Crayola Clan Wiki | Reviews / Doom 3

August 14, 2006

I finished Doom 3 yesterday. Overall, I liked it a lot. It was a very satisfying single-player experience. (I haven't tried multi-player.) I wrote before that Quake 4 was dark, but I really had no idea what a dark game was. Doom 3 is the undisputed King of Darkness. And again I don't mean ambiance-wise, I mean lighting-wise. There were plenty of areas where the screen was pitch black and you could only see using your flashlight. (No amount of gamma or brightness adjustment fixed this, either.) And guess what? You can't hold a gun and a flashlight at the same time. So guess what? If you need to actually shoot something in the darkness, the game screen becomes... you guessed it... pitch black. Very disorienting and not a particularly fun aspect of the game for me.

Like its predecessors, Doom 3 is not a game for the kiddies. It's billed as a "horror" game, and there's plenty of horror in it, though I found most of it pretty gimmicky and cliche. As usual, if you've seen any of the Alien movies, you've basically seen all of the "horror" elements of the game. (The areas in Hell were pretty spooky, though.) It's also chock-full of satanic imagery and gross body parts hanging from the walls, not to mention unsettlingly huge blood sacs pulsating on the walls and ceilings from time to time. Interestingly, though, when you kill the demonfolk, they just kind of fade out of existence rather than spewing bloody gibs around like in Quake and most other shooters.

I experienced some nostalgia for Doom days gone by. Just like the original Doom, I found myself laughing whenever I used the chainsaw. It's just plain fun to use. (I remember playing multi-player Doom games where we only used chainsaws, which was a total riot.) Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to wield the Doom 3 chainsaw properly, so I never found it to be a very effective weapon. In the original Doom, I would always pull out the chainsaw against the Demons, because they couldn't bite you while they were "stuck" on the chainsaw, but when I tried that tactic in Doom 3 it didn't work out so great. I almost always found myself using either the shotgun or the plasma gun, so consequently I had tons of leftover ammo for the other weapons at the end of the game.

Overall, it's a solid game, but it's not mind-blowing. Half-Life 2 remains the shooter to beat. I give it a 4... out of 5.

Multi-player not reviewed.