Doom 3 Review
TWO BEGINNINGS
One fateful day in December of 1993, Doom unmistakably changed the gaming landscape forever. While id Software’s previous accomplishment Wolfenstein 3D established the first-person shooter experience as a compelling new genre, Doom truly perfected the formula. Instead of samey levels and WWII weaponry, Doom gave us a sexy sci-fi arsenal to plow through a diverse cast of demons both in a space station and Hell itself. Doom's pistol, shotgun, and rocket launcher loadout supplemented by novelty weapons would become the popular default for most shooters thereafter. I rarely encounter a first person shooter fan who doesn't acknowledge Doom’s influence on their taste, if they don't outright call it their favorite game in the genre. While Doom’s influence on the design of modern shooters is undeniable, I didn't experience its release firsthand and thus can’t attest to it being transformative for me like it was for the industry back then. Coincidentally, id Software would still be responsible for my own gaming epiphany by way of 2004’s Doom 3. Once I’d experienced its intense atmosphere and combat, greatness in a first person shooter would have new meaning for me. In this retrospective, I will explore what makes Doom 3 and its expansion Resurrection of Evil so memorable, and judge how faithful the BFG Edition remaster is to that legacy.
Doom 3’s setup is certainly similar to the original games. You're a marine who defied orders from a superior and now you've been given grunt duty at a Mars space station. You'll soon find that this remote base has been compromised by a power hungry scientist named Bertuger, who's been pushing the teleportation technology too far and allowed
The player will spend their time skulking around cramped, dark areas listening for ambushes, engaging in small to midsize conflicts, hunting for keys, solving the odd puzzle, and fighting bosses.
The lack of scale and speed has left a vocal minority of fans dissatisfied. While I certainly enjoy the pace of the original games as well as Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, I can’t count Doom 3's lack thereof against it, as it simply highlights different aspects of the series’ core tenets. Doom has always had classic horror elements, from the monster growls heard long before you can see them to the strobe light sections where imps lurk in the shadows. id Software simply leans into this aspect of the title more forcefully than before, emphasizing close quarters combat, scant light sources, and the most realistic environments and NPCS yet seen in the series.
John Carmack’s idtech 4 engine is largely to blame for this remarkable upgrade of Doom's philosophies. Vicarious Visions also worked wonders to squeeze a lot of Carmack’s groundwork into their original Xbox port of the game, which is the version I’ve played the most and which I maintain is the best looking game to grace the sixth generation of consoles. This level of graphical fidelity and tense pacing has kept me experiencing my fair share of minor heart attacks over the years, no matter how many times I play it.
WHAT SETS IT APART
One of the most fundamental contributors to Doom 3’s atmosphere is its most controversial: the handheld flashlight. You cannot wield a weapon and the flashlight simultaneously and must swap between them as needed, meaning your guard could be down at crucial moments while attempting to explore. User forums to this day still decry this feature as clunky, contrived, and out of place in a Doom game but I must protest.
My criteria for a good mechanic is that it increases the fun factor of the experience and contributes to the central gameplay hook, regardless of contrivance. The flashlight fulfills these criteria admirably because it challenges the player to constantly assess and reassess the danger of the darkness around them and choose between illumination or possible elimination. Worth pointing out to naysayers is that most enemies have glowing projectile attacks that give away their position in the dark whenever they use it, making the choice to forego the flashlight for firepower a less negative trade off. Make no mistake, however; the dark is full of terrors and the need to switch back and forth between flashlight and weaponry is often satisfyingly tense.
The second particular feature worth calling attention to about Doom 3’s unique design is its variation on the key mechanic prevalent in the originals. Instead of key cards, the player must find PDA (Personal Data Assistant) devices lying around the UAC base that contain voice recordings and emails from UAC personnel. The recordings contain some of the most naturalistic voice acting I’ve heard in gaming, and sell the UAC employees as tragically unaware of their impending doom, concerned more with workplace dissatisfaction, corruption from their bosses, relationships, and even why so many chainshaws have been overshipped to the facility. The player must listen and read these PDAs carefully too, as they contain supply locker codes and door codes. They even have a stylish sci-fi animation and sound effect when queued up, feeling like a functional part of the world as well as a progression mechanic.
