Reviewed: August 30, 2004
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Activision
Developer
id Software
Released: August 3, 2004
Genre: FPS
Players: 16
ESRB: Mature
8
10
10
9
9.1
Minimum System Requirements
Doom 3 is a lot like chocolate cake. I love chocolate cake but after 42 slices of it I never want to eat another piece. That’s pretty much how I felt after defeating the final boss in Doom 3 three weeks and 42 hours after I started playing. Make no mistake about it. Doom 3 is a masterful piece of work, mainly in presentation, not so much in gameplay. It is a visual feast for the eyes, an emotional roller coaster, and a benchmark by which all gaming rigs and video cards will be measured, at least until Half-Life 2 arrives next month.
Doom 3 is all about the atmosphere, ironically taking place on Mars where there is none. But the UAC is about to change that with new terraforming technology that can manipulate matter at the atomic level turning red dirt into water or even breathable air. Of course there is a secret lurking deep in the Delta Labs, a secret you’ll learn all too soon. As one scientist so eloquently put it, “The Devil is real and I have built his cage.”
Skip this paragraph unless you want a minor spoiler. Apparently, the scientists on Mars have been working on teleportation technology and the resulting wormholes have opened a dimensional door to hell. Various demons have been brought back for study and display in some sinister museum, but other demons are now spilling into our dimension, and the Mars installation is crawling with the suckers.
But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s begin at the beginning. You play as a generic Marine (you don’t even have a name) sent to Mars for a routine tour of duty. The opening movie has a shuttle depositing you into the spaceport where an interactive introduction gets you familiar with the game. This entire sequence is very much like the opening in the original Half-Life even culminating with a dimensional explosion that releases all sorts of nasty demons and zombies into the base. That’s when the game really begins.
Doom 3 doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a hardcore FPS game. They load you down with a small arsenal of weapons and unleash the hounds of hell, literally. Only quick reflexes and a spasmodic trigger finger will keep you alive to the closing credits.
What Doom 3 does do, and very well I might add, is setup a genuinely creepy atmosphere. Even before the “accident” that gets things rolling, Mars and the UAC installation is just a dark and brooding environment. Everything is very sterile, lots of metal, computer monitors, and countless miles of pipes and conduit. It’s also very dark, even with the lights on, but when those lights go off, you’d better have a flashlight handy.
Light, or rather the absence of light, is used to create much of the fear you will be experiencing in Doom 3. You are given a powerful flashlight early in the game and the first time the power shuts down (even though there are no demons yet), it’s just a troubling “oh crap” moment until you reach the exit and they come back on.
Fear plays a major part in Doom 3. Part of it is psychological, generated by the hostile environment, your obvious seclusion as one of only a very few survivors, and the only one with any firepower. There is a surprisingly developed story that plays out through emails, voice and video logs that you will find scattered about the UAC installation on PDA’s and video discs. These pay tribute to the notes and books from classic games like Resident Evil, and generate much of the back story or at least fill in the gaps.
But most of the fear is that in your face, “cat jumping out of a dumpster”, or similar moments. Unfortunately, these tricks become a bit stale about 6-10 hours in the game. You quickly learn that a zombie will be lurking behind almost every closed door; giant spiders (Trites) will crawl out from those narrow gaps along the walls, and every time you pick up a nice assortment of ammo or health a bunch of demons will warp in to deplete you of those items.
Later in the game some of the demons won’t even try to surprise you. They warp into the level with a blinding flash of orange lightning that will alert you to their presence from three rooms away giving you plenty of time to stash your light and ready your weapon of choice. Oh yeah, about that flashlight.
The flashlight is probably your most important item in Doom 3, or at least a close second to the BFG9000. Without it you would be “doomed” to an eternity (or at least 40hrs) of darkness. Apparently the Marines of the future haven’t figured out how to mount a lamp on their helmet or their shoulder and are reduced to carrying around a conventional flashlight. And since all of the weapons (with the exception of the pistol) require two hands you’ll find yourself in the unenviable position of having to choose between fighting and seeing.
This did present a slight problem at first until I remapped the flashlight toggle to MB4 on my Logitech MX510 mouse. That is the thumb button along the left side and I highly recommend this solution if you have a similar mouse. It gives you the ability to instantly swap the light with your current weapon while keeping your left hand free to dodge and move.
There are numerous instances of looking with the light followed by shooting into darkness, and then checking with the light to make sure you killed your target. Fortunately, the targeting cursor changes to red when hovering over an enemy, even if you can’t see them, so you have a slight advantage to fighting in the dark.
