Impressive graphics, sound, and environments

Doom 3
July 2006


My PC: Gateway with dual core AMD cpu with Nvidia Geforce 6100. 1GB ram. This video card is a "real" video card however it uses shared system RAM, which is slower than the video ram, or VRAM used on video cards. CoD works just fine on it however.


Doom 3 has great effects whether they are visual, auditory, or cinematic. Doom 3 is a horror game, it is designed to scare you, and it does just that. With gory scenes, and monsters popping up from any corner or crevice, it made me jump a few times. Try playing it at night with all the lights off. Weird evil sounds also add to the games atmosphere.

This game requires a "real" graphics card with real VRAM. But as you can see my computer with a "semi-real" card, that has a real graphics chip that shares system RAM, worked fine. It only slowed down when there were more than 4 monsters on screen at a time. And then the slowdown was only slight and momentary. The worst slowdowns occur when there were the "lost souls" (floating skulls) that would shoot fireballs. Each monster or fireball is an object and when you have 4 floating skulls, each with 2 or 3 fireballs in the air, that's a lot of things for the PC to keep track of and render.

There are lots of monsters, there are even upwards of 12 types of zombies. Including a flamer, a zombie that's on fire that stumbles toward you. The fire effect is excellent, and well worth the wait (I understand the game was delayed several times.)

What else can I say, but the visuals were superb. The maps and the details in them were excellent, environment sounds were appropriate and scary, fire was superb as were other particle effects like sparks, smoke, and steam. Dynamic lighting was great. Yellow rotating lights would light areas only as the light shone on them, making things jump from light to shadow.

The one bad thing is all the maps were very dark. It was simply not possible for me to see creatures coming at me in many maps due to complete darkness. For me, this is just an annoyance if I don't even have a fighting chance. Increasing the gamme helped a little but made the colors appear gray and washed out. Hence I had to cheat and use god mode a lot.

There were several instances where getting to a goal was not easily done. I had a hard time finding a way to get to the next room. Thus this game has a puzzle-like quality to it.

Replayability was very good, but since I don't really care for scary games I probably won't play it much. Though I did finish the game one time.

There are also cut scenes where you can overhear conversations to get more of a background on the situation, or to give you clues about who The Bad Guy is.

There are also PDAs you pick up, to give you combinations to lockers so you can get more weapons and ammo. The PDAs also let you read emails and hear voice logs, which only restate the obvious (weird things are happening at the labs). There are also video disks you can pick up, whose only use is to restate the obvious (the lab on Mars is being invaded by monsters) or give you useless information. I call this filler. For example, there was a video disk that was basically a marketing piece about a new weapon you would find. It provided only general information and no useful details at all.

One detail I was impressed with was you can talk to all the characters before everything "goes to hell". Each character says one of about 5 or 6 random lines. People often don't understand how long getting 5 or 6 lines right for the director can take. It can take days and days of actor work, just for one character!

This is a technically excellent game and horror fans will like it. But the perpetual dim light or darkness can get annoying, because you will die a lot.