A HELL NEW WORLD
This level of immersive detail carries over into the level design. The player moves through practical spaces that could believably support human life on Mars and also be capable of the technological advances to open portals to another dimension. The initial areas and interactions with NPCS work hard to sell this, hearkening back strongly to Half-Life's opening. The Doomguy arrives on Mars to report for security detail and he's greeted by informative NPCS who naturalistically introduce you into the world and give you a sense of normalcy before chaos inevitably ensues. The irony is that Half-Life’s plot was a send up of the original Doom and now Doom 3 repays the favor.
Work spaces have your typical cubicle set up with desk, computer, and chairs, meeting rooms abound, and there are plenty of bathrooms, kitchens, and other practical features indicating everyday life carries on there. Mars Base hums with industrial fervor and often showcases industrial robot arms conveying products or lasers activating inside of optical machinery. Most every place you go in the UAC base feels purposeful and functional.
Once Doom 3 has established a believable setting, the game does a powerful work of magic to believably capture the spectacle of a demonic space invasion, of the surreal consuming the mundane. This place of research and enterprise slowly slips into a nightmare due to corporate greed. Butchered remains of unwitting personnel line the corridors, and terrified survivors hide in ventilation shafts and behind security doors hoping the horrors outside will soon disperse. Not only do the demons roam freely on Mars, but their dimensional home starts to break through and infest the base more profoundly as you approach the portal to Hell, and eventually, descend into its depths.
Surprisingly, Hell hasn’t shown up in video game history as often as you might expect. The videogame adaptation of 2005's Constantine (one of my favorite movies), opted for a high concept Hell-as-mirror-of-earth look while 2010's Dante’s Inferno threw everything at the wall in terms of gross-out detail and gothic architecture. Hell in Doom 3 is painted with deft restraint as if by a Renaissance artist. The color palette of rusty reds contrasting with glowing primary colors sounds modern but Hell’s architecture and iconography are classic and pregnant with menace. What makes the brief sojourn to Hell so memorable is how effortlessly the landscape transitions from artistically coherent but structurally unique locations. One minute the player can find themselves in a smoke-filled dungeon lined with cages for the damned, the next in an underground cave filled with lava, or even atop a floating stone bridge that lets you cross an expanse of stars and space. Hell never ceases to compel the player towards its heart through it luridly mixture of danger and spectacle.
ALMOST GREAT: SOUND, ENEMIES, AND PEWPEWS
To this point, I’ve spoken primarily about how Doom 3 affects the player visually, but Hell is as good a place as any to discuss how it makes you feel in terms of the audio presentation and the combat loop.
Let’s begin with sound, which ranges from good to middling. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who did much of the soundwork on id's Quake, provided some initial sound design before he parted ways with the project, but the drummer of Nine Inch Nails remained on the project as the primary member of Tweaker, who wrote the game's intro theme. Tweaker's intro theme is chuggy, head-banging goodness, and people may deride it as a Lateralus clone but you might as well say I play basketball like Jordan for all that insult's worth. This track is the perfect motivation to jump back into the game every time you load up the game.
Once playing, the score is subdued and ambient, often supplanting actual melody or notes with ghostly whispers and a haunting sound like distant screaming that often swells as if pursuing the player. This unsettling undercurrent of sound keeps the player on edge at all times and makes the breakouts into combat all the more affecting as gunfire and enemy screams take over.
Speaking of enemies, engaging them is the point where all of Doom 3’s elements coalesce in a satisfying way. They are incredibly well animated and tenaciously pursue the player over and around obstacles. Most possess at least three unique sound effects: one to signal they’ve seen you, the next to signal they’re attacking, and the last to signal their death. Hearing a screech from the darkness is panic inducing and a great hook throughout. The frenzy this encourages in the player’s mind is amplified by how deliberately you move by default and how limited your sprint is.
Imps are your most common pursuer and so the most time and effort was placed into their design. They often stalk the player like panthers, dropping on all fours to crawl on walls and ceilings to pounce attack the player if they aren’t throwing fireballs your way. Other enemies like the Commando snake out a long appendage ahead of them as they charge, and most other enemies and all boss characters have formidable ranged attacks to make up for what already small distance the player can maintain. This intentional power dynamic baked into basic traversal and combat ratchets up the tension but can also lead to some frustration when your Doomguy gets stuck on level geometry or gets boxed in by the more athletically gifted enemies.
