(Note: Even though this is a review for Doom 3, I should disclose that I played Doom 3 through a mod called “Sikkmod” that provides minor gameplay tweaks and enhanced visual effects. In spite of modding the game, I am confident that the complaints I have about Doom 3 are still valid and reflect the game, modified or not)
Doom 3 was a game that took me many years to work through. I started it on a whim because I was curious about it -- Doom 3 has quite the reputation behind it, and it’s not an especially positive one. Yet, there was still something about Doom 3 that drew me towards it. Even as I knew I wasn’t having a lot of fun with the game, something inexorably pulled me towards the end of the game, though it would take nearly six years and three separate installs to do so.
Doom 3 is a game that wants to be many things. It is good at basically none of them. Many of the things it wants to be contradict each other. It wants to be scary, but it also wants to be macho action. It wants to be Half-Life (pre-Half-Life-2), but it also wants to stay Doom.
The shades of Black Mesa are obvious, but the problem here is it doesn’t mesh well -- Doom 3 wants to be the same silly, over the top heavy metal game that the original Doom was, but it will also pull you aside and demand you take its spooky atmosphere seriously, and it never puts in the work to make the two styles gel. This is kind of oil and water mixture is what comes to define Doom 3.
It’s just not scary, and it’s not very action-packed either. The story, wavering between morbid and goofy, comes out the other end not making a lot of sense.
It goes something like this: demons arrive on Mars with the help of Dr. Betruger and want to use our space ships to travel to earth. Think about that for a moment: demons have to use our ships for their invasion, and the game goes out of its way to imply they're rare enough that they aren't readily available. When the first 15 or 20 demons get to earth, what do they think will happen when they get there? Do they think they'll just order another shipment of demons from Mars until, 20 demons at a time, they've conquered the entire planet, unopposed?
And why does Betruger want to help the demons reach earth? He just does, because that's all the reason anyone needs, apparently. There are dozens of email logs, a bunch of lore about the origin of the demons and why a portal to hell even exists, but the antagonist is evil just because he's evil, like a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain.
The real heart of the problem is the gameplay. Flashlight issues aside, gun play is slow and clumsy. Weapons take forever to reload, and once you start reloading your gun, you can't switch to something else. Often I'd get in to scenarios where I'd empty the clip in one gun, only to have my character start reloading it automatically, locking me in to a long animation. Your only option in that scenario is to watch your character slowly slot each individual shotgun shell in to the barrel, all the while helplessly dancing around incoming enemies. This feels like a horror game mechanic designed to make you panic, but as you progress further and further in to the game, the action ramps up. Small armies of demons file out of monster closets like they were clown cars, forcing you to refresh your clip at some point, whether you want to or not. It creates a very frustrating disconnect, because any logical human would just switch to a different weapon and reload that other gun later.
And then there's the ending, with one of the most limp final bosses I've ever encountered and a crummy cliffhanger to set up the expansion pack, Resurrection of Evil. The last thing I wanted out of this game at the end was a stupid "Gotcha!" moment, but that's exactly what it has.
Doom 3 has a reputation that can't be ignored, but I figured it was at least interesting enough to see through to the end. I was wrong. Curiosity killed the Cacodemon.
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It took me five years, but I finally finished Doom 3 a few days ago. It left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. I’m not even really sure why I finished it, but it may have something to do with what Sikkmod does to the game.
At its core, Sikkmod is a graphics enhancement mod for Doom 3. It adds advanced lightbloom, color correction, film grain, etc. As you can tell, the results can be quite striking, especially when paired with the Wulfen texture pack, which adds high-def replacements for some textures with added parallax mapping.
Sikkmod also has a lot of options for gameplay tweaks. Armor-mounted mini-flashlights, health kits you can keep in your inventory, and the ability to modify a whole host of damage settings for guns, enemies and more. How I ended up playing the game was to crank the difficulty up to “Veteran,” the hardest non-Nightmare difficulty. Then, since Veteran beefs up enemy health, I used Sikkmod to forcibly turn enemy health back down. The idea was to have enemies that could hit me really hard, but wouldn’t eat tons of ammo.
As a safety measure, I turned on regenerating health that would refill me up to 65% hp. This meant finding health was still important, but I’d never be cornered in an unwinnable situation.
Even though all of this might sound like wuss mode, it still provided a pretty decent, balanced challenge. I couldn’t sustain more than a few hits from any given enemy, and even with their reduced health, enemies like Imps could still take a full shotgun blast to the chest and live to rip me apart. But, as long as I played carefully, I never found myself quitting out of frustration.
But really, it just highlighted all of Doom 3′s other problems that Sikkmod doesn’t fix, like the inane storyline, how slow and horror-y the guns are, and how a lot of enemies seem to spawn out of a clown car, one-by-one. Not to mention the horrid ending, which ends on a cliffhanger to set up the expansion, Resurrection of Evil (which I do not own and will not be playing).
The Wulfen textures also created an odd problem every now and then -- though metal and technology looked fine, the parallax textures for stone and dirt could sometimes warp and distort in some kind of dizzying ways.
Occasionally I’d run in to textures that simply didn’t correctly load at all.
These were rare problems, though.
For those out there curious about my Sikkmod settings, I’ve thrown them all in to this Imgur album. This other Imgur album has every single screenshot I ever took while playing Doom 3 in the last week.
ID 's engines Rock ! Doom 3 and RAGE both look fantastic on my PC !
Check out whats cooking on my PC these days, the best of graphics and the best of ID's tech 4 and Tech 5 !
Can you spot which ones are from RAGE and which one's from Doom 3 ! :^) Yes, Doom3 +Sikkmod +Wulfen's texture Mod = Awesomeness of the highest order !
What are your opinion about Doom 3? For me I take it a a different flavored Doom where Demonic Horror mixed with sci-fi in a more serious tone is something that had to happen since the first Doom, and I think people give it too much flak because it's different than the originals (which I love, but not as much as Quake 1).
Doom 3 is a fine game. Its got nothing on the classics, but on its own it’s pretty solid. It’s best when played using Sikkmod and with the random enemy spawn rate cranked up to give you that extra feeling of tension when you realize that you’re never safe no matter where you are, no matter how many demons you kill. Also more lurking enemies makes it feel a lot more like the originals. Killing demons is always most fun when there’s a whole lot of them.
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