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Doom3

I’ve been playing a lot of games, and not writing about any of them here. Shame on me.

Most recently I’ve put a lot of time into Doom3. Here’s the one-line review: It’s one of the best games id software has ever made, but it has some very annoying flaws.

The game is very spooky—if you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, it’s set on a zombie and hellspawn infested base on Mars—and the engine is absolutely spectacular. The lighting is hyper-realistic, the shadows are soft-edged and smoothly rendered, and the game looks plain real. Enemies leap from the shadows, and throw fireballs at you that actually light up the room. It’s unbelieveable.

There are really two major problems. First, the enemies act incredibly dumb. I fully expect zombies to be dumb and mindlessly charge toward me (and my boomstick), but the hellspawn are another matter. They should be smarter than the zombies, and they just aren’t. The enemies don’t dodge, most don’t use cover or retreat, and they are practically no threat. It makes me sad, because most of the model designs are very creepy, and there’s a lot of potential to make something that’s truly terrifying.

Second, the game features many, many ‘security’ crates, which you have to unlock using key codes that you find by reading other people’s emails and listening to their voice diaries. So, you pick up the key codes as you push the story along, right? Well the problem is that the secuirty crates and the PDAs with the voice messages are not always close, so by the middle of the game, you’ll be searching through thirty voice logs just to find the key code that’s hidden at the back of one of them. It’s cool that id is trying to force people to use that Notes section at the back of their manual, but the fancy PDA you carry through the entire game should automatically make a note whenever a new code is discovered and add it to a master list.

The security crate thing is just a minor annoyance, but the enemy AI problem is inexcusable. For gods sake, Half-Life had better enemy AI than this six years ago.