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I will admit, that I am not a very big fan of the Doom series—in fact while people were boasting about it last summer as being an evolution before they even got to play it, I was already calling it out as nothing but the older Dooms with technological updates, but if you think about it, it really isn’t that bad. After all Doom helped bring PC gaming to the mainstream, and helped to mold the very popular first-person shooter genre that we now enjoy in more expansive forms now in the form of Far Cry, Half-Life, and Halo games. A lot of people thought that Doom 3 couldn’t be done on Xbox—especially with the added Co-op but by almost a miracle it was done.
Doom 3 follows the story of a no-name soldier who must come to Mars City to help with some problems they have been having in research and development. As it turns out the problems are that the scientist have opened the gateway to hell and now hell is on Mars as preposterous as that may sound. Going throughout the game you will see more details be unveiled, and come across a lot of emails, and audio files, most of which are trying to show a history and story behind the title. Most of which will probably bore the hell out of you, especially because you probably came into the game expecting only to kick some demon hell-spawn ass and not worry about something as inane as a story. This is were the game gets a bit strange though, is because it is actually trying to have a story. Last I checked, every single Doom was about finding a red key, killing some baddies, going to a boss, finding a red key, killing some baddies, so on and so on. Like a friend of mine said, “Since when the hell did Doom have a story? I don’t want to think anymore then I have to when I’m beating the crap out of stuff straight from hell”.
The game is for the most part still the same thing it was in the past Dooms. You may have to search some e-mails for passcodes to get into lockers to collect gear, you also will need to scan personnel’s PDA info to get past certain doors, but it still is basically the same basic run and gun any of the Dooms have been. You know if you are going the wrong way if you don’t see any demons as well. As soon as a demon runs straight towards you, you know that your going in the right direction. Most of the baddies aren’t that hard to take out either. Demons normally run straight for you and can easily be taken out in even the harder modes with a few shots from the shotgun without getting damaged. Any projectiles demons throw at you are also easily dodged. The most challenge you will probably find is when you run into zombie infantry packing shotguns or pistols that hide behind boxes while reloading and then come back out and shoot. I will give the game this though—it leaves you feeling dirty after your done playing like no other game can. This title is best experienced in a room with no people, no lights, and the sound cranked and the bass booming. Without this, you can’t have the full Doom III experience.
Then there is how the game actually handles and where Doom III starts to make less sense. Why is it I can’t have a weapon drawn, and throw a grenade at the same time? Is the technology to do that to advanced for the guys at iD software to find out, or did they not get the memo that that is standard affair in any FPS nowadays? Why is it that not one of the weapons I have has a flashlight already mounted to it? Sure I can see a zombie right before he bites into me because of the red glow in it’s eye, but it becomes annoying, especially when the reason I can’t dodge something is because I didn’t see the crate behind me. I also thought that it was strange that sometimes it would take more then two shots from a shotgun to take down a zombie, but if I beat them with my flashlight or fist twice, they would go down. There is also this little spider robot you will encounter a few times within the game that will follow you around and gun down demons as it comes past them, and without any threat, meaning all you have to do is walk behind it, and wait for the demons to be mowed down. The game also has its share of boss battles, which ultimately amount to grosser bigger versions of demons you have been encountering earlier on in levels, and while they are great to look at, they go down almost as easy as their lesser counterparts.
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