The game also has an unwelcome affinity for old-school monster closets. On many occasions, once an item in a corner of the room is picked up, a nearby wall slides open to reveal a demon ready to take advantage of your diverted attention. A similar gimmick is that demons will lie in wait behind closed doors and leap through as it is opening, resulting in unavoidable damage. The third such poor design choice is the frequent enemy spawns that occur behind you, often while you’ve just been engaged by several enemies in front of you. In the often cramped spaces, the abundance of AIs competing with the plethora of particle effects can become a sensory mess that just asks too much of the player.
The player’s ability to fight back effectively can depend on the version they decided to play, however. The Xbox port comes out ahead of the original PC version because the left-thumbstick can be clicked to crouch and dodge projectile attacks. Mastering this technique up close is the most indispensable skill on console and means the difference between taking thirty to forty damage in an attrition battle with a demon up close or simply dodging an imp fireball or Commando tentacle and one-shotting them, no worse for wear. The lean and dodge function simply does not seem to exist on the PC version and for that reason I cannot recommend it except for its graphical fidelity. Put simply, without the dodge move, the player goes from being the Doom Slayer to this guy right here:
“That’s one doomed space marine!” - Duke Nukem 3D easter egg
Of course, you couldn’t make any headway against the demons with only a dodge move at your disposal. Your arsenal is a varied and interesting mix of conventional weapons like pistol, shotgun, and machine gun supplemented by laser weapons and otherworldly options. They are generally all effective enough to be worthy of inclusion, but some of their sound effects are underwhelming.
The shotgun is the workhorse of Doom 3 as it is in most id Software titles, and while it has a powerful sound while reloading and chambering shells, the actual shots fired sound overly compressed, like a full can of paint being hit with a hammer. The shotgun also possesses highly inconsistent damage and spread at range. It’s still mostly fun and satisfying but it remains an ugly duckling next to Doom II’s super shotgun, Blood’s quick-firing sawn off, or FEAR’s SPAS-12, to name a few. By the same token, the machine gun and its rattling burst fire often sounds more like a nailgun than a Marine grade service weapon. The chaingun and rocket launcher have low feedback, clinky sound effects when fired and reloaded. The weaponry that is truly empowered by their sounds are the plasma rifle and BFG, two of the traditionally most potent choices in a Doom game; they do not disappoint, each giving off pleasingly full crackles of energy as they rip through enemies. Overall, the weapons are solid despite their sometimes mismatched sound effects.
Now Doom 3 is not without faults in maintaining its atmosphere, and the guns are not the only place it falters. The game can devolve into a repetitive stop and pop rhythm too often, and rooms start to become very predictable in how enemies will spawn in. Some fights, especially in the PC version, also spawn in imps or the spider-like trites in for upwards of a minute, but only after the other has died, resulting in a tedious and goofy conga line effect. Boss fights, while visually impressive, are often too easy to overcome even on Veteran difficulty and some can be bested in under a minute depending on whether you have access to ammunition for your most powerful weapons. Now these issues don’t run rampant in the game but they will come up and are likely the cause of what ill will the game does have from a vocal minority, especially when fans seem to have expected something more guns a’ blazing.
Fortunately, Doom 3’s commitment to concept is what makes it more than the sum of its parts. While not as narratively transformative for the genre as Half-Life, Doom 3 manages to give horror fans the lurid challenge of disempowerment long enough to take the game’s danger seriously, but also gives action fans the payoff of sweet revenge. In survival horror, the player is often so scant on resources and abilities they are lucky to survive most encounters, and that rush of escaping certain death keeps the player coming back for more. Doom 3 acknowledges the validity of that approach and provides it as a preamble, but also allows the player to rise to the challenge and to become just as fearsome as the demons.
POST-LAUNCH CONTENT AND THE REMASTERING
To further distill what makes Doom 3 worth the warts, let’s examine how the expansion Resurrection of Evil greatly amplifies the strengths of Doom 3 and how the remaster the BFG Edition fails to live up to the legacy of the original build. Resurrection of Evil picks up a short time after where the main campaign ended. A distress signal goes out from a remote Martian installation near where the first invasion was put down, and the player character is sent in with a group of marines to investigate. They find an abandoned archaeological site where more research into Hell portals was taking place and predictably events transpire that leave this Doomguy on his lonesome, but not before unwittingly activating a Martian artifact and alerting Hell to its presence. The artifact is the first major new addition to the arsenal you acquire and is powered by absorbing the souls of human corpses. It can also be leveled up by defeating bosses, consequently gaining the abilities to slow down time, do extra damage, and become invulnerable.
