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My history with Doom III goes back about two years to the leaked Alpha test that came out after E3 when ID first showed the game. At the time it was like looking at the framework of a house and discussing how nice the coat of paint on the non-existent walls was. But, I was impressed by the fact that ID seemed to be abandoning the balls-to-the-wall shooter style that all their games previously had for something that was sleeker and resembled a survival horror style of play. Then a few months ago I played a leaked beta test of the game. It only contained a few levels, but it did give a full taste of the game. And that's when I started to worry. There was still no heads-up display, but that was something I liked. It made you count the rounds in your weapons and guess at how much damage you could take before you died. Also, the monsters stuck around after you killed them. This is important; I'll come back to it later. All in all, it seemed like ID could possibly salvage a worthwhile horror experience from the game, but I wasn't going to be optimistic about it.

Then the game launches and it seemed to me as if the game actually managed to get worse as it progressed. Sure, it's more polished now, but it's by no means better. The story hasn't changed a bit in a decade. You are still a space marine trapped on a Martian instillation where the scientists have been mucking with things they shouldn't have been mucking with. Hell-based zaniness ensues. I hope that sarcasm in that statement was apparent enough for you; because it was dripping with it. The years have proven to us that first-person shooter games can have amazing stories, complex stories and stories that are still small but tightly put together. Doom III has none of that.

Instead of having a story Doom III has a bunch of clichйs thrown together in a series of poorly designed levels don't do anything but foster a sense of annoyance. The levels in Doom III are tight and confined. And by tight I mean that you're strafe key is going to be pretty dang useless. There are going to be no poetic dances as your fingers fly across the keyboard in an attempt to get an advantage over your opponent. Instead, Doom III opts for the more direct approach of giving you a big gun and hoping you have more armor than the thing you're shooting at. There is absolutely no finesse to the fighting in this game. There isn't even an area-based damage for hits on the monsters. A headshot will do as much damage as a shot to the knee on anything that actually has a head in this game. I don't know about you, but it really bothers me when I go to the extra effort of lining up a shot on a monster's head and it doesn't fall over. A bullet in the head is a universal standard mega-damage shot. Unfortunately Doom III doesn't subscribe to this universe.

Sequels are generally more fun when you have new and more weapons to use than the previous games. In theory, Doom III does. Sort of. They added throwable grenades and a machine gun while taking away the ever-favorite Super Shot Gun. So you have a net gain of one weapon. But there's a problem with the machine gun in that you need it most often but its sound is rather rattling, making it aurally painful to use. Then your "new" grenades have almost no range and explode the second they hit the ground, making them dangerous to use if you mess up a throw. To me this is the same as losing a weapon in the translation from Doom II to Doom III. Just like in Doom II you're going to find yourself relying on the plasma rifle, shotgun and rocket launcher more than anything else in the game - the others just don't meet muster. And that's never a good thing, when a game has weapons that are superfluous. It's a shame that the pistol is completely antiquated once you find the shotgun, and the plasma rifle makes everything else worthless unless you run out of plasma cells.

Going back to the levels, you find the same problem. You find yourself wandering through narrow halls that look nice, but start to blend together after the first few minutes. Once the bad guys start popping up, you'll begin to see a lot of black. Lights start going out and more than anything else in this game you'll find yourself holding a flashlight out to see what's in the dark corner. Ninety percent of the time it is something that wants to eat your face; the other ten percent it is some sort of power up. But the real issue with all the black is that it becomes predictable. Is there a dark corner in the room? Most likely it's going to have a bad guy in it, so just shoot into it now before the baddie gets near. And in that one sentence I have taught you the best strategy for surviving Doom III: shoot the dark corners. The other downside to the darkness is that none of your weapons have a built in light on them. So, you constantly have to pull up your flashlight to see, which means you have to put your weapon away. This is one of those little things detracts a lot from my fun while playing the game. Every time I find some drooling menace in one of those many dark corners, I have to put away my flashlight and pull out a weapon, at which point I lose the monster in the dark. I still have a rough idea about where it is because nothing in this game moves that fast. After pumping a few rounds into the general area of the monster, I pull out my flashlight. You find a dead monster (or occasionally not, I'll still get back to this). I cannot explain to you how completely unsatisfying this kind of action is. As a player in a game like this I want to see the monster charge me, I want to see my fire rip through its ghastly form, and I want to see it fall lifeless at my feet. Guess what I'm not getting to see because of all the darkness. The simplest solution would be to simply put lights on the weapons, like the modern day military already does. Apparently in the future soldiers stop fighting at night and in dark places.

There seems to have been little forethought put into jumping puzzles you occasionally have to go through with this game. More often than not, these puzzles just add frustration to players who are having a hard time judging where their feet are. In Doom III, your marine is apparently so burdened by his armor and weaponry that he can't get more than a foot or so off the ground, not even enough to jump on top of the many small crates in the game. That's why they aren't worried about letting you shoot out the windows into an area you're going to get to later, because you can't actually jump high enough to get through the windows that go from your knees to your head - much less learn to climb on anything. This is just another factor that adds to the clumsy-shooter style of gameplay I experienced in Doom III.

In all honesty, this game is really nothing more than a visual update from Doom II. The play mechanics are essentially the same. In Doom II your aim would automatically pull up or down if you were trying to shoot at things that were above or below you. This was because the technology did not support the sort of movement that it now easily calculates. In an update of a decade old game, the gameplay didn't get an update!

That's why I hate this game so much, because it doesn't strike me as a game. It strikes me as a tech demo for their new game engine. Just like Quake I, Quake II, and Quake III were, Doom III is a poorly designed game that is meant to do nothing more than sell an engine. Now, it's an amazing engine, the normal mapping and lighting technology makes this game gorgeous. But at least with Doom III, ID relies too much on eye candy to make an impact. The physics in the game are atrocious. Anything you see on a shelf is most likely going to stay on that shelf. You can blow them up with a rocket launcher round, but they still aren't moving. This is a sign of a game that focuses on the broad strokes and not on the fine detail. Sadly, it is that fine detail that divides the decent games from the classics. The disappearing bodies of the monsters are also a sign of this. In the alpha and beta versions I played of Doom III the bodies of the dead monsters would hang around, allowing you to play with them. You could shoot them, shove them and do various other weird things to them. This allowed you to get a feel for how nice the monsters looked and how the physics of the game worked. All of that disappeared in the retail launch. Monsters disappear after a certain amount of damage has been done to them, making it impossible to play with their bodies. This is done to keep the amount of polygons the game has to render down to a bare minimum, which is understandable, but it's still disappointing. In other games there are decay timers on the bodies, so if they aren't touched for a certain amount of time they disappear. You don't get to appreciate the level of detail that was put on these models, and you're left wondering why the body just broke down into ash. It breaks the immersion of the game for me. Not that I had that much in the first place.

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