Doom 3

Hell on Mars
Your character is a low ranking Marine on a routine rotation to the United Aerospace Corporation's (UAC) Mars Research Facility. That's pretty much all the back-story you need. Doom 3 is a bit skimpy in the story-line department, but rich plotting and character development have never been the focus of the Doom franchise. Action is the name of the game here, and we found plenty. After a few minutes of wandering through the facility, listening to rumors about impending catastrophe from the staff (remember Half-Life?) it was time to start shooting. We fought our way through dark, lavishly detailed environments until finally doing battle with pure evil in the depths of hell. Although the game offers no opportunities to explore the Martian setting apart from the linear corridors of the research facility, good level design and well crafted sound effects were successful at scaring the living heck out of us all the way through.

Fearsome monsters. Dimly-lit environments. The perfect recipe for horror.

Guns, Guns, Guns
While there are many powerful weapons in the game, they are designed to force players to anticipate and plan for firefights. For instance, we liked wielding the chaingun to shred enemies at longer ranges, but the weapon devours ammo and using it on close-range targets was a waste of bullets. We quickly learned to switch to the shotgun or the chainsaw to dispatch foes at close range.

One piece of hardware, the flashlight, was a point of both salvation and frustration for us. Doom 3 is a dark game and many enemies know how to take advantage of it. You'll find yourself switching back and forth between your weapons and your flashlight often just to see what's lurking ahead. This problem might be easily solved by duct taping the flashlight to your equipped weapon, but, alas, we found no duct tape on Mars.

Multiplayer
While Doom 3 is no Halo 2 when it comes to multi-player action, there are some respectable multi-player arenas and modes including death match, team death match, last man standing and tournament. Five maps serve to keep things interesting, and you'll want to look for special tricks in some arenas to give you a leg up on enemies. Cooperative multi-player proved to be a hoot as we teamed up with friends to try to make our way through the levels. The intensity of gameplay ramps up significantly in the cooperative mode, as the levels are designed to be harder. They're also designed to force players to work together, so you'll want to communicate with your partner as much as possible.

Looking Good
Doom 3 is incredible looking. Every room is exquisitely detailed, from the shimmer of the air near a heat source to the texture of a hamburger sitting on the counter of the company mess hall. Id obviously went all out designing every creature in the game and their realism makes them all the more horrifying. Get ready to jump out of your couch cushions!--Joshua Gunn

Pros

• Stunning display of graphics technology
• Strong level design with lots of spookiness
• Great cooperative mode
• Plenty of hours of single-player gameplay

• Thin storyline
• No headlamps or gun-mounted lighting in the 22nd century
• Fairly basic multi-player options

John Carmack, who is programming the graphics of the game, has stated that you'll be able to run Doom 3 with all graphicsdetails at a reasonable framerate (probably around 30 fps) with a Geforce 3. Anything below that (Geforce 2, Radeon DDR) and you will have to turn down a lot of the details to get it to run well.

Doom 3 is designed for a Geforce 1 level class of card, so any DirectX 7 card with hardware T&L will be able to display all the effects.

Doom 3 was shown at Quakecon running on a P4 2.2 GHZ with a Radeon 9700. It has been shown twice on the Radeon 9700, and was shown at a higher resolution and framerate the second time. This means the code is improving, and a Radeon 9700/Geforce 4 card should be able to run the game smoothly with all the details turned up.

If you're wondering if you should upgrade now, you could hold off until early 2003 when newer cards are being released. A Geforce 4 or Radeon 9700 should run the game great, but there will better cards available by the time of release.


Graphics Technology Showcase   August 25, 2002
7 out of 23 found this review helpful

Will Doom ]|[ have a story? Yep
Will you be shooting scary meanies that jump out of nowhere? Yep
Is it be a rehash of previous Id releases? Slightly different flavor, but yes.
Will the main focus of Doom 3 be to showcase the latest Id Software 3D Graphics engine? Big honkin' Yepper on this one.


The one game to pre-order   August 28, 2002
6 out of 31 found this review helpful

If there is one computer game on earth to pre-order, it is Doom III.
Evolutionary graphics, high-poly models, incredible shader effects, realistic game engine and thirlling single player action.
Id Software is number 1 again.


Hmm ok then..   August 30, 2002
Chosen One (Hilton, NY United States)
5 out of 62 found this review helpful

If your new to gaming this will be a great experience..

If you like me and expect a good replay from a game this will be technologically entertaining.. not much else. The real benefit to this game will be as a benchmark so that people can spend 100's of hours optimizing their PC's to get an additional 3 fps out of it.

I'm much more interested to see what real game developers can make out of the engine. ID is an engine house that pretends to make games. If you thought Quake III was a game your mistaken. More like an extended demo.

That being said, people will buy this game because it starts with 'DOOM' and ends in the next # in the sequence.