While the darkness might be perceived as an annoyance to some, I found that it quickly became a viable part of the gameplay, almost like an enemy unto itself that had to be fought the entire game. Since most of the game is played at some level of darkness any light whatsoever just became that much more noticeable. Shadows are cast in real-time so moving lights like red warning beacons, swaying fluorescent fixtures, or the centrifuge in the research area create some eerie moving shadows, and backlighting was used to create some sinister silhouettes. It’s amazing how much a computer and three pipes look like a demon ready to attack when lit from behind.
All of this sinister lighting, the sense of isolation, and foreboding atmosphere created some genuine fear along with an ongoing sense of uneasiness and even some paranoia. I counted each time I yelled aloud at something and by the end of the game I had 14 hash marks on my notepad. For a game that eventually got very predictable, they managed to save a few surprises, even up to the very end.
The enemies in Doom 3 are more frightening in their appearance than in their tactics. AI is lacking and these mindless hordes simply come right at you challenging the fact that you may have forgot to reload after the last encounter. The four bosses in the game create a bit more of a challenge but mainly only due to their increased firepower and hit points. You can circle-strafe your way to victory against all the bosses once you learn the best weapon for each one.
There is a wonderful assortment of weapons in the game. You start off with this bad ass pistol that looks just like the one from Blade Runner. You then add a shotgun, assault rifle, plasma gun, chaingun, grenades, rocket launcher, chainsaw, and the piece de résistance, the BFG9000.
As the weapons and ammo become more plentiful, so do the monsters. While some weapons work better against some monsters, for the most part you are free to use whatever you like. The shotgun can take down all zombies and a few of the lesser demons with one or two blasts at close range. The assault rifle works great against the Trites while the rapid-fire plasma gun is best against the Lost Souls. And even though you might never suspect it, backing into a corner and holding down the fire button with the chainsaw in your hand is a great tactic against any enemy that has no ranged attack.
Imps and Revenants are probably two of the most formidable opponents because both have powerful range attacks. Imps shoot fireballs, but they are right handed so you can use this against them by dodging to the left a lot. Revenants shoot rockets but those can be shot down before the reach you. Imps and Trites also have a lunging attack where they can spring across a room and get in a cheap shot. These lunges accounted for a lot of my “scream moments”.
Your UAC-issue PDA quickly becomes an important tool in your quest. Not only does it maintain a log of emails, voice, and video discs, both for you and every other PDA you find and download, but it is constantly being upgraded with new security clearances that will get you deeper into the complex. Emails and voice logs are cleverly used to further the story and give you access codes to 30 locked storage cabinets that contain health, weapons, and ammo. One particularly innovative design element will actually send you to the REAL Internet in search of a cabinet code for two special lockers.
After you have saved the world (or do you?) Doom 3 offers a standard multiplayer component in hopes of keeping you playing until the first mods arrive. You have your standard Deathmatch and team variations set in some special maps that are more conducive to multiplayer than the claustrophobic single-player environments. It’s a token effort so the designers could say, “sure we have multiplayer”, but you probably won’t spend much time here. Frankly, after I had finished the single-player game I was physically and emotionally exhausted and looking for something a bit more cheerful to play.
Doom 3 is a spectacular achievement in environmental graphics. It does things with textures and light (or absence of light) that nobody has ever done before. If you have a next-gen video card with Pixel Shader 3.0 support the textures will leap off the screen, just like the demons.
You’ll need a pretty powerful rig to get this game to run as well as it deserves to be run. My system was more than double the power of the required system and I still had to make a few concessions to achieve optimal framerates in the 40’s. I suppose if you have an over-clocked, water-cooled, system you can probably run this game at max settings. Even so, at 1280x1024 with high graphics options, Doom 3 is a stunning experience.
There were only a few cutscenes that appeared to be pre-rendered and even then it looks like they were generated with game engine graphics. Most of the cutscenes are scripted events that control the in-game graphics and end with the camera zooming into the back of our Marine’s head returning our control and view to his perspective.
Perhaps the most stunning achievement in graphics aside from the lighting was the vast assortment of animated textures that were used to create the countless video displays. Not only were these displays animated with wonderful and believable textures, many of them were interactive. Your cursor would change to a pointy finger and you could use these touch-screens to download information to your PDA, unlock areas, rotate a bridge, operate an elevator, or activate a monorail. Even the health station, when touched, sprang to life with vital statistics like heart rate and blood pressure.
The weapon models look fantastic, each with special lighting effects and digital ammo counters. They also have interesting fire and reload animations. The flashlight is a work of art and looks just like the real thing with a cone of light, swirling dust particles in the beam, and that creepy dark ring in the center of the circle of light. It realistically lights up the area and even reflects from the demonic eyes of creatures hiding in the darkness.
