If it weren't for the Doom name attached to it, Doom 3 would have already been forgotten about along with every other mediocre first person shooter from the 2000s.
In some ways Doom 3 is a logical progression from iD Software's Doom 64 - Furthering the dark and horror aesthetic of that game and sprinkling it into the mechanics themselves. Perhaps if Doom 3 committed to being a true survival horror shooter, it could have worked, but the end result is "Kind of Doom, But Slow" instead.
After the allure of the horror aesthetic quickly dissipates within the first 30 minutes, you find yourself trudging through hours of same-looking dark sci-fi corridors, shooting awfully unsatisfying guns at bullet spongy enemies that result in even less satisfying death animations.
The game improves as more demon types show up, but even appreciating those comes with a few asterisks. Most enemies have a radical redesign, and very few of those land. The coolest monsters in Doom 3 are those original to this entry, though I still can't tell if it was their raw cool factor, or their novelty that charmed me.
Doom 3 weaves together all of its levels in a somewhat seamless-feeling progression throughout a UAC Mars base. This is part of the reason so much of the game's levels look and feel the same, and in some ways it reminds me of a poor man's Half-Life. Doom 3 also introduces cutscenes and voiced characters in an attempt to weave together a narrative, though honestly I fail to see the value in the attempt, as Doom 3 practically doesn't have a story anyway.
At times Doom 3's environments boast impressive detail and interactivity, but that too gets old quick. Scouring through emails to find codes, or fiddling with janky control panels to control various contraptions once again feels like extra, unnecessary steps to the Doom formula of Hit Button, Find Key.
Doom 3 experiments with a lot of things new for Doom, but never fully commits to its new ideas. Anything that I can almost appreciate comes with some sort of caveat. Sure, for the time on a technical level, Doom 3 was graphically impressive. But aesthetically it looks like a fake video game you might see someone playing in a movie or TV show.
Doom 3 is ugly, slow, and unsatisfying. It is the perfect companion to the 2005 Doom movie.
In some ways Doom 3 is a logical progression from iD Software's Doom 64 - Furthering the dark and horror aesthetic of that game and sprinkling it into the mechanics themselves. Perhaps if Doom 3 committed to being a true survival horror shooter, it could have worked, but the end result is "Kind of Doom, But Slow" instead.
After the allure of the horror aesthetic quickly dissipates within the first 30 minutes, you find yourself trudging through hours of same-looking dark sci-fi corridors, shooting awfully unsatisfying guns at bullet spongy enemies that result in even less satisfying death animations.
The game improves as more demon types show up, but even appreciating those comes with a few asterisks. Most enemies have a radical redesign, and very few of those land. The coolest monsters in Doom 3 are those original to this entry, though I still can't tell if it was their raw cool factor, or their novelty that charmed me.
Doom 3 weaves together all of its levels in a somewhat seamless-feeling progression throughout a UAC Mars base. This is part of the reason so much of the game's levels look and feel the same, and in some ways it reminds me of a poor man's Half-Life. Doom 3 also introduces cutscenes and voiced characters in an attempt to weave together a narrative, though honestly I fail to see the value in the attempt, as Doom 3 practically doesn't have a story anyway.
At times Doom 3's environments boast impressive detail and interactivity, but that too gets old quick. Scouring through emails to find codes, or fiddling with janky control panels to control various contraptions once again feels like extra, unnecessary steps to the Doom formula of Hit Button, Find Key.
Doom 3 experiments with a lot of things new for Doom, but never fully commits to its new ideas. Anything that I can almost appreciate comes with some sort of caveat. Sure, for the time on a technical level, Doom 3 was graphically impressive. But aesthetically it looks like a fake video game you might see someone playing in a movie or TV show.
Doom 3 is ugly, slow, and unsatisfying. It is the perfect companion to the 2005 Doom movie.
2 Comments
Re-reading this; I still basically stand by all of my original points but I'd like to address Midway's involvement with Doom64 as well as the fact that Doom 3's levels flowing into one another is probably more in line with iD's Quake II, which I had not played before writing this review originally. (Doom 3 still makes sense as a follow up from 64, and a continuation of that path for the brand even if that game was largely handled by another studio.)
letshugbro
3 years ago