Kaeru's Review of Doom 3! \o_o/
So I recently had the chance to give Doom 3 a spin...
I've played a lot of FPS games in my time. Staring from the original Doom up until today, I have played some of the best games and some of the worst games out there. Doom 3 is not the worst game I've ever played by a fair amount, so you can put the pitchforks away. You might want to keep the torches though, because this is not a good review either. For a few years now, we've been hearing about how wonderfully advanced Doom 3 is, and how everything out now and in the future will not hold a candle to the uber-hotness that is John Carmack's love-child. We've been assaulted with movies, screenshots, leaked-alpha demos, Gamespot Previews of previews, and so many Exclusive First Reviews that it's hard to not think that this game is the best thing since Christopher Columbus discovered fire and created the wheel. But, I don't!
The game starts you off boringly enough. You're a nameless marine sent to mars to bolster the ranks of a cliched research facility's guard detail. Within moments of walking off the ship, such original plot threads as civilians going missing, rumors of strange experiments in the delta lab, and the typical mad scientist are thrown at you. You're given a PDA and tossed off on your first mission, find a missing scientist and bring him back. Easy enough? Not really.
See, a lot of things conspire against you when you're playing Doom 3. Number One being Doom 3 itself. You see, the game doesn't like you. It doesn't want you to touch it with your unclean hands of the non-believer, so whenever you have to go somewhere or really do anything, it makes everything really, horribly, unbelievable dark. I know what you're thinking: "But Kaeru, a lot of games are dark!" And I agree, lots of games are dark... but few games are so dark that their shadows act as mini-blackholes, letting no fun escape their black boundries. Doom 3 has some of the nicest graphics I've ever seen in an FPS, excluding FarCry... because every other review I've read also excludes FarCry because it makes Carmack cry. However, in order to set mood, tone, ambience, setting, and all sorts of other gay theatre terms for 'I'm putting shadows everywhere because they're creepy'.... Doom 3, being the creepiest of the creepy games obviously needs more shadows than any other game ever made put together. So everywhere you go there is darkness, and gloom... and unhappiness. I was bumping into walls, NPCs, monsters who also couldn't see, and all sorts of miscellaneous creepy things I couldn't identify because it was so dark. I tried turning the gamma up in game, but all that did was make the light bulbs brighter than the sun without adjusting all the damn shadows... so I turned the gamma up directly on my video card, and by the time I had the game up to a decent light level where I could actually see things in the shadows, the windows in the background had achieved a fusion reaction and were well on their way to forming their own galaxy.
I've gone off on a tangent though. Doom 3 is pretty, when you can finally see environments. So you're playing along and monsters are appearing, and the first couple of ones are pretty cool. Your typical zombie guys with machine guns, large fat guys with wrenches, ugly lanky guys that throw fire, the usual... and then suddenly, it happens. A cutscene starts off with this giant dog thing coming out and breaking stuff. I'm all like 'Sweet! Breaking stuff is awesome! >_
Oh yeah, I had a nice birthday. Thanks to everyone involved and to everyone else who left me alone!
I've played a lot of FPS games in my time. Staring from the original Doom up until today, I have played some of the best games and some of the worst games out there. Doom 3 is not the worst game I've ever played by a fair amount, so you can put the pitchforks away. You might want to keep the torches though, because this is not a good review either. For a few years now, we've been hearing about how wonderfully advanced Doom 3 is, and how everything out now and in the future will not hold a candle to the uber-hotness that is John Carmack's love-child. We've been assaulted with movies, screenshots, leaked-alpha demos, Gamespot Previews of previews, and so many Exclusive First Reviews that it's hard to not think that this game is the best thing since Christopher Columbus discovered fire and created the wheel. But, I don't!
The game starts you off boringly enough. You're a nameless marine sent to mars to bolster the ranks of a cliched research facility's guard detail. Within moments of walking off the ship, such original plot threads as civilians going missing, rumors of strange experiments in the delta lab, and the typical mad scientist are thrown at you. You're given a PDA and tossed off on your first mission, find a missing scientist and bring him back. Easy enough? Not really.
See, a lot of things conspire against you when you're playing Doom 3. Number One being Doom 3 itself. You see, the game doesn't like you. It doesn't want you to touch it with your unclean hands of the non-believer, so whenever you have to go somewhere or really do anything, it makes everything really, horribly, unbelievable dark. I know what you're thinking: "But Kaeru, a lot of games are dark!" And I agree, lots of games are dark... but few games are so dark that their shadows act as mini-blackholes, letting no fun escape their black boundries. Doom 3 has some of the nicest graphics I've ever seen in an FPS, excluding FarCry... because every other review I've read also excludes FarCry because it makes Carmack cry. However, in order to set mood, tone, ambience, setting, and all sorts of other gay theatre terms for 'I'm putting shadows everywhere because they're creepy'.... Doom 3, being the creepiest of the creepy games obviously needs more shadows than any other game ever made put together. So everywhere you go there is darkness, and gloom... and unhappiness. I was bumping into walls, NPCs, monsters who also couldn't see, and all sorts of miscellaneous creepy things I couldn't identify because it was so dark. I tried turning the gamma up in game, but all that did was make the light bulbs brighter than the sun without adjusting all the damn shadows... so I turned the gamma up directly on my video card, and by the time I had the game up to a decent light level where I could actually see things in the shadows, the windows in the background had achieved a fusion reaction and were well on their way to forming their own galaxy.
I've gone off on a tangent though. Doom 3 is pretty, when you can finally see environments. So you're playing along and monsters are appearing, and the first couple of ones are pretty cool. Your typical zombie guys with machine guns, large fat guys with wrenches, ugly lanky guys that throw fire, the usual... and then suddenly, it happens. A cutscene starts off with this giant dog thing coming out and breaking stuff. I'm all like 'Sweet! Breaking stuff is awesome! >_
Oh yeah, I had a nice birthday. Thanks to everyone involved and to everyone else who left me alone!