Doom 3 Review
Played on:
Xbox
For most PC gamers, DOOM 3 needs no introduction. Console fans might be wondering what the big deal about this game is, though, so let's just go through a quick history of why this game is significant. id Software pioneered the first person shooter genre back in the early 1990s with Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM - the visuals were incredible, the action was fast and furious, and the subject matter was a very different design compared to the very largely kid-friendly titles of consoles at that time. Indeed, while both of these titles wound up getting ported to various consoles, they were watered down from both a technical and from a content perspective. This may all seem irrelevant to this review, but there's a reason for it. Bear with me.
id Software then saw astounding success with the Quake series, and some of these titles made it to consoles, again largely limited from the same perspectives; Quake's internet play was a blast, but no consoles could really take advantage of it yet. To put it bluntly, id Software's track record for delivering console games has been iffy up until now; they seem to have not really wanted to put any major effort behind a console port that they knew wouldn't live up to the original. This has changed with DOOM 3 for the Xbox, though, as aside from a few minor changes, the full experience has made it onto Microsoft's console with some very enticing new features as well.
The story behind DOOM 3 is standard for science fiction games, but this one's fleshed out pretty well. It's he year 2145, and you're a marine sent to the Mars base of a major corporation called the UAC. The base has seen troubled times recently, with many workers disappearing or having major psychological problems. Dr. Betruger and his brilliant yet dangerous experiments in the Delta Labs are making matters worse by taking vital resources away from other areas and departments on the base. It turns out that Betruger's experiments cause a much larger problem than that, as he literally opens up a portal to Hell, and demons start flooding into the base. While the game will ease you into your role with a bit of ambience and a little exploration (along with a few tutorial-style tips), you'll be fighting for your life inside of ten minutes.
For a good chunk of the game, the gruff veteran Sergeant Kelly will be briefing you on what to do over your radio, although he seems to have no clue about the kinds of horrors going on in the base. You'll find them out firsthand, though; DOOM 3 is a first person shooter, but it's also a horror-based game as well. All of the devilish ambient sound and other atmosphere in the original PC game has made it into the Xbox, and it truly is a unique experience even alongside other horror-themed console games like Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill or Eternal Darkness. The best part is that you get to deal with Hell's minions with some excellent in-your-face action, and you're free to move and shoot unlike many strictly-defined horror survival games.
I want to stop here and express my wonder at how Vicarious Visions managed to pull this port off. At the heart of the Xbox is a 733MHz Intel CPU, with roughly the equivalent of a GeForce 4 video card and only 64MB total RAM. If you tried to play the PC port of DOOM 3 with these specs, you wouldn't even get to the title screen. In fact, the PC version's minimum requirements are a CPU that's twice as fast as what's seen in the Xbox, and it also requires four times as much memory. Yet the Xbox version runs far better (and with more detail) than the game on a minimum-spec'ed PC can even remotely accomplish. This is true even at the lowest PC resolution of 640x480, which is roughly the same resolution the Xbox version draws the screen at. Almost all of the PC version's detail is here, and the game runs at a pretty steady 25-30 frames per second at pretty much all times.
Console gamers are going to be largely unimpressed by the numbers and technical specs I listed, though; they're going to compare the game to other similar Xbox titles, especially ones with realtime shadows and lighting like Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay has. Now I'm not knocking Riddick here, but DOOM 3 blows it away. The graphics are better, the action's more fluid, and the multiplayer options will keep you coming back.
There will of course be some concerns over the controls, and this comes up every time a PC game (especially a FPS title) is ported to a console. To this end, id & Vicarious have done as well as they could to keep the controls smooth. There are plenty of presets to choose from, and buttons can be reassigned as well. That being said, if you just can't get your hands around controlling a FPS with a pair of analog sticks, then this version of DOOM 3 is probably not for you.
One of my favorite parts of this port is that the brought over a feature that is highly celebrated in PC games but is very rarely seen on consoles: quick saves. All you have to do is hit the Back button on the Xbox controller, press A to confirm, and the game will quick save at any point. Of course, if you don't want to do this, the game still allows manual saves as well as a checkpoint at the beginning of each level.
Speaking about levels, one thing to note is that the Xbox version is split up into smaller levels to fit inside the console's much smaller memory size. This didn't feel annoying or distracting, though, and the progression through levels was very smooth and natural. If you are required to backtrack, it's for a specific purpose, like getting a door open, and you won't have to cross level boundaries to do it. You'll come back to certain portions of the Mars base a few times, but it's all new gameplay most of the time. Load times through all of this are reasonable, but they're not particularly stellar.
The game has been shortened a little bit overall, but from what I can tell and can remember from the PC version, only about an hour or two of gameplay is gone (out of roughly eighteen total, give or take) and only repetitive or annoying parts have been removed. As id's Tim Willits put it, they "trimmed the fat" from the PC version, and in my opinion, it actually makes for a better game overall.
For those who have played some console action games and don't really know much about how DOOM 3 plays, the action is fast and the AI is really kind of secondary. The monsters have multiple attacks, but they don't use any brains to get around behind you or anything like it. There are quite a few large battles, but you'll find that most of them involve waves of enemies spawned in rather than a huge number of them at once; for some this is a deal-breaker, but I still enjoyed the hell out of this game. The weapons, all of which were seen in the classic game but have been retooled for DOOM 3, are great and pack a lot of punch (with the exception of the fists and pistol, I guess), and most monsters will make at least some efforts not to just rush right into the barrel of your gun.
For example, the imps will throw fireballs at you while exposing the least amount of their body at a time; indeed, sometimes all you'll see is their right arm and a fireball coming at your face. This is helped out quite a bit by the game's per-pixel hit detection, which does away completely with the old style "hitboxes" and assures that your bullets hit exactly what you pointed your gun at. For this reason, the gunplay is quite satisfying, and it makes dying less frustrating.
