The Flashlight:
When I first played DOOM3 I thought the idea of either having a gun out or the flashlight out, not BOTH was benign at best. After I played through some of the game I began to realize that this is actually a good feel. It made the game more interesting. If you had been allowed to keep the flashlight and your gun out at the same time, all the time, the game would have lost it’s survival feel. There would have been no challenge since the monsters (even on nightmare mode) had almost no health at all. The darkness helped confuse you so that you couldn’t see where they were, you had to rely on sound cues.
Level Lighting:
The lighting was good. If you couldn’t see, then you need to have your eyes checked. I could see just fine the whole time, and I wear glasses. Personally, if they would have made it a cheerfully lit research facility, the game would have had no interesting things about it except maybe the exploration factor. The darkness helped make it more eerie and creepy, not scary, just more eerie and creepy. I wouldn’t change the lighting.
The Weapons Sounds:
Ok, here I have to agree with you. The pistol sounded like someone beating a tin can with a popsicle stick… what the fuck is this shit? I expect BANG BANG, not tik tik tik… and what in the fuck is up with the shotgun… sounds like a machine standing on it’s last leg. WAY too much metal sound in a shotgun blast… should sound more like a shotgun and less like someone taking change and making it clang together… anyway…
The PDA:
I thought and still think to this very day that the PDA was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you could finally get some back story on DOOM that you couldn’t in the first two games. A blessing because it described how the BFG 9000 actually worked. A blessing because you could see how life was inside the base. Yes, most of them bitched about not being home, about how their boss sucked, or how they hated working there, but it was still interesting to actually see what had happened previous to your little demonic adventure.
Now on the flipside, I thought it was a curse because you had to constantly get the fucking codes out of it. Now every locker and every locked door that required a keycode to get in… the PDA’s were not ALWAYS in the exact same room (I would have to say about 45% of the time). Oh, and you were NOT subject to getting killed while you were tinkering with the PDA, time stopped when you used it… Besides, if you were stupid enough to open it in a room that you didn’t check a few times over to make sure there weren’t any more monsters going to spawn in or come through the next door, then that’s your fault. Don’t drag the game down because you didn’t think before you hit the button.
All in all, this game was great. While it had it’s ups and downs, I’d have to say I really enjoyed playing it after I got over the whole flashlight part during the first hour or so I played the game. I’d have to give the game a 9/10. Good Job ID, keep up the good work. Oh, and I am desperately looking forward to DOOM 4.
BTW: You really made me laugh with a few phrases you said though…
“DOOM3 is a one-trick pony, and the trick is to kick you in the nards every time you enter the room.” That was great, thanks for the laugh. :p
Doom the second FPS ever made? Thats a load of horseshit. How about Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3D, and Blake Stone? These are all games that were released before Doom.
Okay… So I’ve read everyone’s comments for this review and I must say, this game probably does suck. First person shooters are always bad. They are made for the worst kind of nerd. Get out of the basement if you think this is such a masterpiece of a game, and go talk to some people. Maybe learn a new skill. When you come back to the game you will see that it’s pretty horrible, and so is your life.
← Previous Comments