Doom 3 Review @ Speeed's Reviews

The D3 screenshot provides more gamedata than HL at half the resolution. I conclude that D3 looks far better than HL and runs acceptably. There is more to consider than can be represented by a mere screenie but the purpose is served.

Some game veterans will recall the release of the Voodoo 1 card which enabled glQuake . I bought the Orchid Righteous model and had Q1 framerates around 36 fps at 640x480. The game was eminently playable at that rate. Is 34.2 fps an acceptable rate for D3. Maybe, that's your call not mine. I play D3 at 1024x768 Hi and get less than that.

I also conclude that my rig, while a very powerful system, isn't up to snuff for the current DX 9 generation of games. This leads to another question: Should I spend money to upgrade so I might play D3 and the ensuing hoarde of new games based on "heavily modified"* D3 engines. Let's look to the past, again. In 1994 I had 4mb of memory and Doom needed 8 if I didn't want to cha cha. i.e. boot with a minimum of devices. It cost me almost two hundred 1994 dollars (when I made a hell of a lot less scratch then I do now) to install 4 mb of budget mem. It would seem that I need to spend around $600 to bring me into compliance today : new videocard and another 512 mb of HyperX. The answer for me is, nope. Your answer will vary.

Onto the review.

Graphics: 9

The first thing to catch my eye was that there is almost nothing to see. The game was designed to be dark...Which is probably why so many puds are writing "Play this game in the dark!" It's the only way to see any action. D3 has a brightness slider but it is worthless, absolutely! I went to the ATI tools and created a custom profile for
fullscreen 3D games but even when I maxed out brightness and gamma the game was too obscure for my enjoyment. A tad of Google research led me to the console commands: r_gamma and r_brightness. I boosted gamma to 1.2 - Nope, 1.4 - Nope, 1.6 - Nope. I settled on 2.0. I have since scaled back to 1.8. It makes the game bright enough so I can see....The key word here is I. I can see. The aura the game developers wanted to express is of little interest to me. Once that $50 was plunked down the game was mine to enjoy how I see fit and I'm sure that's what iD wanted...The game to be enjoyed. If a games not fun why play? Because the game is so dark I can't give the graphics a 10. It's gets a 9. If it hadn't of been for the r_gamma console command it would of had a 0.

It seems that the flashlight is designed to be carried and swapped out for a weapon when monsters are near. HA HA! Here I am a big tuff ass Marine and I can't carry a flashlight and a weapon simultaneously. Man, it isn't George Bush thats out of touch with the common man. It's game developers. Do the Marines in the worlds hot spots
know that they can't carry a weapon and a flashlight? I doubt it. please don't e-mail me that this isn't a realistic game. If iD wasn't trying for a realistic experience I coulda played this game on my GeForce MX 400, right. I know, I know different types of realism.

Other than the preceding cavaets the graphics are as good as it gets. Did you expect less from the leader? One thing I really found new and original were the percussion waves from grenades. I haven't seen that before.

Sound: 10

It's exquisite. I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz OEM soundcard and a 2.1 Altec Lansing budget speaker system. Sound entails more than the music, ambient noise, monsters and weapons. An all too frequently overlooked aspect is the voice acting and dialog. A great example of a popular game that has very bad voice acting is FarCry. In this day there is no excuse to have voice acting that sounds as bad as that in FarCry. The dialog must have been written by a 9 year old in that game. Not so in D3. The dialog is better than OK and the voice acting is good. Weapon sounds are first rate as are monster sounds. What really shines are the ambients and the music. Too many times game music sounds like game elevator music. It has nothing that distinguishes itself. In D3 sound is excellent and close to perfection.

Gameplay: 9

Hey, none of the other stuff matters is the game is crap. Going in I asked myself...could this game be as good as Doom or Doom 2? I knew it couldn't be. Why? Reread first paragraph. The gameplay is just what I like. Action....I don't want to solve puzzles or I'd be doing puzzle books. I don't mind an occasional search though. I knew after a few minutes of playing pretty much where the surprises were going to be. How? Well I played the original
Doom and iD was true to the archtype in this and other respects. Though not as many monsters attack the job of clearing them out was a challenge that I could accomplish playing on the Marine difficulty level without dying 50 times. That is an important consideration. Not all gamers are 12 years old. There are scores of older folks such as myself that don't want or feel the need to try something 20 or 30 times. I am most grateful for the quicksave feature. Why would anyone want someone else to decide where saving is allowed? There is plenty of quality action. I did get the chills a few times....which I like and I didn't even have to "turn the lights off"..How Lame. You will enjoy the game.

Asides:

I don't like the reprocessing of wav files from previous games and iD did that here. With the talent and the money they have they might have worked up sounds I hadn't heard in the Quake series. If iD was going to reuse sounds they should have been from Doom. Perhaps they did and I didn't hear them though. One of the more harmless hellions looks and acts like the barf zombie from Blood. Perhaps they're paying tribute to another great game.

I don't feel I should have to disable or as I had to, uninstall my CD ROM emulation software. There are plenty of legal and moral reasons that kind of software exists. It is a wrong to pay $50 and spend 30 minutes reworking your software to run the game. It's not right for iD and/or Activision to make me do that. If the boys at iD are such great programmers have them make a scheme that is effective in the battle against piracy. I don't consider not being able to run my game with emulation software installed and effective anti-piracy option, infact it promotes it.

Conclusion:

This is a great game and is worth the $50 iD and Activsion want for it. iD has that long history of providing for the consumer in ways that other developers can't or won't match. I like Call of Duty and Max Payne 2 more but there is almost nothing that can be done with those games once you finish. The community will make this game remembered when those are forgotten.

FInal score.....Hmmmmm Let's see 9+10+9=28

28/3 = 9.3