Doom3 is the latest installment of the famous first-person shooter (FPS) game for the PC. For the first time since Doom2 back in the mid-nineties, the Doom franchise hits its third frightening installment.
The long awaited sequel features a lot of great new enhancements such as dynamic lighting & fantastic modeling; however these improvements in PC game technologies put a generous strain of many of today’s computers.
My AMD XP2000+ running at 1.66Ghz clock speed with 512mb DDR PC3200 400Mhz RAM & a Sapphire 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro runs Doom3 at 800x600 resolution with medium graphics at around 40-50 frames per second. This isn’t too bad I suppose, and definitely playable, but in heavy fight sequencing with muzzle flashes going off the frame rate can drop to mid-twenties which is less than perfect considering the situations you get into!
As you can see from this in game screenshot, the levels are very atmospherically dark, which definitely adds to the scare factor and you have to navigate (all the levels I’ve encountered so far) using your flash light. What are also apparent from this screenshot are the violence and gore levels in the game. Not for the faint of heart.
Annoyingly though, in this futuristic setting, the specially trained marine is unable to wield a gun and a flash-light at the same time! This can become extremely tiresome after a short period of playing the game. Imagine this common scenario from the game: you are walking around in the pitch black with a flash-light only to spot a zombie in the distance, you switch to your gun to blast the little blighter, but “oh-no” you can’t bloody see it! If you fire a few rounds the neat muzzle flashes add some very cool dynamic lighting to the scene and light up the character momentarily. But I think this is a waste of ammo. And before you know it, the damn zombie is gouging your eyes out! The game is supposed to be scary, and with this level of darkness, it achieves it.
Aside from the fact that the game is very dark (but I’ve cheated a bit and put the gamma settings to full), the game is extremely good both graphics-wise and killing-wise (which are essentials for new FPS games), especially if you can afford a super computer run on high specs.
I’m not very far through the game at present, but I am enjoying walking around, and feeling very scared. I think the game developers achieved what they set out to do… to force people to stop playing as they’re too scared to carry on. A big thumbs up!