A quick review, I have only been playing the game for a couple of hours
but I feel like I have a good sense of it now.
The long awaited Doom 3 from the creators of the first person shooter is
here. There is no way to adequately do justice to the anticipation of
myself and the gaming community.
However while there are those that revere ID there are also some that
have lost faith a little. I don't think there is anyone who doesn't
respect Carmack and friends for giving birth to arguably the PC's most
popular gaming genre. But there is a growing feeling among some gamers
that over the last couple of game engines ID has focussed on graphical
inovation and left gameplay untouched. Basically the more cynical among
us believe that ID have only ever really had two big ideas.
The first was Doom, or Wolfenstein 3D if you are real purist, but it was
Doom that created a market for 3D first person shooters (even though
Doom wasn't true 3D). There are many ways to measure Doom's success and
impact on the mainstream, sales, merchandise, online communities, etc.
But for me one of the most telling was once seeing a couple of doctors
playing Doom in an episode of ER, thats fairly mainstream and I think
most people would agree.
The second big idea was popular online multiplayer with the advent of
Quake 2, again purists will point to Quake 1 (and technically Doom as
well) but it was the sequel that helped explode not only multiplayer
first person shooters but also online multiplayer gaming for other types
of game as well (even civilization 3, a turn based game, now supports
online real time multiplayer).
The heart of most of the criticism of ID is that the gameplay changed
little with each iteration of Carmacks engine, whilst games like Half
Life and Deus Ex were busy creating new absorbing and inovative game
experiences. There is some truth to this in my opinion, I don't rate
Quake 2 single player much, and by definition it is hard to innovate
deathmatch.
I could wait till the end of the review to give you verdict on whether
the third installment of the Doom series delivers any groundbreaking
gameplay inovation. But I won't, i'll give it to you now, while not
devoid of interesting gameplay, in my opinion there are no new big ideas
in Doom 3.
However I do think some of ID's more critical gamers will be pleasantly
surprised with the gameplay, there are some sophisticated touches which
do make this game stand out. If there was one word that came to mind
when I first started playing it was Immersive, as you would probably
expect from a game with genre leading graphics. But it wasn't just the
graphics, indeed with a GF4 ti4200 non direct 9 compatible I am
certainly not getting the full experience, but the game does run very
smoothly. I not going to go into too much detail about the graphics as
I am sure others will do so to the extreme. Suffice to say that nothing
else matches it at the moment.
When you begin playing you are given a PDA, you can access it at any
time by pressing tab and in it you can read your email, listen and watch
sound and video clips and you can also download infomation from other
peoples PDA's. This is a very clever trick which really helps to draw
the player into the story, but it is not new, in Deus Ex you could log
on to computers and read their email. But this does lead on to another
nice touch, computer screens are usable in game, it's difficult to
explain, but when you walk up to a monitor your weapon automatically
lowers and a cursor appears on the screen which you can control. In my
opinion this is the closest that ID have got to a new big idea, but it
isn't a general gameplay element, other games that use the engine won't
be able to use it unless they have sci fi setting (think ww2 or fantasy
games) so as clever as it is it will have limited influence.
As for the actual game, while immersive the story is essentially what
you would expect. ID have set the game as if the first two games never
took place, so it's the original military science base overun by demons
from hell that anyone familliar with Doom would know. Can't really
fault ID for this, after all if you don't like it then don't buy the
game, it's not like they are trying to mislead anyone.
Some of the gameplay does remind me very much of the oroginal, walking
down a corridor to have wall open behind you revealing a monster.
Monsters which are incredible, not only do they receive the graphical
benefit of being in the latest engine but the animation is also
amazingly smooth. The monsters look so good now it is hard to reconcile
them to their counterparts in the original game, the imp for example,
once an almost solidly brown creature is now made up of many different
shades of black, grey and dark blue (you wouldn't know it was an imp if
he wasn't firing fireballs at you).
This game is dark, and it will scare the shit out of you if you play it
with the lights out. All the familliar demonic horror references that
the ID boys love are in there but updated and in more detail than ever
before.
This review might come off seeming a little negative but it wasn't meant
to be, even without groundbreaking gameplay Doom 3 is a better game than
most of the competition and deserves the many plus 90% scores that it
will recieve. It's certainly better than Quake 2, their last single
player game and makes me hopeful that with Carmack stating that their
next project would be entirely new intellectual property they might just
have another big idea up their sleeve. Go on ID surprise me.
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Eps
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