Three-and-a-half years into the life of Doom 3, I finally find the time to pick it up and play it. It’s hard to believe it’s that old; I have better recollections of the gags people made about production delays and its outrageous system requirements. In the present, though, I realise several things:
- It’s too piss annoying to be a survival horror game. In SH games you can see where you’re going. In Doom 3, you are a one-armed bandit that can hold a flashlight or a gun, but not a flashlight and a gun.
- If you can’t see where you’re going, you can’t see where you’re shooting. If you can see where you’re going with flashlight in hand, then you can’t shoot anything.
- You get bored of the metallic grey colour very fast. Terraforming engineers of the future have no aesthetic sense.
- Building on Mars may be complicated, but the base is designed for second graders: everything from security clearance to crane operation is operable via LCD consoles with, at most, two large buttons on them.
- This is a highly technical facility, so id Software figured it needed to staff it with lots of Asians. Unfortunately, Asians look creepier than whites in this game. No perspective yet on how well black people are rendered because there are none. Does the UAC follow Civil Rights Act guidelines at all?
If you played this game three years ago, good for you. If you haven’t, I would recommend you skip it. After developments in Half-Life 2, the Doom 3 universe is mundane by comparison. Worse, three years of hardware evolution aren’t enough to truly make Doom 3 stutterless. My MacBook Pro is about a year or two younger than the game and it’s barely getting by on medium video settings.