...Yeah, its old. But this is a review.
I had always wondered how much of an ignoramus it would take to damage a great franchise. Doom 3 is the reboot of ID Software's Doom franchise, and I say "reboot" because ID themselves called it a reboot, and you can't really call a 10-year span of a game that retells the story a sequel. I'm going to start off with the positive things about Doom 3. First off, it is a very fucking good looking game. The textures on the walls have a special kind of detail called "bump mapping" which makes lights interact with them and give the illusion they are 3D, shadows react realistically to light changes, and the scalability of the graphics engine makes it playable on a variety of machines. Second off, while it is a complete 180 in the gameplay compared to Doom 2, it is still set at a good pace to any player with any degree of skill in the FPS genre. Third off, ID gave it a back story. Usually in ID games, a back story means fuck all when you're mowing down rooms of enemies, but the story of Doom 3 has a surprising amount of work put into it, and some big name voice actor makes an appearance. Notice how I said "actor", singular, because the only recognizable voice actor is Steve Blum, who has been in every action game you can think of.
Now, let's talk negative. The graphics I mentioned eariler, while quite nice, are still a big target. Light quickly cuts off to dark, most of the halls are lit with either a flourescent light from the 1970's, or ID can't make a lighting engine to save its life. This is supposed to be a graphical orgasm, and it can't even light a room properly?! The weapon I was using at the time lit the room better than those lights! The game also throws so many scripted and cliche elements at your face, you sometimes wonder if you're watching a movie, or playing a game. Or a tech demo of a game. Now let's rip on the difficulty curve. Enemies spawn in the same place level after level, but that's usually par for the course in games, but at least have some variety in the placements of the enemies every now and again. The Imp creature appears so often in the same way as a normal human being drinks water, and it's incredibly weak; a shotgun blast or two, or a grenade immediately ends its miserable existance. In fact, most of the enemies are far and few, and your arsenal quickly fucks their shit up, I sometimes question if Hell's economy has been hit just as hard as the American economy. There are also zombies in the game. Which for an invasion from hell, that's pretty fucking weak. Literately. The zombies are like their skin is made out of papier mache, and slapping them with a flashlight twice, like how a pimp slaps a hooker, does the job. The cliche part of this is that in some parts, when you open a door, an Imp jumps at you. It's just a minor inconvenience and afterwards you kind of expect it because the game does it so damn much. This game is supposed to be marketed as a survival horror game, but it is not a survival horror game in the slightest. It's a hallway crawler with Imps jumping out at you whenever you open a door, or so much as blink your eyes.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the game is more linear than a straight line, and I know that defies the laws of physics, but shut up. The game is almost nothing but arbitrary hallways, almost being there's a boss fight on more than one occasion, which I guess you could say is a non-linear section, but then so is every boss fight. In Doom 3, a boss fight is: You're locked in a room, there's a big demon, pump enough lead into it until it stops living. And normally this wouldn't be a problem, but if the boss involves doing the same thing to take it down, as do the bosses in the whole fucking game, there's clearly a problem. The weapons palette is also blatantly recycled from Quake 3, and if you don't believe me, go play Quake 3. Back? Good. The machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, and BFG, to name a few, all make an appearance here. You know, that's the problem I have with ID's games. Between games, there's such a little change in the weapon palette. They've been basically the same since the original Doom. Granted it's standard practice to bring back weapons from your older games, but not your older franchises, and for fuck's sake, come up with new weapons! I at least give them credit for making the BFG 9000 even more of an amazing weapon.
Speaking of Quake 3, I feel I should mention multiplayer. Multiplayer is what made Quake 3, and the original Dooms what they were, because they pioneered online gaming. In Doom 3, the multiplayer felt like an afterthought. What happened to the lightning fast deathmatches and the inspired, open maps? What happened to the variety in gametypes? And for the love of God, and all that is holy, where the hell is the Gauntlet?! Instead, we're treated to the same fucking hallways from the same fucking palettes as the single player. Oh sure, you move faster, but that doesn't have any effect when you're walking down a HALLWAY. In conclusion, I'd like to say Doom 3 is the uninspired bastard child of Doom 2, but as a game on it's own, you can certainly do worse. You know, I might sound like a pissed off fan with a raging hard on for the classics, and I am not ashamed to say that, but it pisses me off to no end when a company decides to make a sequel, or reboot, or new game, without staying true to what make the original games so great. Doom 3 didn't ruin the Doom name, I still to this day play Doom 1 and 2, but if you're going to make a sequel a decade after the first game came out, do a good job on it.
