Love/Hate: Doom 3 (2004)

Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the black sheep of the franchise, 2004’s Doom 3! This game came out around the time I was just starting to get into video game magazines, and as a result, it was my first real exposure to the Doom franchise. This is particularly interesting, because Doom 3 was considered a major departure from the series’ normal tone and gameplay style, an opinion which has only become more solidified now that more Doom games have released that harken back to the first two entries. Doom 3 is basically a modernized remake of the original Doom, but with the horror elements of that first game now fully embraced. It makes for a much darker and more serious take on the Doom formula, one which the series hasn’t really attempted since. Is Doom 3 a failed experiment, or is this a real gem that the series should revisit again? Read on to find out…

There are two main versions of Doom 3 out there: the original release, and the BFG Edition remaster which came out in 2012. For series purists, the original version is generally considered the “superior” experience. The original version of Doom 3 has a hand-held flashlight which needs to be equipped in order to light up the various dark rooms and corridors in the game (meaning that you can’t use the flashlight and a gun at the same time). BFG Edition, on the other hand, makes this flashlight armour-mounted, so you can use it to illuminate a room while firing a weapon. This might be a personal preference thing, but a lot of people who have played both versions feel that this change in the BFG Edition reduces some of the tension and atmosphere (not to mention that some of the levels have been made less-dark). That said, I went with the BFG Edition for my playthrough, because I like playing games with a controller, and that version of the game has built-in controller support. I doubt that this had a major impact on my overall thoughts, but I’m just putting that out there for the sake of context.

Love

• Horror – The entire premise of Doom is so ripe for horror, so it’s really cool to get to see at least one entry in the franchise where this gets fully embraced. Doom 3 absolutely nails the horrific reality of your facility getting overrun by monsters from hell, the brutal violence that they unleash on the people trapped there, and the terrifying way that they possess human beings to become their vessels of destruction. While I didn’t find the game particularly scary in its own right, the overall atmosphere lends makes every step feel dangerous, and every dark corner feels like it could be hiding some sort of awful monster just waiting to ambush you (and, what do you know, they often are). I would not be surprised if Doom 3 was a major influence on Dead Space, as they both share a pretty similar vision of sci-fi horror.
• Redesigned Enemies – In keeping with the more serious, realistic horror vibe, Doom 3 has overhauled the designs of nearly every enemy type (and introduces a bunch of new enemies for good measure). I actually really like a lot of these new designs, and wish that some of them would return in future games.
  • In particular, this game’s Hellknight is perfect. The hulking, eyeless, slobbering beast adorning the cover of this game has always fascinated me and was the first thing that made me go “this game looks awesome, I want to play it”. I’m so glad that future Doom games continued to embrace this design, because it’s so much better than just being a reskin of the Baron of Hell.
  • I’m also a huge fan of this game’s Pinky demon. They go from being this goofy, rotund monster in prior entries to an unnatural, quadrupedal beast with a maw of hateful fangs that want to tear you to shreds.
  • The Doom 3 Cacodemon is also fascinating. The original design is iconic, so I can’t really say that I prefer Doom 3‘s living, floating tumour rendition, but it makes for a really interesting take on a rather silly-looking enemy.
• The Latter-Half of the Game – Maybe I’m letting the cat out of the bag early here, but I wasn’t having much fun with Doom 3 for a good chunk of the playthrough. We’ll go over the reasons why soon enough, but around the time you reach the Delta Labs (about halfway in), I noticed that the game started feeling a lot more enjoyable. I’m still not sure exactly why this was. Maybe the level designs were just better? Maybe having access to your full arsenal helps? Maybe the enemy variety started getting better? Whatever the case, I was slogging through the game for a long time, and considered quitting on multiple occasions. However, by around the halfway point, I was suddenly having actual fun, which made the trip to the finale a breeze, and which definitely improved my overall feelings on the game.

Mixed

• Slow Pace – The Doom games are well-known for their high-octane gameplay, so it might not be surprising that the most controversial aspect of Doom 3 is its slow, measured pace. You’ll often spend lengthy periods of time outside of combat, and even when you do get into a fight, you’re only fighting a handful of enemies at a time. Hell, once you’ve started the game, it takes around twenty minutes for the first enemy to even show up! Your mileage will vary significantly on whether this is good, bad, or negligible. If you are a huge fan of classic/modern Doom, then this might feel like utter heresy. However, if you’re into horror games and can set aside how Doom is “supposed” to play, then this might be a cool change of pace. Personally, I don’t have particularly strong feelings about it: I appreciate that id Software were trying to evolve/modernize the Doom formula, so I’m not going to penalize them for deviating from the past. It’s very easy with hindsight to see how Doom 3 is an aberration within the overall franchise, but in 2004 this would not have been obvious at all.
• The PDA – One of the key new, “modern” features of Doom 3 was its PDA menu, where you can collect emails, audio diaries, video logs, and the like scattered around each level. These often contain hints to unlock storage lockers and find hidden items. The system works fine as intended, but it does come with a couple caveats. First of all, reading emails and collecting audio logs just exacerbates the aforementioned slow pace of the game, and not in a particularly interesting way. In addition, the game doesn’t pause while you’re using your PDA, so your battle-hardened space marine can literally get his ass beat because he spent too long checking his phone. Again, it works as intended, so I have a hard time considering this a “Hate”, but I’m not exactly keen on it either.
• Graphics – Doom 3 is a pretty good-looking game for its era, especially thanks to its use of light and shadows, which mitigates a lot of the muddier textures. It doesn’t really hold up all that well by modern standards, but it’s decent enough. In fact, I might have even put this into “Love”, but there’s one glaring issue: the human character models are super uncanny and are just unpleasant to look at. Every time a human is on-screen, it just makes you sneer in disgust and makes everything else the game is doing feel so much more inadequate as a result.
• Reloading – Doom 3 introduces a novel concept into the franchise: reloading your gun! This is yet another feature which really makes Doom 3 stand out as an outlier in its own franchise, but that’s really down to the benefit of hindsight. Doom was a product of its time, and its design was iterated upon for a decade before Doom 3 came out. We weren’t far enough from the “boomer shooter” era for them to feel nostalgic, so it would have made no sense for id Software to not adopt many of the subsequent innovations in the FPS genre. Hell, it even makes sense here, since this is a slow-paced horror game and the idea of running out of ammunition mid-battle is an easy source of tension. That said… it really does make Doom 3 feel very “samey” to any other 2004 shooter, and very incongruous within its own franchise.