The game's visual and aural atmosphere is dark, evil, and at the same time very effective, and I think that console gamers will get something with DOOM 3 that other developers haven't really delved into on console platforms. This is especially true as you go further into the game and start your descent right into Hell itself. I don't want to spoil anything for those players who haven't experienced the PC version yet, but let's just say that it's very creepy, plenty difficult, and should satisfy your thirst for a dark and twisted game.
I understand that many will buy this game for the Xbox because their PCs couldn't run the game as well as they hoped (or maybe not at all). I want to point out that even though you'll be seeing this on a TV, it looks way better than a slower PC playing DOOM 3 with a couple of key features (like realtime shadows) turned off. It was a shame to see some people trash the PC version after playing it this way, because the added atmosphere from all of the visual effects really does help make this game something more than just a run-and-gun shooter.
Actually, if you wanted to enjoy DOOM 3 on the PC but wound up hating it because it ran poorly or was too dark, then you might really enjoy the Xbox version. There are no upgrade or hardware concerns here, and the game has been brightened overall to match both a gamer's living room environment and the larger distance your eyes will be (or at least should be) from the screen. There are still many, many dark areas, but the flashlight is bound to a button for quick switching - and I was whipping the flashlight out far less often on the Xbox version. If that's not enough, you can also fiddle with brightness and contrast controls in the game. And to address the joke regarding why a Marine in the future on Mars still can't figure out how to duct tape his flashlight to his gun, well, he's still apparently having trouble finding some tape. Just don't let something as silly as this be the sole thing that stops you from enjoying this game. Please, do me that favor; it's not like stellar games are that vast and plentiful nowadays.
Still, there are some fundamental gameplay quirks with DOOM 3 that many would consider weaknesses, and for the most part these have not changed. For example, many monsters will appear out of what detractors like to call "monster closets", and will expectedly spawn up when you pick up a powerful or important item. There's also the issue of the game teleporting an enemy in directly behind you, and maybe one in front of you at the same time. Now, the monster closets are here in full force, but it seems that number of times that monsters that spawn directly behind you has been lessened. I didn't like the back-spawns even on the PC when I could spin around 180 degrees instantly with a mouse, and it'd be really annoying on the Xbox controller where it takes you quite a bit longer to turn around fully. As it is, I think Vicarious Visions did a good job making the game's four difficulty modes match comparably to the PC version's equivalents, especially considering that you'll be using a vastly different control scheme.
Earlier I mentioned a couple of extras that come with the Xbox version that won't be seen on the PC. The first is cooperative two-player action - unlike the Halo games, these can only be played via System Link (LAN play) or over Xbox Live!. Split screen modes aren't supported in DOOM 3's normal game, as it seems to have been tough enough to render one player's viewpoint at a time. The coop action works fairly nicely, and the game makes efforts to keep players from splitting up constantly by requiring both players to activate certain doors simultaneously throughout levels. The game's also been slimmed down a decent amount further than the Xbox campaign for coop, but there's still quite a bit of good gameplay here. And one of the best parts is that unlike the single player game, the boss battles here are full-on shootouts, without any gimmicks or timing required for victory. It just works better that way when we're talking about coop.
Then there are the game's competitive multiplayer modes, which are limited to four players just like the PC version originally intended. Again, there's no split-screen play, but System Link and Live! are supported fully. You can do several deathmatch variations and these play very similarly to the PC version, but the inclusion of only the original game's five deathmatch maps isn't so great when you know that modmakers won't get a chance to work with this port of the game. Hopefully, id and Activision will be delivering up some new levels later on for Xbox Live! gamers to download. But let's stick with what comes in the box for now - with the rather limiting four-player maximum in multiplayer and so few maps, deathmatch won't last you long as far as online replayability goes, but it's still nice to have along with the coop and normal campaign.
The other extra only comes in the Collector's Edition version of the game, which will have a $59.99 price tag. It's got both the original Ultimate DOOM as well as DOOM 2, both of which can be played alone or with up to four players in split-screen mode. Now with these classic versions, the only way to play multiplayer is with a split screen - no online play is supported here.
Both of the classic games' major gameplay modes, deathmatch and cooperative play, are in and work just like they did in the old days. I want to mention that other than the split-screen action, these are pretty straight ports of the original games; there are no advanced features that many classic DOOM junkies have enjoyed since id Software released the game's source code so many years back. The same blocky textures and simplistic sprites from the old days are still in here, but I wouldn't really expect (or even want) an official id Software game to spruce things up. The original games are just fine the way it is, in my opinion.
The classic ports' split screen modes work nicely; in two-player mode, both players' viewpoints will sit side-by-side in a widescreen style configuration (although widescreen modes aren't supported in the classic ports; 480p widescreen works in DOOM 3 itself, however). I really had a lot of fun with the classic ports, and I think that the extra ten bucks for the Collector's Edition is easily worth it with these accurate versions of the classics. Sure, if you're a diehard classic DOOM junkie, LAN play on a network of PCs is probably the only way to go, but I think most people will enjoy the originals in the format that's in the Xbox version.
DOOM 3 has lost little in its translation from the PC to the Xbox, and one might argue it's actually a better game with some of the tedious stuff removed and cooperative multiplayer thrown in. Some of the original complaints will continue to be heard, as this game's still dark as hell and full of the same monster-spawning tricks. The multiplayer modes are plentiful, though, and the total package is very high quality. Add on to this the classic DOOM ports in the Collector's Edition version and we've got an excellent game ported masterfully to the Xbox, and it's got plenty of action for you and your friends to blast through.
