This is my first game review so please just ignore all the errors that I'm sure are rampant in this review. Well I beat it, took me two days of heavy play and basically it was one great game. An 8.5 is rather low while a 9.5 is rather high considering once you beat it there really isn't much else to do since the multiplayer is.....less that top notch. You could go through it again on a harder difficulty but much of what made it so scary the first time though was the surprises that the next time around you would be aware of. While the Doom 3 engine is great it can't hold a candle to the new source engine and will be out shined. The single player experience is great while it lasts with some truly great graphics, especially in Hell. This is one scary game, I haven't played a game that has scared me like this before. Turn the lights off and turn your sound up and it will give you a truly creepy experience. Whether it's the shadow of an Imp crawling across a window, the creepy whispers of an unknown creature, walking though a small corridor and having a door snap open up beside you with a moaning zombie or the sheer shock of opening a door only to immediately have a monster lunge at you with a loud shriek. This game will scare you if you play it right. Another thing that adds to the fear factor but turned out to be a love or hate thing was the flashlight, I for one loved it. Walk into a room that is very dark, and oddly silent, so you whip out your flashlight and scan across the room, everything looks normal until you turn and see that there’s a jawless man standing not 5 feet away from you and once the light hits him he strikes at you. These kind of things really make you jump out of your chair. Though it really doesn’t make sense that so far in the future we're still using little flashlights, and don't even have any duct tape around to just tape them to the guns instead of holding them. It still is in my opinion a great addition to the game. Since you can't see the whole room with the flash light and you can't be armed with it either you will find yourself relying on sound to tell you where enemies may be lurking. Though some of the sounds are recycled, like some ammo that just uses that sound from Quake 3, there is also a lot of great sound effects as well, there’s some great voice acting, but a lot of the people sound the same as each other. The voice acting is well done though and the people really sound as if they are trapped in a demon filled complex scared to the point of insanity, this along with a lot of very creepy whispers and some great screams, roars, and moans the sound really adds to the whole experience and at times the sound alone will scare you when it turns out that there’s not even anything there. The sound, though excellence, is not nearly as impressive as the graphics. The graphics are probably the most thought about thing when you think of Doom 3 and it does look simply amazing, but for me they don’t really live up to the levels that people held them out to be. There’s plenty of low quality textures and sometimes things look as if they have been coated with wax. This aside the game still looks gorgeous and even with these small flaws its still the best looking game out there now. Even the graphics help the scary feel of the game. It could be that you're in a room and there’s a body near the wall laying out, suddenly its starts to move and some creature in a vent slowly pulls it in. Or it could be just walking through a hallway with blood on the ground as if half a torso has been dragged through the hall. These small things combined with the realistic look is a deadly combination. Doom 3 also sports some amazing lighting which like just about everything else adds the scary mood of the game, with constant instances where a creature is hiding in the shadows ready to pop out when you get close. The physics are once again something that adds the feel of the game, but not as much as the graphics, lighting, or sound. They are a few times though where they will be used to scare you, it could be a monster throwing a barrel at you when you're walking up stairs, part of the wall or floor falling apart in a dark room so you see movement, or a body swinging back and forth as it hangs by its feet. You can also shoot or hit many things and they will move, fall, or swing depending on what they are. The weapons are the standard Doom weapons, nothing really out of the ordinary here. You have your standard first person shooter set of weapons such as the Pistol, Shotgun, Machine Gun, Grenades, and Rocket Launcher. Then of course you have the Doom type weapons such as the Chain Gun, Fists, Chainsaw, Plasma Gun, and what would Doom be without a super over powered gun? Well it wouldn't be Doom that’s for sure so of course the newest model of BFG (The BFG 9000), is in the game, I'll let you figure out what the acronym BFG stands for yourself. It was slightly disappointing that they used for most part the same guns as the other Doom games. Though you can use the flashlight as a melee weapon the only real new weapon that Doom 3 brings to the table is the "Soul Cube", a small box shaped weapon with engravings on it that has the power to destroy just about any monster and restore your health after it kills something. This weapon is also the basis of much of the story that the game revolves around, The premise of Doom 3 is that this high-tech Mars research base has been having some odd things happening with an archaeology site leaving many of the people there spooked. When you arrive things get bad pretty quick, some how a gate between Hell and Mars has been opened, and the only way to stop the invading hoards from going to Earth from Mars is the Soul Cube. That is really all I can say without spoiling what little plot there is. But there are plenty of hellish monsters to face that make up for the plot. One thing that I noticed after beating the game is that the boss fights where some of the best and most fun that I have ever played, especially the final boss. The enemies where also some of the most creative and scary looking creatures I have seen. This game is very demanding on your machine as you most likely already know, now I am running on a high end machine, but my 9800XT didn't get along too well with Doom 3 and its many jumping and fast moving enemies. Constant crashes filled the game and made reaching for F5 to quick save at every mildly important moment second nature after the first couple of levels. But besides the problem with crashing it ran rather smooth, I was able to keep a high frame rate on high settings even during intensive battles. Now if they had included co-op it would have brought the replay value up a tremendous amount in my opinion, unfortunately they choose to leave that to the mod community. Now I know that they left it out because "The game is meant to be played alone.", for the scare factor. While I agree that it wouldn't be as good the first time through on co-op because that would take away a lot of what made it scary, knowing someone has your back and it's not up to you alone. Once you beat it by yourself it would have been fun to go back through the game with a friend and just run and gun. The Xbox version will have it, so why not just go ahead and take the time to put it in the PC version too? Co-Op would have easily made my rating higher and Greg would probably have given it a higher score in value if it was included. My final score using GameSpots User Rating system is a 9.0. What brought it down for me and probably others was the lack luster multiplayer that didn't have the ever so elusive co-op mode that has seemed to slip out of PC gaming, the instability it had with my high end graphics card, and the recycled sounds. But all in all Doom 3 delivers on most of what it promised and is defiantly a game that no fan of the first person shooter genre should pass up, it's another one of those games that shows that a game doesn't have to be revolutionary to be great, especially in the first person shooter genre where many games are overlooked unless they bring something really new to the table.
I think this game is indeed the best game I've ever played. I like it because it scares me, though I've played it before. The gameplay is really rapid, you should always load your weapons, otherwise you would be torn apa... Read Full Review
This game is not for the faint of heart, the paranoid or the weak stomached. Playing this game alone in the dark with headphones at full blast is one of the most enjoyable if un-nerving experiances you can have with a ga... Read Full Review
