Tuesday, April 05, 2005
I've been playing a bit of DOOM 3 on Xbox, and it strikes me that... this isn't DOOM. It's a pretty good game, but it's not the DOOM I remember.
(Apologies if you've heard these sentiments ad naseum over the last year; I'm a console gamer only, so I haven't played the PC version)
First things first: It looks spectacular. What impresses me most is the detail, especially in terms of light and dark. Dark areas invite your flashlight's gaze and then reward them with unexpected details -- it's funny how many pillars are actually hollow with their inner workings laid bare through grates. Impractical, but it looks great.
There's a great vibe and a great atmosphere about the game. It feels really well fleshed out in terms of the setting and the environment, from all the extraneous information scattered everywhere to the somewhat logical layout of various areas.
Thing is... you look at the amount of work that went into creating all this, and you think it might be better off as a seperate franchise, because it doesn't really match the old DOOM experience.
For instance: Yes, it is scary when a monster leaps out from a dark corner at you. But that's not what DOOM scary is about. DOOM scary isn't seeing ONE monster leap up at you -- it's seeing six or seven all coming your way. That's a whole different sort of scary.
This is without actually examining the mechanics behind the enemies leaping out at you. One thing you don't notice the first time around is that Mars City is filled with an awful lot of little man-sized alcoves that make little sense except to hide monsters in dark corners.
The PDA is an interesting element and a nice way to pick up extra information, but again, there's something awkward about having to stop every so often to digest new information either in someone else's emails or (worse) audio logs. I'm here to SHOOT stuff, not read. It doesn't help that the one DOOM element they really brought was the hokey storyline -- look, the "We accidentally opened a gate to hell and uh you need to close it" angle works in a game that has little else in the way of story, but with something as detailed and as richly told as DOOM 3 it ends up looking a little jarring and stupid. For instance, the opening sequence mixes a quite strong representation of what may well be a Martian outpost in a hundred years' time -- but then throws in a couple of conversations with cookie-cutter characters that seem out of place in what tries to be a realistic setting.
Still sadly even then the game needs a bit more work. The dumb AI isn't a huge concern for me, but the gunplay is -- I don't feel like I'm getting good "positional" damage on enemies. If I shoot them in the kneecap I expect them to go down, damnit, and if I shoot them in the head I expect to see chunks flying everywhere. Maybe this is the after-effect of RE4 being so superb in this regard, but on the other hand GoldenEye did this sort of thing pretty well almost eight years ago now.
Funny thing is, I felt like I had a good run at DOOM. I borrowed it from a friend for a day (since we don't have Blockbuster here consider this the equivalent of a rental for me) and while I can't say I really enjoyed it or really disliked it, I feel... satisfied. I played enough to get a handle, enough to get my fun out of it, but not so much that I got turned off and pissed off completely with wandering around in circles in open-plan Mars City corridors (@*$*&!^). The good thing is this isn't a review, so nobody will whine at me for not getting my 60 hours in :-)
Posted at 3:56 AM
