DOOM 3 works very hard to establish a foreboding and tense atmosphere. This is primarily done by keeping you in the dark for most of the game. You’re in a station with no windows, so once the trouble starts and the power goes on the fritz you’re faced with a lot of very dark rooms to pass through. Pressing the White button will bring up your flashlight, but it only illuminates a small circle of light leaving most of the room in darkness. Making matters harder on you, you can not use your flashlight and a gun at the same time. Don’t they have helmet or head lamps in the future? Or perhaps, say, night vision goggles? While some people will find this to be realistic or to add an additional level of challenge, most will find it more annoying than anything else. DOOM 3 loves to try and scare you by having zombies and demons pop out of dark places to catch you off guard. Sometimes you’ll begin taking damage without any idea of where your attacker is. Spinning around doesn’t help much as everything is so dark you may not be able to even see your attacker. You’re stuck with shooting around madly, taking your lumps, and cursing the fact that you’ll very shortly be reloading your game.

Co-op mode is twice the fun.

The demons and various monsters you’ll face in the game are imaginative, creepy, and move with a swiftness and purpose that will have you believing that they are real. If you ever played the old DOOM games then you’ll see a “re-imagining” of some familiar ugly faces, but there are brand new monsters to blast as well. For all of their looks and realistic animation, your enemies in the game are not too bright. They pretty much all come straight for you, challenging you to empty your weapon into their bulk and drop them to the floor before they can reach you. Most of the fighting takes place in pretty cramped quarters, so the single-mindedness of the demons’ AI is not always obvious. However, when you’re in a larger room it becomes blatantly obvious. When you take into account the fact that you’re basically just pumping ammo into lumbering attackers while moving from one dark room to the next in a very linear path, you’ll find that DOOM 3 has a tendency to grow repetitive and even monotonous at times. You’re better off playing it over numerous short sessions than a few daze-inducing marathons.

The weapons in the game are decidedly old school, lifted right out of DOOM 2. They basically progress up in strength as you move from pistol to shotgun, all the way up to the BFG. None have any secondary fire options and all pretty much fill demons full of lead, so you’ll find yourself using the strongest weapon that you currently have the ammo for. The two weapons that are different from the bunch don’t prove very useful for the most part. The quarters are so cramped that you’ll hurt yourself with the rocket launcher as much as you do your enemies and the chainsaw is more for visceral thrills than anything else.

In addition to the single player campaign, DOOM 3 includes an enjoyable co-op mode as well. The co-op mode takes levels from the single player game and tweaks them for two player play. This makes the co-op mode a genuine two player game and not simply two players moving through the single player version. Some of the changes include story dialog directed at two players, doors that require two players to open, and extra ammo and items to be shared between two. The co-op mode can be played both over System Link and Xbox Live, and is actually the better of the Xbox Live modes. This is because the multiplayer death match play is a bit disappointing. The game only supports four combatants at a time battling it out in the same sort of dark and cramped quarters found in the campaign. It’s there, but it’s pretty basic and I don’t think it will keep shooter fans away from multiplayer Halo 2 for very long.

DOOM 3 scores very highly in the atmosphere and visuals departments, which is an accomplishment when you consider that much of the game is simply too dark. It can be both creepy and enjoyable, but also repetitive and monotonous. It’s not a groundbreaking shooter along the lines of a Halo 2, but it is better than most and is sure to find its own audience of devout fans.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 86%.  What it does it does well. Hunting demons in the dark is fun at times, but there’s not much more to DOOM 3 than that.

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