Doom 3 Review

Overall Rating

"Good" graphics (but not excellent)
Atmospheric

Dull gameplay
Poor use of sound
Dumb AI - easy to kill creatures
Very repetitive
Trading on original Doom's reputation
Where's the story?
Over-reliance on simple scripting

After the excellent game that was Far Cry, I sat back and waited until Doom 3 was released.

Initally I liked Doom 3, the first level was a good introduction. but after the first level the game went downhill.

I'm running the game on a decent PC (Athlon XP2800, Geforce FX5600, 512MB DDR) and have to set it to "medium" with no anti-aliasing otherwise the frame-rate drops to the point where you can't control what happens when you get attacked by a monster.

The game itself seems like a step back 2 or 3 years in time, when every code shop was knocking out 1st person corridor shooters (Soldier of Fortune, etc.)

the biggest problem is no "hook" to keep me playing, I'm only playing doom 3 because I'm bored and there's nothing on TV, I want to finish the game as I don't like leaving games unfinished, but as soon as it's done its going to the exchange shop and will never grace my desktop again!

The lack of decent story is inexcusable if you look at some recent PC games (NOLF2, Far cry again!) Doom 3 consists of running down a corridor, blasting ugly monsters, finding health and ammo, running down another corridor and so on....

It really gets boring after a while, at least the original Doom was innovative for its time and very fun to play (although Duke Nukem 3D was arguably better, more interactive and fun).

The lack of interaction is quite incredible, after all the games of the last few years that allowed you to move items about, pull switches, blow out lightbulbs, blow the wall away (red faction) Doom 3 totally lack a consistency of interaction - basically you can't do much unless the game designer wanted you to.

It's frustrating when you can't blow out a window with a rocket launcher(!!!), and when you shoot a computer terminal the bullets vanish after a few seconds. What happened to all the progress made in other games?

There are a couple of decent bits, for example in one level you have to lift leaking radiation barrels into a drain. There are parts of levels where you have to jump across platforms, or drop ramps.

It's very easy to get lost, as there is no map, and sudden attacks can mess up your sense of direction.

Speaking of attacks, the enemies are dumb and tend to use "swarming" to attack the player. As everything has such simple scripting, you can tell where attacks are coming from when you replay sections, and this with the quicksave makes it easy to work quickly through the game.

OK, the graphics are an obvious improvement over the original Doom 3, but not radically better than games from 2 years back, like the amazing graphics in Far Cry (which ran beautifully smoothly on my PC).

Also, it's very very black and you spend half of your time using a torch to see where you're going (if you turn up the gamma setting it looks yucky)

Overall, I was disappointed with the lack of innovation, low interactivity and absence of a decent story.

Maybe ID spent too much time making Quake III no-story-type games and forgot how to make decent single player games?

Members' Comments onroelkoel's Review

• TOMLEECEE on 9th Dec 2004

  I think you have missed the point with this review. Doom was always about running down corridors are blasting things. Just because Far Cry, Half Life etc have more involving plot lines doesnt mean all games have to be similar. Its akin to giving Serious Sam a low score just because there's no plot. Doom 3 is a Doom game and any meddling with the formula may have left fans of the original cold. Some of the points you make are perfectly valid (destructable environments etc), but the industry's obsession with trying too hard to improve an old idea can sometimes result in a mismash of a game (look at spyhunter). Doom 3 is, was and always shall be a no brain shooter.