I had always wondered how much of an ignoramus it would take to damage a great franchise. Doom 3 is the reboot of ID Software's Doom franchise, and I say "reboot" because ID themselves called it a reboot, and you can't really call a 10-year span of a game that retells the story a sequel. I'm going to start off with the positive things about Doom 3. First off, it is a very fucking good looking game. The textures on the walls have a special kind of detail called "bump mapping" which makes lights interact with them and give the illusion they are 3D, shadows react realistically to light changes, and the scalability of the graphics engine makes it playable on a variety of machines. Second off, while it is a complete 180 in the gameplay compared to Doom 2, it is still set at a good pace to any player with any degree of skill in the FPS genre. Third off, ID gave it a back story. Usually in ID games, a back story means fuck all when you're mowing down rooms of enemies, but the story of Doom 3 has a surprising amount of work put into it, and some big name voice actor makes an appearance. Notice how I said "actor", singular, because the only recognizable voice actor is Steve Blum, who has been in every action game you can think of.
Now, let's talk negative. The graphics I mentioned eariler, while quite nice, are still a big target. Light quickly cuts off to dark, most of the halls are lit with either a flourescent light from the 1970's, or ID can't make a lighting engine to save its life. This is supposed to be a graphical orgasm, and it can't even light a room properly?! The weapon I was using at the time lit the room better than those lights! The game also throws so many scripted and cliche elements at your face, you sometimes wonder if you're watching a movie, or playing a game. Or a tech demo of a game. Now let's rip on the difficulty curve. Enemies spawn in the same place level after level, but that's usually par for the course in games, but at least have some variety in the placements of the enemies every now and again. The Imp creature appears so often in the same way as a normal human being drinks water, and it's incredibly weak; a shotgun blast or two, or a grenade immediately ends its miserable existance. In fact, most of the enemies are far and few, and your arsenal quickly fucks their shit up, I sometimes question if Hell's economy has been hit just as hard as the American economy. There are also zombies in the game. Which for an invasion from hell, that's pretty fucking weak. Literately. The zombies are like their skin is made out of papier mache, and slapping them with a flashlight twice, like how a pimp slaps a hooker, does the job. The cliche part of this is that in some parts, when you open a door, an Imp jumps at you. It's just a minor inconvenience and afterwards you kind of expect it because the game does it so damn much. This game is supposed to be marketed as a survival horror game, but it is not a survival horror game in the slightest. It's a hallway crawler with Imps jumping out at you whenever you open a door, or so much as blink your eyes.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the game is more linear than a straight line, and I know that defies the laws of physics, but shut up. The game is almost nothing but arbitrary hallways, almost being there's a boss fight on more than one occasion, which I guess you could say is a non-linear section, but then so is every boss fight. In Doom 3, a boss fight is: You're locked in a room, there's a big demon, pump enough lead into it until it stops living. And normally this wouldn't be a problem, but if the boss involves doing the same thing to take it down, as do the bosses in the whole fucking game, there's clearly a problem. The weapons palette is also blatantly recycled from Quake 3, and if you don't believe me, go play Quake 3. Back? Good. The machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, and BFG, to name a few, all make an appearance here. You know, that's the problem I have with ID's games. Between games, there's such a little change in the weapon palette. They've been basically the same since the original Doom. Granted it's standard practice to bring back weapons from your older games, but not your older franchises, and for fuck's sake, come up with new weapons! I at least give them credit for making the BFG 9000 even more of an amazing weapon.
Speaking of Quake 3, I feel I should mention multiplayer. Multiplayer is what made Quake 3, and the original Dooms what they were, because they pioneered online gaming. In Doom 3, the multiplayer felt like an afterthought. What happened to the lightning fast deathmatches and the inspired, open maps? What happened to the variety in gametypes? And for the love of God, and all that is holy, where the hell is the Gauntlet?! Instead, we're treated to the same fucking hallways from the same fucking palettes as the single player. Oh sure, you move faster, but that doesn't have any effect when you're walking down a HALLWAY. In conclusion, I'd like to say Doom 3 is the uninspired bastard child of Doom 2, but as a game on it's own, you can certainly do worse. You know, I might sound like a pissed off fan with a raging hard on for the classics, and I am not ashamed to say that, but it pisses me off to no end when a company decides to make a sequel, or reboot, or new game, without staying true to what make the original games so great. Doom 3 didn't ruin the Doom name, I still to this day play Doom 1 and 2, but if you're going to make a sequel a decade after the first game came out, do a good job on it.
