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.
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She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.
How about the stunning AI? I just loved how after an imp fell down from a glowing teleportation point it would roar, giving you ample time to run over to it and unload a shotgun shell in between its eyes. Screw Half-Life 2, THIS is truly the greatest FPS ever made!
Bit of a late review ain’t it?
Doom3 was not that bad. sure you were getting your arse munched by Imps constantly but the health and armor drops were really well placed i thought. Always felt satisfied when i crawled over a nice big stockpile at 30 health after battleing through rooms of baddies.
I never noticed the monsters spawning behind me as much as you make out either. Infact, i was always more worried about a chaingunner running up the corridor or running into one of those rocket launching fuckers. There was alot of killing. Its not like you only ever got to fight one or two imps, i remmeber several rooms where multiple badass monsters shot death at you as you attempted to avoide swarms of those little spider-face things. It had a mixture of horror and action ( very dark action mind ). True the first hour was very slow but im sure they were just trying to build a sence of dread and try to emmerse the player in the general feel of the game. And if you could put a torch on the gun there would be no point in even making it dark. i guess commen sence of the protagonist was the price they payed for the atmosfear they were going for.
I think they actually did alot with doom3. I personaly would have been a bit miffed if it played like the originals. Classic as there are, theres 2 games already with piles of mods. Doom3 HAD to be different to stand out. Its not the best game but its really not bad enough to be torn to shreads like that. I really find myself wondering how much of it you even played.
But yeah, the first 2 are more fun.
i’m done now.
I SO agree with everything. I don’t remember having any fun AT ALL running through the Mars base. Heck, I can’t even remember the difference from one level to the next. I remember one level had a big laser. Another level was outside. Then there was a computer room level. Everything else was pointless, aimless, unlit, non-functional corridors that didn’t really LEAD anywhere. The original Doom levels had more life to them! More color, more pizzaz. More freaking variation. Hell, original Doom even felt more 3-D!
Then you get to “hell”, where they give you ultimate power and actually REMOVE the darkness. Was the demon homeworld SUPPOSED to be easier than my base? To me it sure was.
Mainly, though … I miss the slaughterfests. Game designers are trying TOO hard to make “good” games. Sometimes all people want is to wade through one-shot imps, zombies and the occasional two-shot pinky. Gimme plenty of ammo. Plenty of health, plenty of enemies and steady aim … and I’ll give you a good review.
Boo! as a typical fanboy of Doom I must love anything that iD produces and thus I am forced to reject all your opinions and comment on how stupid you are without actually disproving any of your points.
Go back to a game that insults you due to connotations.
I liked Doom 3, I think that they really had to do something different with the game and moving it to more of a survival horror theme was a good move. Had they just made it a generic FPS, it would have felt… well generic. Doom was awesome for its time, but that was because back then the FPS genre was in its developmental stages and Doom was one of the first classic FPS games. But when Doom 3 was published, the market was saturated with conventional FPS games. Making Doom3 in the same style as its predecessors wouldn’t make the game feel remarkable at all. People didn’t just want Doom 2 with a fresh coat of paint, I think players wanted a new experience. We’ve all played dozens of conventional FPS and if D3 wanted to stand out it needed to add something.
Now I think Doom3 succeeded in retelling the story with a new flavor to it. I honestly didn’t find the darkness as bad as most people say it was and for the most part, a lot of the survival horror theme worked well. About the only complaint that I had was that the game levels (aside from Hell) did not seem very different from each other. They could have done a much better job of making the moon base levels feel and look different. Instead it was just one generic metal corridor after another and it seemed pretty lazy to me.
And the game could have benefited from letting you combine the flashlight with some of your other weapons, I don’t really think it would have hurt the horror atmosphere much. In fact they could have then made the game even darker and scarier because you wouldn’t’ always need some ambient light to fire your guns. As it was, you could generally see the enemies without the flashlight but they were just shadowy outlines. And if you were in one of those near pitch black areas you basically just retreated to a more well lit area to fight. This really could have been averted by just letting the player have a flashlight on the gun.
But the game did a nice job of adding survival horror elements while still feeling like Doom, the monsters had an aura of familiarity, yet because the game changed a lot, they also felt new as well. So you were still scared to encounter some of them.
