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John Carmack is back in top form with Doom 3, a gorgeous tech demo for id's new engine. Unfortunately, the game play just can't live up to the same standards.
Let's get one thing clear from the outset: this game is dark. I do not mean that the storyline is dark, although it is. I mean that the game is litterally dark. Every room, corridor, and location is enveloped in a relentless and unceasing darkness. And don't think about jacking up your gamma correction to get around it, that doesn't work on this game. This is not to say that the darkness is necessarily bad. Indeed, it leads to many of the game's scary moments and adds to the tension and atmosphere. The darkness also means that fancy lighting effects, of which there are many, are that much more noticeable and pronounced.
Unfortunately, it is the consistent use of darkness that leads the game down a rat hole of repetitive game play elements. This ultimately dulls the otherwise shiny armor of the awesome Doom 3 engine.
It is important to note that the game was designed to be scary. It was setup to be a frightening experience and, at least early on, it delivers. You play the nameless space marine, just like in the old Doom, and arrive at Mars to investigate some problems with a science wing. You soon discover the "problems" and all Hell breaks loose, as you would expect. It is at this point that the lights go out and the tension starts to mount. The game does an excellent job of maintaining a stressful, high tension atmosphere for quite a while. You are faced with some scary foes, but not unfamiliar ones (if you have played previous installments). The game offers a pretty long single player campaign with a good storyline and missions that keep everything moving.
The problems with the game's style start to become evident by the time you reach the halfway point in the story, but probably earlier on. By this point in the game it is clear that every room or area has a trigger point and every encounter will involve multiple enemies teleporting in from thin air and ready to attack. At some point you will instinctively take on a successful strategy of hearing the telltale teleport sound, whipping around 180 degrees and opening fire. This will almost invariably result in you getting the first hits on some bad guy who is about to strike. This trigger/teleport mechanism will also teach you to think twice before picking up ammo, armor, health packs, etc... The reason is that you know this will trigger a set of enemies, so you weigh the benefits of the power-up with the cost of another fight. This starts to make the encounters and the game in general rather predictable and mostly uninteresting.
At the point where the game's mechanics are exposed, the darkness ceases to provide tension and starts to produce a tedious monotony of switching gun-flashlight-gun-flashlight to see things in a room and stay ready for the next predictable wave of baddies. And that leads us to the most annoying facet of this game: you cannot have a weapon and a flashlight at the same time. You can read this same criticism everywhere, but it seems ludicrous that humans have stations on Mars and interplanetary travel, but they don't have weapons with attached flashlights, like we already did way back in the 20th century. Thankfully, the "duct tape" mod was produced, which allowed for a flashlight attached to certain weapons. This is not essential to beating the game, but it can make the experience more...illuminating.
In the end, Doom 3 delivers a solid run-and-gun FPS, as you would expect. It delivers this through a great new engine that looks really good. Unfortunately, it also delivers some stale game play elements and repitition that sometimes dull the overall experience.
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