Gameplay
To a greater or lesser extent, your objective through the game is to follow the orders from one or other of these guys, given to you by radio or video links. However, dress it up as much as you like with CGI sequences and radio transmissions, this is still very much a ‘throw this switch to open this door’ or ‘fetch this item to unlock this area’ game. It couldn’t be more linear if it was an ‘Operation Wolf’ style on-the-rails shooter. The whole idea of completing various tasks soon becomes tedious in the extreme, especially as to achieve one objective you may have to complete as many as five or six other jobs first. At times you feel more like a handyman with a gun than an elite space marine as, for the third time, you replace a plasma containment canister or re-fit a broken conduit pipe.
This is made doubly frustrating in that one of your first tasks is to link up with the rest of your squad. In this modern day of gaming, team and squad play are included in most FPSs, and are in the fact the cornerstone of many of the most recent successful titles. So by telling you to link up with your squad you’d think there was some sort of squad-based fun to be had, perhaps even a re-enactment of that classic ‘Aliens’ scene where Vasquez shouts “Let’s ROCK!” and the whole squad open up as the walls come alive…. But no, you spend so much time faffing around with fuses and circuit boards to get one door open that your squad are all dead by the time you get there. Yep, Doom 3 is a single player, single person, solo experience, no matter how much it teases you into believing it’s anything else.
As the screenies testify, the game does look incredible. The attention to detail in the environments is outstanding and it really does look and feel like you’re walking through a disaster zone. Bodies and body parts litter the floor, broken walkways and fallen masonry or walls block the path ahead. In areas where the machinery is automated, things carry on doing their jobs. The inventiveness and thought that has gone into making a believable and richly detailed game to play in is obvious. Although it has to be said that the game does get a little repetitive, for although the areas all differ in some way, each area can start to feel very ‘samey’ and I often found myself just wishing for the end of the level so I could see something new.