Overall I’d probably give the game a 7 out of 10. It wasn’t an excellent game, but it was still very playable and entertaining.
God. Just hearing about this game makes me want to play Resident Evil so as to clear these thoughts from my head. And it’s 4 in the morning. The whole game was just: “Shine your flashlight, walk walk walk, get attacked, SHOOT ‘EM IN THE HEAD, rinse repeat.”
“People didn’t just want Doom 2 with a fresh coat of paint,”
O RLY? Seems to me that Lef4Dead is frickin HUGE. Popular and well liked. It has 6 enemies, all of which are zombies, 2 PVP levels and 2 other levels, none of which last more than an hour or so. However, people LOVE IT! It has no tedious plot, and what plot there IS is scrawled on walls to be ignored at your convenience. It’s best feature? It’s an FPS with NON-STOP FIGHTING! People don’t WANT to lurk through corridors, they want to SHOOT SHIT. That’s why we BUY First Person Shooters.
Do SOME people want “something different”? Sure. Is Left4Dead more popular than Doom3 has EVER been? I don’t have stats to back this up, but my gut says, “Hell yeah!”
I can’t see how your comparing L4d to Doom.
For one, doom is fun.
They’re both FPSes where you shoot zombies. And yes, “Doom” IS fun. Doom3 is NOT fun. The comparison comes from a non-statistical observation that more people SEEM to enjoy L4D than Doom3. I further speculate that it’s because of the non-stop shooting that’s involved. Yeah, it’s not exactly testimony that would hold up in court, but I don’t feel like doing proper research.
A stat I CAN stand behind is personal preference. I. Like. Killing. Stuff. Doom3 has what seemed like one enemy per minute or so. In L4D, the carnage is vamped up to closer to a zombie every 3 seconds, or sometimes 30 PER second. Plus, the levels have FAR more life and character to them.
If I’m going to play a game about killing zombies, I want to kill zombies, not lurk through narrow tunnels LIKE a zombie. RRAAWWWRRR. Pfft. No thank you.
You know, Doom 3 gets most of it’s bad rap, in my opinion, for several reasons.
1. Because no one paid attention to the fact that it was supposed to be a re-telling of the original doom
2. They don’t like the dark.
3. They don’t like the lack of a splatterfest.
Doom 3 does have some failings as a horror/survival game, but the lack of mountains of enemies piling out in front of your gun barrel -can- get boring. I loved the original Doom and Doom 2. I loved the balls to the walls firefights with lead and fireballs everywhere. This game has them too, just in smaller scale. Yes most of the time you’re fighting one, two, or only three baddies at once, but then you hit rooms when you have to deal with the first room containing a squad of Six Eyed No Ass Having Motherfuckers. And they don’t just spawn in, they come out of the ceiling, floor, air ducts. And it’s a beast to fight them. The first time you run into a Pinkie Demon it’s pretty damn bad because you can’t get through the door, and you’re just waiting for the bastard to bash through the plate glass so you can tango with it.
I agree whole heartily that the darkness can be mind boggling in how stifling it is. There’s a solution to that though. If you run the game on PC pick up the No Duct Tape on Mars or Falken’s Light Mod. ID practically endorses these, the first puts a light on your machine gun and I think -maybe- your shotgun. Falken’s puts a flashlight on everything, often with the bigger the gun the crappier the light, and no light on the rocket launcher or the BFG that I can remember off hand. The lights in those mods, also, are usually much less bright and tighter beamed than the flashlight, making you still have to worry about whats going to sneak up on you.
The cheap scares with creatures spawning behind you sucks after a while, yes, but it can make things dicey as well, forcing you to abandon your backpedal tactic should shit slap the fan, making you dive into a room to find better cover. The game is more about tension in Doom 3, rather than kicking the door down guns blazing. You know the bastards are coming, you know they’re gonna spawn behind you at some point, or come out of the walls. It’s just a matter of how geared up you let yourself become. They do the same in F.E.A.R. but the difference is in F.E.A.R. they do it better because sometimes they trick you and nothing happens. Doom fails in that.
The game has it’s ups and downs, but it’s still fun, unless you refuse to let yourself have fun.
