I NEED SCISSORS
Banned
I've finally dug into DOOM 3 after buying it in the Christmas Steam sale. I'm sure a few other people have recently picked it up as well this Summer.
I've been playing for about 5 hours now, yet looking at a walkthrough I can see that i'm only just 1/4 of the way through. It's certainly refreshing to have such a meaty FPS campaign in a gen of 6 hour long shooters.
The best aspect of the game so far has been the visuals, which still hold up remarkably well in 2011. It looks better than a lot of contemporary games thanks to its brilliant art direction and expert use of shadows to create atmosphere and hide flaws. It's the sort of game that shines with a higher resolution - very clean visuals, and of course being an old game the framerate is flawless even with heaps of AA applied. I'm using Sikkmod 1.1 to add colour grading and motion blur, the rest just does itself (check out my screens here in the PC screenshot thread).
In terms of gameplay however, it's not quite as timeless. In fact it feels dated since it mostly relies on just shooting things a lot until they die. It's somewhat refreshing though that it doesn't need any gimmicks like a cover system or superpowers to be fun - just very raw blasting with tons of blood. The level design, while linear, is interesting enough, although there have been some particularly annoying jumping sections which had me quick loading about 10 times. When the game starts to get boring, it always seems to perk itself up with a new enemy (which are all superbly designed) or some massive gun at just the right moment.
One thing I do really really like is that you cannot use the flashlight and gun at once. Coupled with 5.1 surround sound, this builds up tension in dark areas and creates some satisfying pray and spray horror. It's quite an effective horror game because of this, even if most of the scares are jumpy ones. It's reminiscent of Dead Space in a few of ways (use of shadow, many enemies, jumps).
Another similarity is the PDA audio diaries, which I feel add a lot of back story to the otherwise paper thin plot. Their quality kind of surprised me actually, since id games are usually just about shooting and less about storytelling. I'm hoping the main plot picks up a bit though, as right now it's mostly going from point A to point B with no real objective in sight and your commander telling you to go faster all the time.
tl;dr - So far i've been impressed, and it only increases my hype for RAGE.
I've been playing for about 5 hours now, yet looking at a walkthrough I can see that i'm only just 1/4 of the way through. It's certainly refreshing to have such a meaty FPS campaign in a gen of 6 hour long shooters.
The best aspect of the game so far has been the visuals, which still hold up remarkably well in 2011. It looks better than a lot of contemporary games thanks to its brilliant art direction and expert use of shadows to create atmosphere and hide flaws. It's the sort of game that shines with a higher resolution - very clean visuals, and of course being an old game the framerate is flawless even with heaps of AA applied. I'm using Sikkmod 1.1 to add colour grading and motion blur, the rest just does itself (check out my screens here in the PC screenshot thread).
In terms of gameplay however, it's not quite as timeless. In fact it feels dated since it mostly relies on just shooting things a lot until they die. It's somewhat refreshing though that it doesn't need any gimmicks like a cover system or superpowers to be fun - just very raw blasting with tons of blood. The level design, while linear, is interesting enough, although there have been some particularly annoying jumping sections which had me quick loading about 10 times. When the game starts to get boring, it always seems to perk itself up with a new enemy (which are all superbly designed) or some massive gun at just the right moment.
One thing I do really really like is that you cannot use the flashlight and gun at once. Coupled with 5.1 surround sound, this builds up tension in dark areas and creates some satisfying pray and spray horror. It's quite an effective horror game because of this, even if most of the scares are jumpy ones. It's reminiscent of Dead Space in a few of ways (use of shadow, many enemies, jumps).
Another similarity is the PDA audio diaries, which I feel add a lot of back story to the otherwise paper thin plot. Their quality kind of surprised me actually, since id games are usually just about shooting and less about storytelling. I'm hoping the main plot picks up a bit though, as right now it's mostly going from point A to point B with no real objective in sight and your commander telling you to go faster all the time.
tl;dr - So far i've been impressed, and it only increases my hype for RAGE.
