Doom 3

Genre:	First-Person Shooter
Developer:	id Software
Publisher:	Activision
Release Date:	3 April 2005
Released On:	Xbox, PC

Amazing Ben Describes the Plot in 10 Words or Less: 

Space Marine battle zombies and demons on Mars.

Overview: 

I'll start this one off by saying that Doom and Doom II are both on the list of my most favorite games ever.  I mean, how can you not love a game where the primary objective is to collect a ton of gruesome, highly-destructive weapons and then use them to blow the holy living shit out of everything from zombies to demons to giant flying disembodied heads that barf and catch on fire when they get hit in the eye with a rocket launcher?  Can't be done.  It's the greatest concept this side of "war with the Soviet Union", and running through corridor after corridor of zombie space marines and bazooka-wielding cybernetic minotaurs is just as much fun now as it was thirteen years ago.  So how is it possible that I didn't like Doom 3?

As you well know by now, Doom 3 is basically an exact re-make of Doom 1.  There's no story to speak of, just you and a gun and a horde of bloodsucking monsters bent of tearing you apart with their claws.  While this sounds great, and WAS great back in 1993, this sort of premise doesn't really cut it anymore.  Half-Life spoiled us.  Now we expect cool guns, hordes of bloodsucking monsters bent on tearing us apart with their claws, AND an engrossing story that keeps us interested.  Doom 3 sort of fails to deliver on that aspect.

But who the crap am I to complain about something like that?  I'm pretty confident that I could be happy with a game that falls short in the story department as long as there's more action than an Arnold Schwarzenegger marathon.  Unfortunately, this is where Doom 3 disappoints me the most.  It seems to me that instead of just going for a straight-up "kill everything that moves and even some things that are stationary" frag-fest where you spend all your time searching for keys and gibbing monsters into bite-sized morsels, it's like they tried to go all survival horror on us this time around and tried to make the game more "scary" than "awesome".  It pretty much fails at both.

By now you're probably aware of the flashlight thing.  If not, here's how it works:  There are no lights in the entire game.  Apparently Mars Base is run by the fucking Amish because there aren't any light switches anywhere and 90% of the game is set in near complete darkness.  But all is not lost - you have a sweet ass Mag-Lite like those ones cops use to go all police brutality on drunk people.  The bad news is that your badass marine is so cripplingly uncoordinated that whenever you're holding the flashlight you can't use a gun.  I know this has been beaten into the ground by now, but seriously what the fuck?  Why is my battle-hardened Space Marine incapable of using a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other?  Why can't I find some motherfucking duct tape and strap the light to a fucking shotgun?  I feel very strongly that if I personally was in a space station overrun by monsters, demons, and the undead, I would find some way to make this work.  Unfortunately, your marine isn't quite that bright and so you spend the majority of the game either stumbling around in the dark getting fucked up by zombies or desperately trying to bludgeon the motherfucking physical incarnation of Satan to death with the back end of your fucking Mag-Lite.  This can be frustrating.

It seem to me that the flashlight serves two purposes - it provides loads of cheap scares and it hides the fact that every level looks pretty much exactly the same.  The game more-or-less flows like this:  Wall, metal, pipe, bloody smear, wall, dead body, air duct, monster jumps out at you from nowhere, monster randomly spawns behind you and hits you in the back, pitch black while you fumble for your weapon, fire a few rounds into the darkness, miss wildly, keep getting hit, die.  It gets old real fast.  For me, Doom 3 was pretty much unplayable for this reason.  I'm sure others have their own opinions on the subject, but that's where I stand.

X-Tremeness Level: 

Covering yourself in fish oil and then running through an unlit cave full of hungry cats.

Overall Badassitude Score: 

The badassitude of this game almost entirely comes from the fact that I got the "Collector's Edition", which has both Ultimate Doom and Doom II packed onto the disc.  Both have a level select mode and can be played co-op with a friend, which is probably high in the running for the title of fucking awesomest thing in history.  I think I got about thirty times the mileage out of the old-school Dooms than the current one.

      

SCORE:  3 out of a possible 5 BFG 9000s.

Addictiveness: 

RATING:  Going to the Opera, sitting on the upper deck, and then spending the whole time using your binoculars to look down the fronts of womens' dresses.

Yes you enjoy it, but not for the reasons you're supposed to.

Multiplayer Component: 

I think you can play Doom 3 co-op via system link or Xbox Live, which might actually have the potential to be pretty sweet.  There's also 2-4 player split-screen co-op for the old-school games.

Hot Andrea's Take: 

"You have to choose between the flashlight or a gun?  That's stupid."

Awesometer Score: 

-1

Sure the graphics are good, but the game doesn't always run smoothly on the Xbox, the load times are a little long for my liking, and I hate the fact that I have to work to conserve my ammunition in a fucking Doom game.  The saving grace are the old games on the disc, and since it turns out that I basically bought this thing to play a couple of decade-old FPSs in co-op mode, I'm really fucking glad I didn't pay full price for it.