DOOM 3
review by Head Cheeze

You've seen the screenshots, watched the movies, and heard the hype, but forget it all; nothing can prepare you for the feeling of playing Doom 3 for yourself. From the moment you "arrive" at the Union Aerospace Corporation's research base on Mars, you immediately feel a sense of dread, and it soon becomes apparent that never before has a game been so aptly named.

I actually don't feel right calling Doom 3 a game at all. It's more of an "experience"; an interactive horror movie that is so effective at fraying one's nerves that the sheer sense of terror sticks with you long after your computer has been shut down.

You are a marine assigned to the afforementioned UAC facility on Mars. As you take your first step onto Martian soil, you overhear a pair of men whispering about "cleaning up a mess". Their conversation is tense, and filled with urgency. Something is clearly wrong, but before you have time to think about it, you are summoned to the Marine HQ for your first assignment: go retrieve a scientist who has disappeared in the Martian underground.

The mission is a cakewalk. You find the scientist cowering in a control room, babbling on about some sort of discovery; some sort of "accident". Suddenly, the ground shakes, the walls collapse, and the man before you lets out an inhuman groan as his face shrivels, and his eyes go white. As he leaps at you, you shoot him with your pistol, splashing his brains across the flickering control panel. Before you have time to think about what you've just done, the underground station is suddenly crawling with zombies; some of them shambling, some of the shooting.

You run in the darkness, your flashlight bathing the dark halls in a dull white glow. As you turn a corner, a zombie security guard lays into you with a shotgun blast. You fire back, take his gun, and blast your way the hell out of the Martian undeground. However, when you arrive back at the HQ, the base is already under siege. Most of your fellow marines are dead, and the few survivors are scattered in other parts of the huge facility. Now you are alone, and you must fight your way through hordes of undead, legions of hellish beasts, and, literally, go through Hell if you want to survive.

Doom 3 is a marvel of gaming technology. The graphics are nearly photo-realistic, with smooth, detailed surfaces, amazing lighting effects, and volumetric shading that creates "true" darkness through which your trusty flashlight cuts through with lifelike effect. There were at least a dozen moments where I simply sat back in awe at what I was seeing. Unfortunately, the game doesn't afford much opportunity for sightseeing as the action is nearly non-stop. Teleporting "Imps" appear out of nowhere, tossing fireballs, and tearing at your flesh, while spider-like "Trites" attack en masse, skittering down walls or sneaking up from under grates in the floor. Zombies jump out from the darkness, and death waits around every turn. It's white-knuckle gaming all the way through, and the goal is simply to survive, which makes it all the easier to accept that, under the gorgeous veneer, Doom 3 is still the basic run-and-gun shooter that the original game helped popularise.

All of this eye candy comes at a price, of course. You need a fairly hefty system to install the game, let alone play it. While the basic hardware requirements call for a Pentium class CPU of 1.5 ghz, 384 megs of RAM, and a Direct X 9 (64MB) video card, it's not an exaggeration to say that if one wants to reap the true benefits of Doom 3 one need double those requirements. I played the game on a system loaded with an Athlon XP 3.2 CPU, a gig of RAM, and a 128 MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card, and the game's auto-configuration still bumped me down to the "medium" quality setting. After manually setting all of the graphic options to high, the game ran as though it were a series of snapshots, froze, and then crashed to the desktop. Still, the game looks better than anything I've seen, even at medium quality, but begs the question of how good does it look at ULTIMATE quality; a setting Id included that's not supported by any currently available hardware!

I've read that some people have completed the game in 10 hours, and to that I say bullshit. If one were to play without exploring at all, and run through each and every mission like a man on fire, it would still take at least twice that to finish Doom 3. It took me closer to 24 hours, but I snooped around every corner, and in every crevice, seeking out secret goodies, health kits, and ammo (beware, these secret spots often lead to some attacks that render getting the health/armour/ammo moot since you end up using/losing it all to fend off the beasties!). Also, be aware that, unlike many shooters, Doom 3 isn't one that you can just simply run through. If you do that, you won't get past the second level. Doom 3 requires that one exercise a bit of caution when moving from room to room, hall to hall, place to place. If you simply run past the creatures from one area, they'll follow you to the next, where you'll then be confronted by twice as many enemies. The best way to play Doom 3 is to take your time, soak it all in, and let the terror wash over you. Actually, you really don't have much of a choice!

Doom 3 also features a multiplayer mode that is similiar to Quake/Unreal style shoot-em-ups, but features some nifty touches like the ability to interact with much of the environment (making distracting noises, shutting off lights, etc). The atmosphere and graphics in multiplayer mode are just as good as the single player mode, but I did notice that the player models don't look as smooth as they do in the single player campaign. I'm also not a big fan of the unorganised shoot-out genre, so while the multiplayer option is welcome, it's not one I'll revisit too often.

Doom 3 is a spectacular achievement in both sight and sound, and not only is it one of the most intense games I've ever played, it's one of the most terrifying entertainment experiences I've ever had.

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