1. I knew going into this that Doom3 was supposed to be a re-telling. That’s one of the things that leeched the enjoyment out of it. In the original Doom, I THOUGHT I was fighting the denizens of Hell, and that was friggin cool. Doom3 makes it VERY clear from the get-go that you’re fighting aliens. I really wish they had at least TRIED to keep the Hell theme for at least a little while before spoiling the truth. All in all, it did NOT feel like the original AT ALL. The story felt different. The genre. The pacing. PDAs? Really?
2. Very simple. If you have to use a THIRD PARTY MOD to make a game playable, then the GAME is not actually playable! It doesn’t matter if they “endorse” them. Unless they patch it into the game, it’s not a reviewable part of the game!
3. Many people that bought Spore complained that it wasn’t the game they thought they were buying. They were expecting, perhaps, something similar to EVO: Search for Eden (SNES title). What they got was a VERY badly done space sim. Same thing with Doom. Technically, they didn’t PROMISE a splatterfest, but that’s exactly what I was expecting and what I wanted. “Doom with kick-ass graphics.” What I got was, “F.E.A.R. with no graphics and bad design.” F.E.A.R. is a GREAT GAME, of course. I just want to play it. When I want splatterfests, I turn to id! (neither letter is capitalized, btw). Seriously, Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Heretic 2, Hexen, Quake 1-4 … ALL SPLATTERFESTS. It’s what they’re known for, and what I expected from a REMAKE.
Hello.
I agree with You Noah for the most games that u reviewed so far, but in this case i cant. Doom3 was awesome. I cant understand most of your problems and i think its becouse u played the xbox version and not the pc one. I’m an old school gamer myself, and even so I’m failed to see most of your problemes. For example the darkness thing. I can remember only 2 times in the WHOLE game (which is not very short i think) where i have to put away my gun to bring up the flashlight ( at least U dont have to change battery for those, right:D), one time with the doc in a long corridor and the 2nd was with a some stasis tubes for monsters that keeps eluminating thought the whole chamber while its moving. Anyway the reason is that You can see the monsters almost every time. There wasnt a single time where i cant point out my finger and say: the “monsta” is there. And even if u cant see it U can easily see the fireball or whatever that he creates and shoot that bastard. So i dont know why but i can go thought the game without any flashlight using, and didnt find the darkness thing irritating for my battles, and i have to say i can get scared preaty easily.
The 2nd thing: PDAs. Seriously? U can spend about 5 mins in the whole games with PDAs if u dont like em. U can see the cabinet codes becouse the are numbers and not letters like the whole letter. U can start a audio log and put away the PDA coz u can hear that and the code as well while u killin. There is always a prenote: “and the code is:” or something like this so if u dont play attention u still can hear it. So the whole PDA thing is such a minor problem if its a problem that it cant have that much negativ effect for the game.
About the horror/survival thing. U can play this game thought it 2 ways: 1 with flashlight and going like u have shit in your pants, that way u get scared and affraid of the monters, ahh and btw I didnt found that much situation where the monters “back-spawed” me, there is like 20 times in the game along with the trap doors or whatever so Im failed to see your point. Anyway, the 2 is when u go in oldschool guns blazing way. U can do it. U can go in and shoot a shotgun blast in the face of the spawning monsta before it can act. Use the sprint FGS. U can kill most of the enemies with shotgun before they can act or get in the way of your current fighting, and if not with shoti and with chainsaw, only the hellknight cant be killed that way. So if u go like berserk and not affraid of monsters u can easily kill em and make the whole game much more fast and much less horror style. But what do u expect in a closed base in Mars with alien infestation, to be like Las Vegas? Anyway if u want to see Doom3 played oldschool style than go and find some speedruns, i know they are HC gamers but u can clearly see u dont need flashlight, u dont need PDA and u dont need to be scaered, and play this game some other way. But if u still want 1000 of monsters go play Serious Sam. Pls play the Pc version if u can and use the sprint, that helps a lot. Sorry for misspelling and stuff. Byez
Quick note, Merkol . You lose most, if not all, of your credibility when you constantly spell the word “you” as “u”. You even spell it correctly ONCE which means that you actually CAN spell.
