Doom 3 Review

Years in the making, with months and months of delays the long anticipated Doom 3 has finally made it to store shelves. With a lofty price tag it's still sure to be one of the top sellers of the year.

Doom 3 was finally released on August 4th and quickly set the standard for action games. It gives fans of the Doom series nearly everything they could ask for, good storyline, non-stop action, stunning graphics and sound effects, they all add to the atmosphere of the game. It also allows me to answer the question I’ve had since the first previews of the game. How good can it really be? Really good, really, really good.

Set in the year 2145 the planet Earth is desperately low on natural resources man has been forced to look to Mars and its resources. Doom 3 opens with your arrival at the Mars Research Facility owned and operated by the United Aerospace Corporation. As a marine knowing very little about the facility or it’s day to day operations you have been recently assigned to the research facility’s security team.

Research, however, isn’t the only thing going on. After becoming familiar with your surroundings by touring the basic facilities and being shown how to use your PDA, you are given as your first assignment, the duty of locating a missing scientist. Upon finding him, the entire research facility is hit by a thunderous shockwave that literally opens up Hell on Earth (or Mars).

The game then continues through 28 spine tingling missions that seem to transport you to a different world. The storyline in itself is very similar to that of the original Doom and Doom 2 games. The 28 missions are linear, so they must be finished before advancing to the next level and do not provide flexibility often seen in some other new games.

The basic game play features are that of any typical first person shooter using the mouse and key board. The action after the opening sequence is virtually non-stop and the animated cut scenes through out the game come as a welcomed break for your hands and senses. The action mixed with the animated scenes gives the game a nice cinematic horror movie feel.

Probably the single most important piece of equipment you have in the game is your PDA. The PDA allows you to download, store and read codes, keys and other information that is pivotal in making it through each mission. Getting to know it is fairly simple and after a while will become second nature.

The weapons in Doom 3 are also very important and a nice mix of short, medium and long ranged weapons are available. How are you going to get past those 20 zombies with just your bare hands? All the favorite weapons from the original Doom and Doom 2 are back; the chainsaw, shotgun, machine gun, plasma gun, and grenades just to name a few, all make an appearance. The monsters of Doom are also back; zombies, imps hell knights, and demons await you.

The graphics of Doom 3 are visually stunning, each new room and corridor seems to give your eyes something new and exciting to look at. After reviewing Far Cry, which is a very good game, earlier this year, I questioned if the graphics of Doom 3 or Half Life 2 could be much better. With a new 3-D graphics engine that renders characters and atmospheres life-like, Doom 3 surpasses the graphics of Far Cry. The non stop nature of the game almost makes you want have the ability to slow down and enjoy the view that id Software has created, for a minute or two.

These graphics, however, come at a heavy price and will tax your system for every ounce of graphics memory available. The minimum requirements call for a 64MB graphics card, but if you have this, plan on using the lowest resolution setting, luckily the graphics are still remarkable at these lowest settings. For full visual effects a graphics card of 128MB or greater is necessary.