Ah, Doom. Where would we be without you? Stuck playing crappy text adventures for the past 10 years? Faced with no reason to spend a thousand bucks on PC upgrades? Left without a convenient scapegoat for school shootings? The possibilities are too horrible to contemplate.
While the original Doom wasn't quite the birth of the first-person shooter on the PC, it definitely was the genre's coming-out party. So it's no great surprise that Doom 3, id Software's 2004 return to the series that started it all, has been getting an ear-splitting, teeth-rattling amount of pre-release bombast. OMFG! IT'S THE SECOND COMING OF PC GAMING! KNEEL! KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!
Yes, well. The reality of Doom 3 is this: it's a very, very, VERY good-looking game, and initially it's also extremely scary as well. But peel back the incredible graphics, character animation and overall production values, and there's really nothing in Doom 3 that we haven't seen done before. And, in many cases, done better.
Which is not to say Doom 3 is a bad game. And really, like any special-effects-soaked summer blockbuster, you're going to buy it no matter what I say. But best to go into it knowing what (and what not) to expect.
Doom 3 isn't a sequel to 1993's Doom and 1994's Doom II. Rather, it's a re-imagining of both games, sticking you in the space boots of a nameless and apparently mute Union Aerospace Corporation marine, summoned to the UAC facility on Mars to bolster its skittish security corps.
The first couple hours of Doom 3 are truly grand. Exploring UAC's Mars facility, talking to the people you meet, checking out the eye-popping machinery churning away in virtually every room ... the world of Doom 3 feels surprisingly fleshed out, helped in no small part by the stunning graphics and the insane amount of detail that's gone into building the computer game version of the world's most expensive Hollywood movie set.
Then all hell breaks loose - literally - and you spend the rest of the game's 18 or so hours of single-player mayhem fighting off the assorted minions of hell that have invaded the Martian base and turned its inhabitants into homicidal walking corpses.
Unlike Serious Sam, Painkiller or even the original Doom games, Doom 3 is less about charging into wide-open areas and moving down dozens of enemies at once with a chaingun and more about carefully creeping along claustrophobic corridors, waiting for the next hellspawn to pounce from a dark alcove or materialize behind you.
The game's use of light and darkness are literally second to none. Much of the UAC facility is shrouded in inky shadow, and while this may be the year 2145, apparently the marines haven't got around to equipping their weapons with lights - you have to manually switch between a flashlight and your gun of choice, which makes exploring darkened rooms just that much more terrifying.
For a game that's so technologically groundbreaking, Doom 3's system requirements won't necessarily bring your PC to its knees, if you're running a relatively modern rig. I played through the first portion of the game on an Athlon 2800+ XP machine with an ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which let me run at a resolution of 800 by 600 at the second highest graphical quality setting, and with scarcely a hiccup.
After I slotted a new ATI Radeon X800 Pro into my beast, though, all bets were off. I cranked the detail level to the max, bumped the resolution up and enabled the card's antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, and still got silky smooth framerates. Talk about finding heaven in hell. (It doesn't hurt that the X800s are also the video cards of choice for Half-Life 2, which will likely be in stores next month.)
But it was about halfway through the game that I realized the hinted-at snippets of a more complex story were never going to bear fruit, that there was never going to be a Halo-style firefight among a squad of A.I. comrades, that the Deus Ex-like overtones of the PDA entries you find scattered everywhere were never going to amount to much. Doom 3 is about action and atmosphere, and frankly not much else.
After a somewhat draggy and repetitive middle section you find yourself in the bowels of Hades itself for a while, and things pick up (and finally become a little more challenging) from there through to the end of the game, and its pants-wetting showdown with a familiar old pal.
And then, well, that's it. There's not a lot of replay value to be had, and Doom 3's barebones online deathmatch modes probably won't hold your attention for long.
Don't get me wrong, there were many times in Doom 3 when I yelped in genuine fear - as a "Pinky" demon leapt out of the darkness or a Commando Zombie emerged from a hidden alcove with its chaingun blazing or a Hellknight roared around a corner and swatted me with its claws.
And there are dozens of scripted moments in the game that are truly cinematic and terrifying, especially when coupled with a 5.1 surround sound system that immerses you in a sonic landscape of fear and foreboding.
But when it comes right down to it, System Shock 2 is more genuinely scary, Far Cry has more varied environments, Painkiller has cooler physics ... heck, even the original Half-Life has more interesting weapons than Doom 3's stock selection of bullet/rocket/plasma-belching firearms, though the addition of an uber-weapon called the Soulcube does add some tactical depth to the relentless carnage.
So if id Software's goal was to fuse '90s-style old-school Doom flavour with cutting-edge technology, they succeeded admirably with Doom 3. But they clearly decided not to push the envelope with anything other than the game's visuals.
And to me, that's a hell of a shame.
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BOTTOMLINE
High-tech graphics meet old-school gameplay in the triumphant return of the Doom series. While the visuals are second to none, the game ultimately doesn't bring anything new or notable to the first-person shooter formula.