Anyway, I personally DID play the PC version. The lighting problem was just as bad, and I did everything IN GAME that I could to minimize the pain. I think about half the game was spent with my flashlight out. Waiting for the enemy to attack JUST SO YOU CAN SEE is generally a bad idea. It tends to get you hurt far worse than taking the initiative and blowing them away as soon as you spot them.
Ok. Maybe the lighting problem was just on my and my brothers pc is solved but i doubt it. As for my spelling, i ask for your sorry coz im not from England or USA i try my best but..:). I just cant understand these problems. As i mentioned i never used the flashlight and i was managed to finish the game in nightmare difficulty without it and u get instanly killed that way almost from everything. And i have to say that it can be done easily exept for few part where i had to load 5-6 times. Im not a pro gamer but i know that what i say can be done with very lil time of practice. I can manage to kill almost every spawning deamon without getting hit. If u use the sprint u can go where u see the red flash of spawning and blast the monsta ass before it can act. Thats not a hard thing i can tell ya and u can get the fealing with it that the monsters is scared from you and not the other way. So thats my oppinion, Doom3 was great.
Uh… Griffin… The monsters in Doom 3 _ARE_ From hell. They’re not Aliens. Pay attention to the game.
In continuation though, to battle back your assumptive tendencies, Griffin, I never said you needed a 3rd party mod to make the game playable. I’ve played/won without mods, and going back for another dance with the devil, I put in a mod for flashlights on my guns.
Some people don’t like how ID (I don’t -care- if you want to correct me on it being lower case) essentially did forced perspective on the fact that if you want to see clearly, you need a flashlight. Sometimes that’s what made it fun. Pulling out the light to check something you’re not quite sure of, and suddenly having a monster in your face, shrieking like a little girl, and bonking it in the head before you whipped out a gun to wax the fragger.
Also, lets face it, they (being ID) never said Doom 3 was to be a splatterfest, they said it was going to be a re-envisioning. Just because they made splatterfests in the past, doesn’t mean they’re restricted to it. Heck, Quake 4, despite your saying such, was hardly a splatter fest, and you might note that Raven Software was the primary group for making Quake 4. ID software was, essentially, an approval party who had some hand in it’s making. Doom 3 was meant to be dark, spooky, and keep players paranoid.
But that’s about all the time I’m going to spend on this subject, because after your, Griffin, response to me including the mildly nonsensical reference to the bait and switch of Spore , and your personal attacks on Merkol, I can pretty much decide that you’re just going to continue down such paths, and it will amount to me wasting my time.
hello all, sorry to interupt and being witty, but as a german i wonder what the text beneath the first picture means. mein leiben! ?? first possible match: mein leben! (my life). second match: mein leiden! (i suffer).
always glad to help and to annoy.
Cheap scare thats Doom 3 alright, although I like the whole torch/gun thing I know its kind of dumb that in the future the secret of duct tape has been lost but its a pretty good game mechanic. The main reson i hated doom 3 was cause Farcry was already out and it was soooooo much better.
My roommate supposedly paid more attention to the plot than I did, and was convinced that the portals in the game led to “another planet” instead of “Hell”. My fault for not researching it properly.
J.S. Rathburn, you’re main argument saying that the darkness was NOT a problem was the fact that you could mod it. Your paragraph didn’t mention you having enjoyed the game under it’s “normal” circumstances. Hence my so-called “assumptions”.
I wasn’t trying to “correct” you on the id spelling per se. I prefer to capitalize it, personally. I was merely stating a lesser known fact. And yes, some people liked the darkness/flashlight thing. Many people didn’t. I don’t have numbers. I can say that I, personally, hated it.
So, of my examples, the one game that you claim was NOT a splatterfest is also NOT made my id. Which means, what? That every OTHER game they made WAS such a game? And, yes, I acknowledge that they never said Doom3 was going to be splattery either. However, I NEVER got the impression (from their ads) that they were going to try for a survival/horror genre. I knew that it was supposed to have incredible graphics, and it was supposed to be a remake of classic Doom. THIS is where I made “assumptions”. Yeah, they were completely in their right to make whatever they wanted. That doesn’t change the fact that I could barely SEE their “incredible graphics”. As far as the genre change. Well, boo-hoo on my account. I’ll admit to that. However, it still wasn’t what I was expecting nor what I wanted to play.