While the zombies are more amusing than scary, especially fat zombies and headless zombies, the demons are definitely scarier and deadlier. Perhaps the scariest of the monsters are the ones you never really get a good look at. Cherubs, Cacodemons, and Lost Souls are fast-moving apparitions that lurk in darkness and are only visible the moment they strike, in a blinding burst of muzzle flash. In fact, I didn’t get my first good look at any of these creatures until I went back and started going through my screenshots. It’s actually more terrifying (in a subliminal way) to never get a good look at these creatures, as your imagination does a good job of completing what the game only starts.
Much like the visuals, sound and music combine to enhance the already oppressive atmosphere of Doom 3. Music is minimal and used only as need to enhance a cutscene or scripted event. The rest of the audio presentation is left for chilling sound effects, demonic screams, screeches, and howls, and incessant gunfire.
To my delight, each weapon has a totally unique sound effect, both for firing and reloading but the sound levels for the gunfire and resulting explosions were a bit muffled, or at least not as thunderous as I would have expected or liked. I got better sub-woofer effects from the vibrations of the reactor core than I did from the baby nuke explosions of the BFG.
There were some sheer moments of audio terror. I stumbled onto one horrific scene of a dead scientist, his PDA lying in the middle of a pentagram surrounded by flickering candles and then I hear a ghostly voice hiss, “SAVE ME”. Another time I’m walking through a level and hear a disembodied voice say, “follow me” and then these bloody footprints appear and move away from me. I follow them to a dead-end passage and I hear a woman’s voice say, “save my baby”, followed by the cries of an unseen infant as the screen turns blood red. Yes, this game will freak you out.
Speech is perfect, both in quality and content. All of the interactions with NPC’s are spoken, although you (the Marine) never speak. There are also numerous voice logs that you can play back for story elements and critical access codes. In a moment of designer brilliance, you can close your PDA and continue to listen to these logs as you move ahead.
Another quality moment, several actually, are the narrated promotional videos you can watch throughout the complex and eventually download to your PDA. These informative videos not only look fantastic, they are narrated by “that guy” with “that voice”, you know the one…yeah, that guy.
The entire sound package is available in surround sound. One odd glitch is that the game insists on having your Windows Control Panel sound settings set to 5.1 before you can enable Surround Speakers in the Doom 3 options. My Audigy ZS is normally set to 7.1 so I had to back it down, which in turn affected my audio performance in games like Painkiller, Far Cry, and Call of Duty until I set it back.
In a day where games are constantly being bashed for being “too short” I would have to claim the opposite with Doom 3. I found the game painfully long, mainly due to the repetitive nature of the gameplay and the environments. About 30 hours into the game I make it to hell and think, “Oh good, I’m about done.” Cue maniacal laughter. Oh no Marine, you get to go back and work through even more levels on Mars then come back to hell later.
I’ll confess right now that when I got to hell and had my flashlight and weapons stripped away from me I had had enough and opted to invoke the “god mode”, partly because I was just tired of the game, but mainly because this review was already a week late. Imagine my surprise that even with “god mode” enable I still had more than 10 hours ahead of me.
So yes, there is plenty of single-player goodness (or evilness) in store for you with Doom 3. The game auto-saves at the beginning of each new level and you can create as many custom saves as you want anywhere in the game. There is also the standard F5/F9 quicksave and quickload.
I was surprised at the steep $55 retail price for this title, but savvy shoppers should be able to find it for $45. Hopeful Marines will also want to make sure you have the gear to run this monster. Chances are unless your machine is brand new you will likely need at least one upgrade to make the game run as it was meant to be.
Also keep in mind that the Xbox version of Doom 3 is on the horizon. I played the Xbox version at E3 and it looks just as good as the PC version, albeit at a lower resolution. You can probably pick up an Xbox and the game (when it ships) for the cost of the video card required for Doom 3 on the PC, assuming an upgrade is needed.
Doom 3 is more of an experience than a game. I was reminded of those haunted mansions or “dark rides” they have at theme parks. The designers do a great job of hinting at the overall plot, leaving you various clues to the puzzle. Chances are most gamers will figure things out before it’s actually spelled out for you, but I rather enjoyed being spoon-fed each tasty morsel of the plot.
At its core, Doom 3 is nothing more than either of the original Doom games with a 21st century facelift. A twitch-fest for the reflexes and an assault on your senses, it might not break new ground or explore new facets of gameplay, but Doom 3 does deliver the ride of your life, wrapped up in one of the nicest presentation packages of any game to date.