[kupoartist]

Doom 3 was distinctly meh. The single player was slow paced and by about a quarter of the way through you were starting to get sick with the whole repeatativeness of it all. Halo annoys me because of a copy and paste philosophy to level design... but at least they had the decency to do a little intelligent monster placement now and then. ID just put a trigger somewhere and let the monsters beam in. It's really rather dull running from samey room to samey room triggering monsters, moving on and triggering more monsters. Then there's the little tricks it pulls on you... all two of them, pulled twenty thousand times. "Oh look! Another monster behind a door!". and err... actually, I think that's the only one.

The shooting is rather dulled through that repetition. The weapons are nothing special - the loadout is the same loadout that has been in every FPS since... umm... that game with the demons that pratically invented FPS games... Doom! But the shooting isn't quite as fun because the enemies are sparsley implemented.

Doom is an average game elevated to some kind of playability by brilliant technology. It's very atmospheric, but frankly I thought it was a complete rip-off of System Shock 2. Right down to the (inferior) audio logs and throbbing invasive walls. The shadowing system is awesome, and when you play it how it should be played (in PC terms, a decent system and no lights on in your room) it can be damned scary... until it becomes predictable and the game's one gimmick has been expended. The hell levels are marvelous looking mind you, and I love the whole "crosshair seemlessly turns into computer mouse pointer", but this is a game playing some serious catch up. And ID know it: you don't put a "grabber" gun in your expansion pack if you've not been seriously owned by a nerd in an orange mecha suit.

But then this is ID software anyway. Penny Arcade said it best. They could have salvaged it with decent multiplayer, but they got lazy. Mind you, it's not like Doom 3 didn't sell like hot cakes...