As for my “attack” on merkol, I think you’re over reacting to that as well. I merely ask that if somebody is going to speak (type) in English, that he use the best English he knows how and he demonstrated knowledge of the word “you”. Neither my language nor my request were meant as a personal attack, but I’ll apologize if they were interpreted as such.
I love Doom3. i love the cheap scares, because they are not scary, they just make you jump from your seat and get angry at the monster.
There was some places that were too dark. But not in the whole game, more like 5 % of the game.
The story isnt that bad, its like a classical horror movie – not bad, only cliche.
I liked the audio logs and i would not like ”100 monsters in one room” thing.
I loved this review, hes absolutely right about the cheap scares, unbalanced weaponry and remarkly bad AI design.
What I especially dislike is the actual light hallways (Yes, hallways with dim but still existant light that makes you thank god your eyes can heal for the bare 5 second long hallway), and akwardly positioned dead ends (a path that goes off in a straight line and barely a meter later theres a wall, but somehow that dead end has blocked off all source of light) hides a zombie that at first seem unexistant considering the length of the alley, and yet somehow it wakes up just in the nick of time to jump out and snap at your arm making you jump and wondering why the design and physic of that area was so brutaly crippled.
Wolfenstein wasn’t that well on the Xbox, neither was Doom. New ones will be coming out soon which will go back to their roots. As well with another Resident Evil.
I agree with the claustrophobic halls, no name hero, but most importantly the fucking flashlight. If you’re holding a pistol in your right hand, you can hold a flashlight in your left. A big buff like him could withstand the recoil.
I dunno. I think he hit the nail on the head. However, he left out the part where you battle the final boss in what I guess is supposed to be the gates to hell, and it looks absolutely retarded. It looks like your fighting to get out (or in?)of the Devils Colon. Further more, the boss its absolutely horrible as far as difficulty. In fact when you raise the difficulty of the game, the monsters don’t become more skilled, or better AI, NO. They simply fire faster, and do more damage. Frankly the encounters are always in close quarter area’s so its not like they have a lot of room to maneuver anyways.
If you want to beat the game, fight the bosses by side strafing and jumping. If you want to beat the standard bad guys, simply walk backwards. They will always be behind you. I think I could have played and beat this game, using an Atari joy stick.
I thought Doom 3 was okay. Not great, but not bad either. It was average in the FPS genre, although if you compare it to the original games, it’ll always fail.
> I wasn’t trying to “correct” you on the id spelling per se. I prefer to capitalize it, personally.
It’s id as in the word id, the id and the ego. They are id Software, not “Identify Software”. It was originally spelled Id Software which made this clearer, but by the time of Doom 1 it was changed to lowercase id because it looks more stylish.
that reviewed included all the information gamer needs only fun in doom3 was that you could get classic doom mod to it but thats it and i am waiting what kind of Fuck up will the doom4 be
I was going to see if I couldn’t borrow a copy of that game, but if it is that bad, I may not. Sounds like Doom 3 suffers from modern-day wanna-be itis, basiclly, the coders didn’t care about plot or fun, just graphics, and to me, graphics never make a game, they are just bonuses. I have Doom (since it is now under open source now) and duke3d on my pc, and I still have fun with those games, and they are OLD.
I agree with the very first comment. Being one of my favorite single player fps’s for its time, doom3 was legit. I don’t understand why u continue to scorn the game’s “dark” spots, its not that dark! When you go in hell, its not dark, delta complex is not dark at all. Only dark part of the game was the first few levels, and that was to set the mood for the weaker monsters(zombies). I rarely used my flashlight if ever; And why the fuck would you want 100 monsters in one room!?!? I downloaded box maps, and spawned around that much in god mode…its not fun, you want corners, you want darkness. Story was mediocre though, lol.
I must have missed this update. I miss games like Castle Wolfenstein, however the first six episodes were put onto the iTouch/iPhone, with updated texturing so I am happy.
I agree on some points; and disagree on others.
