Hell on Mars...Doom 3

From the beginning, John Romero and John Carmack only wanted to make great games.  What they ended up doing was revolutionizing the entire industry.  Indeed, I would be remiss to try and imagine our current video game scene without the overwhelming influence of this unlikely duo.  How would games look?  How would they feel?  What cutting-edge technologies would have risen in the absence of such landmark titles like Doom and Quake?  To put it another way, what would Western music be like without the influence of Beethoven?  How would modern day business be conducted without the invaluable contribution of Bill Gates?  Would the automobile have become the world's most popular form of transportation were it not for Henry Ford?  Sure, advancements would have been made in all of those areas, in some shape or form.  But the real question is, would they have been as profound as the changes that these men made in their areas of expertise?  I don't know, I doubt it.

The Two Johns became world renowned game designers and co-founders of id Software.  They would go on to popularize a new genre called the "first-person shooter" and create some of the most groundbreaking and influential franchises in video game history.  With classics like Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), and Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994), id Software invented the blueprint that future games would follow.  Romero was the brilliant architect behind the most memorable level designs.  Carmack was the mad scientist behind the highly-advanced graphics engines that powered the games.  Combined together, their chemistry spawned the most terrifying, fast-paced, state-of-the-art gaming action the world had ever seen.  Ultimately, this fiery chemistry and perfectionist mindset would be what tore them apart, and Romero was soon released from id Software.

Years later, John Carmack decided it was time to revisit the demonic universe that made his company such a huge success.  In June 2000, development plans for Doom 3 were announced.  The game would be a complete re-imagining of the original Doom, taking place in the same hellish universe with a similar storyline using current next-gen technology.  Unfortunately, John Romero's departure from id Software meant that his magical level design would be absent from this new title.  Despite that setback, Doom 3 was unleashed upon the world in August 2004, blowing minds and crashing computers of millions of eagerly awaiting fans around the country.

Carmack's new gaming engine, called the id Tech 4, was so technologically superior that most PCs in 2004 couldn't run the thing!  Standard GPU and RAM capabilities of most modern computers simply were not powerful enough to harness the processing power of Doom 3.  Those who could were treated to a brand new, ultra-realistic gaming experience.  Monsters literally jumped out of the screen at them.  Soon after, the game was ported to Microsoft's Xbox console by developer Vicarious Visions.  This port is pretty amazing, considering that most of the high-end sheen and complex animations of the PC version remained intact and the gameplay stayed smooth and lightning fast as ever.


Welcome to Mars
You are a Marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action.  Shortly after you report for duty at the Union Aerospace Corporation's Mars research facility, a massive demonic invasion overwhelms the base, leaving chaos, horror and uncertainty in its wake.  As one of only a few survivors, you must use overwhelming firepower and all of your combat skill to battle through the demon hordes, find out what went wrong and prevent the evil from speading.  Only you stand between Hell and Earth.


A Walk Through the Darkside
Playing Doom 3 is a lot like walking through an industrial spookhouse.  The game takes place in the year 2145, inside the Union Aerospace Corporation's maximum security research base on Mars.  The compound is massive, sprawling miles across the planet's crimson deserts and rocky canyons.  The metallic interior of the base is comprised of scientific laboratories, vaulted rooms, twisting corridors, and the like.  Occassionaly, glimpses of the red planet's hostile atmosphere can be seen through pressurized window bays throughout the facility.  But mostly you will be spending a lot of time in the dark, searching for exits, and mowing through wave after wave of rotting zombies and hideous monsters.

The highly advanced graphics are what steal the show, painting a sci-fi landscape of pure evil.  The environments ooze a sense of tension and foreboding with every opening door.  Pitch black darkness is present in almost every area of the game, thick and suffocating, interspersed only by periodic flashes of flickering lights and gloomy red or yellow caution lamps.  The darkness also plays a major component in the game's overall tone, inspiring fear and dread by not letting you see what is stalking you until it is right in front of your face.  More often than not, demons will jump out at you from corners and vents in the walls or ceilings.  Monsters will also attack from behind without alerting you to their presence.  You must constantly check your angles and grow eyes in the back of your head, because you just never know what big scare the game is going to throw at you next.

