Okay, so another installment in the Doom series has arrived. Yippee-ki-yay, but is it really all that good?
On a good computer, it is class entertainment for a couple of hours - the only thing lodged in the mind of the semi-obsessed gamer being survival and cold-blooded murder. But it doesn't take long until you fathom how the game works, and it becomes boring. In fact, the whole game can be split into three parts:
Part I
You enter a room. Look! A huge pile of ammunition! Oh! and a cool weapon! When you walk over to pick it up, however, a part of the wall collapses, and zombies run at you, shooting fireballs, having slotted you in on the "luxury menu" as item number 1 in the restaurant of Doom III: Delicacy Marine in mustard sauce.
Of course, if you chuck a grenade at that same part of the wall, nothing happens. If you shoot a BFG-bullet at that part of the wall, nothing happens. But if you pick up a health pack, an imp leans against the wall, it collapses, and then it attacks you visciously.
Part II
Every time you enter a new room, an evil laugh is played ("muuuhahahha omg omg yhbt hand lol lol lol you are gonna die, punk") - they play the same audio clip approximately 600 times in the latter part of the game - and suddenly a demon or two comes crashing through the walls, or a pile of portals open, and imps come running as if their mom ordered them home for supper. Of course, this raises the question why the UA Corps put all these secret rooms in the facility in the first place... And why they couldn't be arsed telling you where they were before you were expected to go rescue the world. Bad Planning of Doom. (pun intended)
Part III
An infinite amount of enemies run at you from a certain point of the level, until you move away a certain distance, or push a button. Which confuses the hell out of me. Aren't these creatures supposed to be evil demons? Shouldn't they behave in a manner a little bit more unlike pitbull terrier pups defending their owner's domain?
AI
Another gripe is the artificial intelligence. All the monsters seem to react identical - if you have a sense of timing, you can kill a hellknight with a flashlight and some patience (I did, because I decided it would be a waste of ammo to actually shoot the damn things). In fact, all the bipedal monsters in the game can be killed by beating them senseless with a flashlight or a shotgun, once you have found how fast they are and how they react.
I suppose it is unlikely that zombies and demons would know battle tactics, but even the soldiers are thick as winter syrup - Why don't they make an effort to find some cover? Why don't they run closer if they are armed with a shotgun? If you play Return to castle Wolfenstein or a similar game, you can see soldiers who really make an effort, and who are smart enough to actually trick you - at least a few times. Doom III is still firmly planted somewhere in the 1990s.
Nor are they particularly intelligent. If you hide behind a pillar, the monsters that have long-range weapons will stop and lounge around, as if they forgot that you went to hide somewhere. The ones that don't have long-range weapons - such as spiders - just continue walking towards you, as they somehow instinctively know where you are.
The physics engine is also rubbish: Crates are glued to the ground - the only thing that can be moved is a laptop: If you shoot it with a pistol it bounces around. A CRT, however, is impervious to grenades, and won't move an inch no matter what you do to it.
Conclusion
Doom III is a mediocre, repetitive shooting game - especially towards the end of the game, where the whole "scare tactics" is left behind, and you end up being a cross between Rambo and.. eh.. Rambo's angrier cousin - and this is something that the First Person Shooter has been moving away from for years - for obvious reasons: Today's computers are capable of making games challenging on more level than one: The Doom I and Doom II era of "shoot everyhting that moves, pick up guns and healthpacks, and keep shooting" is over - too bad Id hasn't caught up. After all, they invented the genre...