The flashlight system seemed cool and original at first. But then it got fucking stupid. I had a lot of the same problems you did with the game. The story was still pretty okay since it stayed close to the original. But… again… where’s the slaughterfest that was the old DOOM? That’s what we came to know and love. John Carmack should be put to death; if anything simply because of Daikatana.
I never understood why this game got such high praise back in the day. I don’t remember being floored in any way by the graphics and I bought it the first day. Not to mention that the light from the flash light looked like ass when pointing at other lights. It was supposed to do shadows good, but it looked really bad an unrealistic to me.
And yeah, it’s not Doom, it’s not even a good FPS. Just some lame corridor shooter. Give me the olden Dooms any day.
Agreed. id failed to deliver a rather simple concept. Doom fans are NOT hard to please.
Here’s the rubric for making a Doom game:
1. Big guns that make loud noises.
2. Lots of demons to frag with these manly man-guns.
3. Heavy-freaking-Metal.
Really, that’s it. The Doom everyone remembers virtually had no plot, and really, the concept they brought to the table was brilliant. You start the game with a pistol, walk into the next room, and there’s a zombie. The INSTANT you kill that zombie, you no longer care about the plot. When I’m done playing a level of Doom, my thought process is literally ruined for the whole day. Ask me a question after playing Doom and my first instinct is to shout “RIP AND TEAR!” and reach for my Great Communicator. That is pure genius disguised in senseless slaughter.
Not with Doom3, though. The irony is that if Doom3 had stayed true to its roots, it would actually stand out in the constant stream of FPSes. Everyone and their grandma is trying to inject survival horror elements into their games anymore. FPS games try too hard to be sophisticated when it was a distinct lack of sophistication which made us fall in love with them.
The funny thing is that you’re right. If they had made a true Doom sequel, the game would have stood out from all the other FPS games. They just needed to make the metal louder, guns bigger, and add a lot more demons. Perhaps they could have made a bit less confusing level design, because that was the only thing that annoyed me in the original.
You raise some very valid points here, Spoony. Clever how you used a visual example of an even more over-hyped and over-rated Action game than Doom3 to further augment your point.
In my opinion, the true sequel to Doom 2 was PainKiller, pure mindless fun. Kill everything in the room, more stuff spawns, kill all of that stuff, get new badass weapons to kill stuff with, kill boss, rinse and repeat. Really a great way to kill some time.
When I played it, I wasn’t scared at all. Startled, yes. Scared? Not in the least. Thanks Spoony for confirming that I didn’t lose all my humanity and that normal people also didn’t find it scary.
Eh I actually really liked Doom 3.Its one of my favorite games actually. I thought there was plenty of atmosphere, running around in a dark ship with some prety creepy sounds and such. To each their own I suppose.
ductape mod is overrated, all you need to do is follow this easy 5 step program:
1. open doom3
2. fuck around with the brigtness
3. screw the gamma
4. ?????
5. ENJOY!
Man Noah, you were playing on the XBox version? I feel sorry for ya man. This sort of twitch jump reflex game kinda NEEDS a mouse. Think, “oh crap portal just opened be hind me”! I actually used most of the guns throughout the entire game. Different guns are better at killing different things. And some guns have rarer ammunition. You CAN run and gun this game, it just makes it much more likely that you’ll be ripped apart by the fiends of hell. Every corridor is the same drab grey metal? OF COURSE IT IS! Its a lab built on another freaking planet! You seriously think they have the time and resources to worry about sprucing the place up? I found D3 to be a serious adrenaline ride. The tension creeping through the dark rooms, listening to demons whisper terrible things to you, just wondering when and where the next one is going to port in gets the blood pumping. And hell was really creepy. I mean, hell is supposed to be chaotic, so how about a place that changes as you go through it. Come to a T intersection and go right? dead end? head back out, and there IS no path back anymore! Stuff like that is a lot of fun the first time you play it, sure after that you realize that it’s scripted and not really a chaotic change, but at the time it was way cool.
If you want balls to the wall guns and metal, just go play serious sam.
Hm, I enjoyed this game tbh. Atleast the Xbox version I played, it never had those big monsters comming at you when you had to use your flashlight, plus flashlight was more deadly than the pistol. Plus don’t think there was that many monsters comming from your behind in Xbox versio, compaired to PC versio anyhows. Must be because you can’t turn fast enough with the pad.