Hate

• Impact Screen Shake – Doom 3 has multiple fundamental design decisions which knee-cap the entire experience, and most egregious among them has to be the insane screen shake. Every time you get hit by an enemy, your entire screen shakes wildly. This isn’t just a visual indicator either; it throws your aiming reticle off. This means that shooting back at the thing that’s damaging you is borderline impossible, forcing you to always break contact and seek cover. This is bad enough when you have an imp throwing a fireball at you, or a demon slashing you up close, but the screen shake applies per hit. When you encounter an enemy with a rapid-fire weapon, like a plasma gun or a machine gun, your screen shakes constantly, to the point of being vomit-inducing. It looks and feels awful and is one of the main reasons why I was having such a bad time with Doom 3 for much of my playthrough.
• Weak Guns + Spongey Enemies – I’ve mentioned it before, but I hate when games make enemies tanky for no good reason. Enemies in Doom 3 feel like they take a few too many shots to go down which, in turn, makes the guns feel quite weak and ineffective. This may very well have been an intentional design decision to make the game feel “scarier”, but it’s just fucking annoying.
  • The most egregious example of this is the game’s shotgun, which is the most unreliable weapon since the fucking Splinter Cell pistol. Even a basic zombie enemy can take anywhere from one to three shotgun blasts at point blank range to kill: there’s no predicting how many it will be, you just have to hope and pray that you kill them in a reasonable timeframe. Because of this, I ended up spending the vast majority of my playthrough cycling between the machine gun and plasma gun, because they were the only weapons with common ammo pickups that I could rely on to perform consistently.
• Terrible Story and Writing – Doom 3 was clearly made in response to the success of Half-Life, hence its discarding of the “classic” Doom formula in favour of something more horror-inspired, cinematic, and narrative-driven. Unfortunately, Doom 3‘s writing completely falls flat and makes any attempts at storytelling agonizing.
  • First of all, let’s just get the best part of the game’s story out of the way: the first twenty-or-so minutes of the game introduce you to the Mars facility right before the portal to hell opens up and everything goes to shit. As you fight your way past the possessed soldiers and demons, you hear people freaking out over the radio and getting killed. This goes on for several minutes, until their voices finally fall into eerie silence. It’s pretty neat… but it’s also a blatant rip-off of Half-Life‘s opening sequence, which really dampens any enthusiasm that I can muster for it. And, again, this is the best that the story ever gets in this game…
  • From there, you’re basically just doing chores to try to stop the demonic incursion. You need to go through a bunch of facilities to shut down some techno-MacGuffin. You spend several levels bored out of your skull to do this, only to find out that you actually need to go do some other task which is on the other side of the facility. Rinse and repeat a few times until the credits roll. This is basically the same structure as the classic Doom games, but injecting a modicum of story makes this feel so much worse.
  • Perhaps worst of all though are the audio diaries. This game released just before audio diaries became a truly codified video game trope, but Doom 3‘s approach is just painfully bad. Usually, audio diaries will give you some cool, optional background info about the game’s world and provide you with an “organic” way to find out about secrets while you continue playing. Unfortunately, Doom 3‘s writers failed to get that memo, because this game’s audio diaries are so fucking boring. They’re poorly-acted, and written in such an inane manner that I take none of it in. Like, most of these diaries are just scientists rattling off uninteresting lab results in a monotone voice for a minute, before suddenly deciding to tell you a locker key combination for no good reason. There was more than one occasion where I’d play an audio diary and then start doing some exploration while it played. The diary would try to impart some sort of hint to me, but because it was so dull, it completely glossed over me, forcing me to listen to the whole boring-ass thing again.
• Key Hunts – Building off of the previous point, there’s only so much you can do story-wise when the fundamental gameplay of Doom 3 still boils down to hunting for keys in generic, dull, non-descript levels. While the game is still not as difficult to navigate as some of its contemporaries, I don’t know how many times I accidentally got turned around and found myself back at the very start of the level again, all because every area looks identical to the one before it.

I was really disappointed by Doom 3. It gets better as it goes, but the game has several glaring issues which put a hard limit on any enjoyment you can get out of it. It’s too bad too: I’d be on-board for this sort of horror experience if it was executed just a bit more judiciously. As-is, Doom 3 is an interesting experiment, but one which fails to measure up to the series’ storied legacy.

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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