Doom 3

I finally managed to complete this game after owning it for several years and must say it’s a damn good yarn. Essentially it’s a first person shooter science fiction horror. Plot? I didn’t really notice one to be honest but it is there. What the game lacks in storyline it more than makes up for in gameplay and is ultimately more or less a simple reimagining of the classic DOS game Doom. The game features all the same monsters from the original (along with many more) and although the plot of the original eludes me, I’d have to say it’s more or less the same. You start out as a marine on a routine assignment working for the UAC on Mars in the 22nd century and due to the experiments they’ve been conducting, Hell invades the base with the eventual objective of making it to Earth. Your job as a marine is to stop Satan and his minions from completing their mission of invading Earth – that’s it. From start to finish the game is basically running round shooting monsters, demons and zombies. Thus it’s arguably features more gratuitous violence than the original which had parents outraged back in the early nineties. It’s deeply immersive and and the tone of the game sucks you in like any decent video game should, the dark lighting and spooky atmosphere set by the soundtrack keeps you on edge and frequently makes you jump when monsters and demons jump out at you from some unseen corner. The game features all the same weapons from the original including the BFG. It also features a weapon called the soul cube which I think the game would be impossible without. I didn’t immediately realise this was a weapon and tried playing a level of the game without it. The lack of health power ups was making things extremely difficult until I realised the soul cube would kill an enemy every so often and replenish your health with theirs. This made it pretty much a flier approaching the end of the game. The boss stages during every part of the game are very difficult and usually take at least several attempts to get past. At times I was kind of wondering if it was even possible to get past some of them at all but eventually all of them do go down. This game would have been slightly more fun to play if it didn’t cause my laptop to badly overheat, so much so in fact that I had to manually cool it with an icepack from the freezer. That’s not really a fault of the game though, more one of my crap laptop. This is a decent game and I think it would make a wicked multiplayer if I knew enough people with machines capable of running it. Something for the future here.