All of the monsters from the original Doom make their return here: Imps, Cacodemons, Lost Souls, Mancubuses, Hell Knights, you name it.  They, too, have undergone a drastic re-imagining.  The monsters now look more terrifying and move much more realistically than they ever did before.  In addition, the game throws some new enemy types into the mix, ranging from dog-sized spiders to a large blob-like worm that crawls toward you at incredible speed.  There are a few larger-than-life boss fights thrown in, as well.  Your Marine will equip himself with the same weapons as those found in previous Doom games: the pistol, shotgun, minigun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, chainsaw, and yes, the almighty BFG 9000!  The game also gives you some new weapons to play with, like the assault rifle, hand grenades, and the supernatural Soul Cube found in the later levels of the game.  John Carmack's id Tech 4 engine illustrates all of these things and their movements beautifully, with incredibly lifelike animation and super smooth framerates.  I was highly impressed with the Xbox's ability to handle the performance specs of this gaming engine.  After playing Doom 3 for a while, you will feel as if you are actually inside the story.

Now is a good time to mention that pesky Flashlight.  In an effort to make the game more intense, the developers gave your Marine a Flashlight to carry in his gear.  This is a vital tool for seeing in the dark.  However, you cannot use it in conjuction with your weapons.  You are forced to constantly switch between your gun and your Flashlight while patrolling around the base and taking out enemies.  This is supposed to add a dramatic level of tension to the gameplay, but only leads to frustrating battle exchanges and cumbersome button pushing.  C'mon, Marine!  They didn't teach you to tie that flashlight around your shotgun in boot camp??

Another important tool to your survival is the PDA device, which stores emails and other important media that you find along the way.  These hold passcodes to various weapons and supplies cabinets scattered throughout the base, and offer backstory to what happened at the military facility before your arrival.  Computer terminals and security stations lay dormant in every sector, and provide your character with the means to download critical information to his PDA and unlock doors ahead of him.

The sound of Doom 3 does some things really well.  The ambient noise in the environments is great, from machinery operating in large chasms to pipes hissing all around you.  Gunshots are loud and jarring, and the "Shrieeeks!" of the Imps are bone-chilling.  The sounds of both will be filling the speakers of your sound system most of the time.  There are also some areas where the audio could have been slightly better.  The musical soundtrack in this game is nonexistent (save for the opening theme), and consists mostly of avante-garde instrumentation.  This does serve the setting and the suspense well, though.  The voice acting is mostly cheesy, reminiscent of a B-grade horror movie and doesn't do a good job of really immersing you into the emotional context of the story, what little of it there is.

Doom 3's main mission is to throw your character into tons of industrialized environments, fill them with as many of Hell's monstronsities as possible, and then let you cut through them in endless displays of graphic, bloody violence.  And I love it!  But ultimately, this game falls short in the fact that it's all the game ever does.  Even though it is a re-telling of a 1994 shooter, id Software could have made Doom 3 different by evolving its gameplay into something new and special.  Instead, what we have is an extremely long campaign of nothing but point-shoot, point-shoot, point-shoot.  This may have been a successful formula in 1994, but doesn't hold up as well with today's expectations.

The two-player Co-op mode included on the disc is actually very good, though you will need the system link device on the old Xbox system or just get online with someone on Xbox Live.  However, it makes the challenge of traversing the compound quickly and killing legions of demons a lot easier.  I actually prefer the single-player campaign to the Co-op mode any day of the week.  Deathmatching (which Doom is famous for putting on the map) is also offered, but it is much better implemented nowadays by a slew of other shooters on the market.


Final Thoughts:
Doom 3 was an incredible new look into the future of what high-tech gaming could be.  It truly is a masterpiece of the first-person shooting genre, but only in the visual sense.  There are a lot of other elements that go into making a great game, such as gameplay and innovation.  This is what Doom 3 really lacks, and as a result, can only be ranked as an Above Average shooter.  Here's to hoping that id Software will pay attention to both the next time around in Doom 4.