Anyhows, game was enjoyable, but it wasn’t like the old DOOMs for sure. :)
It’s really not that bad. Nothing too special, but I had some fun.
Here’s the good news. The parts of the game where you genuinely need the flashlight are usually parts without enemies. You can always retreat a couple of feet to a well-lit area.
What got old for me really quickly was having every other door have the pouncing imp behind it. That, and the Cyberdemon fight being easy as all hell, and frankly quite lame. Also, where the hell were the arachnotrons? And finally, your BFG sucks compared to classic Doom’s BFG, and you can beat the entire game with the shotgun. That, and the occasional plasma burst to take out the revenants’ homing missiles.
If you want some true action, get the Classic Doom mod for Doom 3. It’s a perfect remake of Knee Deep in the Dead, complete with properly remixed tunes of the original Doom. Its unadulterated awesomeness will kick your ass.
hm… i liked doom 3, found in genuinely scary, even. (then again, that was some time ago^^) from your description of what doom 3 should have been like – open areas, lots of mobs, metal music and constant gunfire – i guess you liked painkiller. XD
Well, My reaction to Doom 3 was pretty much the same as Spoony here, in fact, I was beginning to think I was wrong to hate it so much. I tried to play it twice thinking I was just missing something, but the bottom line was I just kept getting bored as hell. Bored. Period. I’m playing a FPS, not a badly designed adventure game, I should not be bored. I didn’t care about anything, and the graphics, while cinematic at times, were the same through-out 90% of the experience. Ok, yes I know it’s an installation on Mars, it’s going to be mechanical and drab in general, but seriously,why does the entire station look like a maintenance tunnel. No, it’s not realistic, it’s limitation. They developed an engine so demanding for the average computer at the time that there was a limitation on how many enemies it could handle at one time, which made the dungeon crawl design from hell, err hell with a capital H, necessary. The textures in Half-Life 2 may have generally been lacking in detail, the A.I was dumbed down, but the animation, the varied environments, and the way the story played out is a stark contrast to the technological nightmare that was Doom 3
Oh! I love DOOM 3! I bought it and the expansion as a double download on Steam.
The game is not that bad… yeah sure later on it gets a bit monotous but fuck man who cares about that when a doglikething munching your ass behind ya, and I think darkness makes the game scarier and exciting. What’s a survival horror without darkness? Yeah sometimes the flashlight thing gets annoying but there is a mod which adds flashlight to guns so you light the way as you gold your gun and when I’ve added the mod the game was PERFECT from there, in fact I started the whole game over from halfway.
This game was 10 kinds of awful and if you enjoyed it then you were probably too young to play the original DOOM games when they were released.
I have the Xbox version. I can agree to that the duct tape idea have crossed my mind while playing it, but it was not that hard to switch between that and the weapon (White button). You have four preset weapons on the directional buttons. But the real annoying bit is when you need a bigger gun. You actually have to sift through “Y” to find the one you need. Memorizing how many times you have to tap it to get the Rocket lanucher, as an example. The enemies spawn right in front, leaving the joy of sniping it out of the game. Some areas are too small, and, of course the biggest and hardest enemies spawn in there, preferably after a cutscene you can’t skip. I still like this game, but it has some aspects of cheap shots, yes in deed.
Every mod you need to install to make a game better is simply another thing the makers failed to do themselves. Why should we depend on unpaid fans to do what a multi-million game developer failed to do? Its pathetic.
You dare to compare Half Life 2 with this? How many mods do you need to install to make Half Life 2 playable? Exactly. And why is that? Because the developers worked hard and did their jobs, leaving us gamers with nothing to do but play and enjoy a great game.
I only got to the big spider boss before I traded it in. Never really got into it. It also annoyed me a bit that the Xbox version seemed to have quite a bit cut from it. I wanted to be able to explore a bit of the station before everything went to hell, like I’ve seen a player do in a YouTube vid. Apparently, they completely ripped all that out. And the PC version has some large areas that seem to have been scaled down significantly for the Xbox port. Most of this is insignificant, I know, but I found it irritating that I wasn’t getting the same game the PC gamers had.
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