If that sounds overpowered, Resurrection and its new options often are and gloriously so. The base game was about gradually allowing the player the means to conquer their fear and retaliate, and Resurrection takes that ideology even further and lets the player really cut loose from it previously tepid pacing. In addition to the powerful artifact, the player gets their hands on the Grabber gun, which allows you to throw inanimate objects at your enemies and redirect their energy projectiles back at them for instant kills. The crowning jewel of Resurrection as power fantasy, however, is the triumphant return of the super shotgun, a double barred powerhouse that blows through enemies like a turn of the century, safari style elephant gun. The super shotgun invalidates the base Doom 3 shotgun due to its incredibly high stopping power, decent range, and less randomized spread; just like in Doom II, this one really improves the feel of combat and changes the power dynamic immensely. Resurrection also does away with the handheld flashlight mechanic entirely, attaching it instead to your base pistol. This means that are brighter more often and becomes more of a standard shooter than Doom 3; this does not prevent it from being highly enjoyable, however. Downloadable content and expansions are often often at their best when they cut the fat from the main game and get to the good stuff or when they allow the player to participate in gameplay vignettes riffing in the margins of the core game’s ideas that might not be as compelling if prolonged over the course of a full-length game. Resurrection gives the players sweet new weapons and powers, and even a couple new enemy types that act as supercharged versions of previously established archetypes from the main game. On console, the lag between quicksaving and loading up menus has been substantially reduced and really smooths out the experience. It’s overall a compelling package and wraps up the loose ends of Doom 3 nicely.
On the other hand, the 2012 remastering of all this content called the BFG Edition did a fair bit to change some core ethics of the original game to its detriment. This remaster attempted to introduce Xbox 360 and PS3 fanbases to the game and would have succeeded if it had not compromised the original’s vision. For starters, the ability to map your favorite four weapons to the D Pad on Xbox has been removed and the player has to perform the inexcusable task of cycling through their whole weapon wheel in the middle of fights. The BFG Edition makes Resurrection of Evil’s pistol-mounted flashlight available from the outset and tunes up the brightness in every area, reducing much of the tension and suspense of exploration. The addition of auto saves to supplement your quicksaves is welcome, but the total gameplay pause that occurs when the saving notification that pops up and covers a third of the screen is not. Ammo counts are much higher than the base game and often times you wind up with a surplus of ammo.
Some sections, like an encounter with two mancubi in Hell, is the prime example of how the game is loathe to challenge the player. In the base game, you would open a gate onto a narrow bridge that tasked you with dodging a falling boulder to get across unscathed. The gate you came through would close behind you and you had to contend with two mancubi spawning on either side and trying to knock you off as you try to time running underneath the boulder to get to the other side. In the BFG Edition, the gate does not close behind you, allowing you to run ahead on the bridge to trigger the spawns and then run back into the cover of the doorway and pop shot your way to a cheesy victory over the two mancubi without exposing yourself. This overall lack of confidence in Doom 3’s intentional and often effective design is a disservice to its legacy and makes the BFG Edition inferior in nearly every way.
One new addition that the BFG Edition offers is the brief but enjoyable Lost Mission. The level design is rather simplistic and definitely looks like it was cobbled together from unused Doom 3 level assets (it was). The first several areas are exceedingly linear corridors with all doors blocked off except that which propels the player straight forward. Soon though, the difficulty ramps up considerably as the level spaces open up and you make your way to the inevitable depths of Hell yet again. The Hell levels in the Lost Mission are some of the series’ most creative and recall the classic open fighting arenas from the first two Dooms. They show off just how singular and creative Doom 3’s vision of Hell is, easily surpassing that of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal for me.
FINAL VERDICT
So if I had to recommend a version to play, it would have to be the Xbox version. It retains much of the PC version’s graphical prowess, and has the original flashlight mechanic, D pad weapon mapping, functioning dodge mechanics, and tightly balanced difficulty. Regardless of your platform though, there’s a high likelihood for having a good time. 2004 was a fantastic year for first person games with titles such as Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Few have remained in my annual playthrough rotation like Doom 3, though; hell, just for this review alone, I played the Xbox 360 version of the BFG Edition, the Xbox port and the PC version of the base game/expansion and had a blast each time. I implore anyone who wants more atmosphere and grit in their first-person action games to go straight to Hell and give this underrated experience a chance to frighten and empower them like few other experiences. So rip and tear, my friends…until it is done.
