Ah
DOOM 3, the black sheep of the
DOOM franchise, stripping away the speedy, fast, heavy metal action and going for a more slower, cramped and claustrophobic experience;
DOOM 3 feels like a sore thumb compared to earlier and even later entries like
DOOM 2016 and
Eternal. From the outside looking in,
DOOM 3 is a divisive game; it's an underrated horror masterpiece to some and a slow plodding mess to others. Some recommend the original PC version and some recommend the 2012
BFG re-release and other still would have you ignore it all together. So after beating
64 I decided to go straight into
3 and finish my own personal
DOOM story that began in 2016 to see how it held up.
DOOM 3 lays down what it wants to be in the first 10 minutes of the game, a horror themed
Half-Life. After the introduction cut-scene you, a nameless space marine, are hurled into a Martian base to get acclimated, meet the people, enjoy some world building; ya know, like in
Half-Life. But sure enough you have to go do a thing and while you do the thing the entire Mars base falls into disaster as you must survive the coming onslaught of demons and monsters and find a way to seal away the horde. It feels like a mad-libs version of
Half-Life, replace aliens with demons and theoretical physicist with space marine. That said there's no version of G-Man, but there is a villain named Dr. Petruger, a man so clearly evil even at the start that if you didn't see that twist coming you must not have been paying attention. His haminess and Palpatine-esque cackling do save this plot and he's honestly the best part of the story but is also endemic of
DOOM 3's biggest flaw.
DOOM 3 is not a scary game, it's a hilarious game.
This revelation occurred to me as I entered the games third area and was rounding the corner into a room only to be hit by a barrel thrown at me by a demon. And then I started laughing, hysterically, non-stop, had to pause the game and everything as I lost my composure. Instead of scaring me as intended,
DOOM 3 had bought to mind a comparison to
Donkey Kong and that broke any illusion that
DOOM 3 was scary. Instead my mind began to shift from atmospheric horror to Disney's
Haunted Mansion ride and as such the "scares" were no longer scary. Petruger taunting you as you moved through the Martian Base was funny and I don't think it was meant to be. The only thing even slightly horrific was the audio logs of people who lived their day to day lives in this base before the demons came, really adds some character to the games proceedings and makes you feel for these people. But the actual jumpscares the game relies on? Not even close to scary.
That said those jumpscares are beyond frustrating, especially when the
DOOM 3 throws Lost Souls, Spiders, or what I call Cherubs at you. These are the worst enemies because they're small, fast, and always come in hordes so prepare to dump a lot of ammo into them. A matter made worse because your shotgun, the reliable demon killer of old, has the nasty habit of not hitting the targets when you need it to, like it has an RNG nerf that randomizes it's chances of killing demons. This results in times where the shotgun nukes imps and other foes like they're nothing but you may struggle against a zombie because your shotgun didn't feel like killing today. It sucks and I hate it; however it does make the other weapons like the machine gun, chain gun, and plasma gun your primary demon killers, which isn't that bad because ammo is plentiful for them in fact too plentiful,
DOOM 3 gets really easy by the end.
This comes around the time you reach the area just before hell, by then I found myself drowning in plasma rifle and machine gun ammo and as such a lot of the resource management that goes into a horror game flies right out the window. That said it's not easy, enemies like the tentacle demon hurt like a bitch, but it felt more like straight action as opposed to action-horror, though given the horror didn't work before I think that's actually a good thing. Then you actually get to hell and hell is actually kinda creepy because it feels like the fire and brimstone kind of hell as opposed to the technicolor heavy metal hell of
1 and
2 or even the medieval castle hell of
64. It's actually a really fun level as you only get the classic
DOOM weapons and if you know where to look you can get a free BFG which is great and a neat call back to the classic games.
Sadly hell lasts about 15-30 minutes and by the time you come out you get the soul cube, which takes whatever difficulty the game had left and curb-stomps it into the dirt. Because the soul cube kills anything in one hit and while it requires 5 kills to charge it makes harder demons like Archviles, Revenants, and Hell Knights into health refills, and those are meant to be the toughest demons in the game. Combine that with the BFG and plentiful ammo for your guns and, with a few exceptions,
DOOM 3 becomes a joke and I largely skated through the entire endgame, ya know, when the game should be kicking your teeth in and making you put every skill to the test. Even the final two bosses are absolute jokes because the Soul Cube turns them into health refills.
That said while I have been dumping on this game there are some things it does that I find genuinely impressive. One of those is gonna sound really dumb but the way you interact with control panels is actually impressive. Every other game I've played that asks you to work a control panel usually locks you into panel control and only lets you access that panel until you choose to exit. In
DOOM 3 this is seamless and you're never locked into it, and yet accessing these panels is a breeze and never once in the whole game felt odd or out of place. I know this sounds weird, "why does he care so much about control panels?" but it's something I never experienced before and I found it impressive. I think it's the mouse control on the PC original that helps it, but I'll know for sure if I get around to playing the Switch port of
BFG Edition. The other plus I can give
DOOM 3 is in the lighting department, the lighting is very well done for a 2004 game. I suppose that's why they wanted it to be a horror game, as those are usually most affected by lighting. And if the horror had actually been good I would have been impressed but it isn't and that sorta ruins the central focus of
DOOM 3's lighting, the flashlight. Yes, in
DOOM 3 the flashlight is a separate item you need to hold, and no you can't have a flashlight and gun equipped. The idea was to make the player panic when they encounter a foe and need to swap to their gun. It doesn't work, namely because I acclimated to this mechanic super fast and learned where the hotkey for the shotgun and machine gun were and if an enemy is in range to make you panic they're close enough for those guns to do the job. So to all those OG
DOOM 3 purists, you're wrong, the mechanic really doesn't matter and you can play
BFG Edition and not miss a damn thing, at least as far as I'm concerned.
But no matter what version you play,
DOOM 3 is a slow mess trying to make a variant of a better game while shoehorning elements of Classic
DOOM into the experience. While it's not a bad game by any means,
DOOM 3 falls into a forgettable phase for ID and I'm certain if it wasn't called
DOOM it would be remembered as well as
Rage is.
DOOM 3's technical impressiveness and solid gameplay are simply marred by poor horror, mediocre design, and a laughable villain. The game is at it's best at the tail end, when it gives up on horror and just plays like Classic
DOOM. But frankly you're better off downloading WADs for Nerve's port of Classic
DOOM if you want more
DOOM.
DOOM 3 is simply too slow to be as good at being a
DOOM game as the circle strafing fast chaos of the original two games (and Final
DOOM I guess). If you're curious though then I'd say
DOOM 3 is worth a chance, who knows, maybe you'll find something I didn't.
(P.S. If DOOM 3 was a Haunted House attraction, I would call it, "John Carmack's Spooky Tech Base (Now With Hell)")
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