Doom 3 : Games : Web Wombat

He appeared in a searing jet of flame, immolating a goodly chunk of the carpet and, might I add, our carefully restored collection of vintage Matchbox cars.

Betwixt his clutching hands, twisted and yellow nails absently shredding the shrink-wrap, lay a retail copy of Doom 3.

And to think my parents said all those pentangle-drawing lessons would amount to nothing. Hah. Imp-Post, for when FedEx Premium just isn't enough.

Demon summoning aside, the question that needs answering right now is: after many years' development time and the consumption, countless times over, of the world's combined coffee bean crop, what do the id team have to show for their apparent toils?

A damnably near-to-perfect game, that's what. So near to perfection, in fact, that I can barely hear myself think for the sound of naysayers noisily digesting serving after serving of humble pie.

From the minute you load up the game (only three CDs, natch) your senses are promptly assaulted and overwhelmed by a level of professionalism almost non-existent in today's gaming industry. The menu system is slick, straightforward and easy on the eyes, and the introductory sequence, entirely engine-driven, could easily hold it's own against any number of Hollywood productions.

Then again, what else could you possibly expect from, arguably, the world's most highly esteemed studio? Indeed, from the moment you take control of the nameless Space Marine who will be your vehicle for the rest of the game, one cannot help but feel utterly captivated, and this is primarily due to the truly brilliant visuals.

We're talking facial animation good enough to put the Square boys out of a job, bump maps on every surface, volumetric shadows and particle work, real time dynamic lighting, ingenious use of pixel shaders (leaking gas shimmering in the air being a prime example) and blended ragdolling.

Not only fun, Doom 3 is educational too

Admittedly, all this visual trickery comes at cost, namely heavy system requirements, but, hey, you'll never have a better excuse to buy that shiny Radeon X800 than this.

It's worthwhile noting, though, while we're talking about hardware, that even at 640x480 things look absolutely gobsmacking, a unique quality amongst the current crop of modern first-person shooters.

Still, visuals do not necessarily a good game make, as I'm sure we're all aware, and so it is with great relish that I say Doom is as good to play as it is to watch.

On arriving at the Union Aerospace Corporation's Mars City installation, you barely have time to get your bearings beneath the red sky before being sent to look for a scientist missing somewhere in the depths of the installation by the local Master Sergeant.

A cleverly disguised tutorial, this first mission introduces you to three key parts of the Doom 3 apparatus:

1. The interface, a minimalist yet extremely functional affair where ammo counts are to be read from the weapons themselves as opposed to off the HUD, the crosshair doubles as a mouse cursor to interact with computer terminals, and your PDA, the most important piece of kit in your inventory, records emails, video disks and voice recordings for future dissection.

2. Mars City itself, a marvel of modern misapplied engineering filled with whirring esoteric machinery ripped straight from the pages of a Phillip K. Dick novel and miles of dark echoing corridor lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs ready to burn out at a moment's notice.

3. The flashlight. When the going gets tough, zombies and other assorted nasties leap from pitch-black pools of darkness and every corner is a potential hidey-hole for demon scum. Particular sections of Doom 3 make Thief: Deadly Shadows look like Garrett Goes Shopping in Sunny Town by comparison.

Your only weapon against such environmental hazards is the handy-dandy torch, and should you happen to run bang into a creepy-crawly there's always the option of beating the horrible thing to death with it.

This fella is really 'busting a gut'

What you learn in the tutorial will help to clue you in to the nature of Mars City, and for the particularly dense souls out there the realities of your situation are spelled out as the end of the level brings you face to face with the missing scientist just as all Hell quite literally breaks loose, turning the base's populace into a horde of slavering zombies and inviting all manner of nightmarish beasties into the world.

As we all know, this does not bode well for you, and so begins Doom 3, a heart-warming tale of one Space Marine and his boomstick.

From that tutorial you will progress through labs, the harsh Martian landscape, office blocks, machining plants, CPU Processing sectors and Hell itself in your quest to stay alive long enough to warn Earth of the threat that stalks through the UAC compound.

In the process, incomparably detailed Archviles, Pinky Demons, Imps, Zombies, Cherubs, Ticks, Arachnids and Caco-Demons (amongst others) will do everything in their power to see you don't succeed, and a gory slog to Hell and back is assured.

Fending off evil is no fun when said evil tends to run straight into a clip's worth of lead, and thankfully John Carmack et al have realised this and given their fiends a modicum of smarts.

For instance, not once will you encounter a creature stuck on a doorframe or a corner without the ability to realise it's own error and some monsters do actually attempt to flank you, but the majority of the creature intelligence does not actually exist.

What I mean by this is that scripted events play a big role in suspending the player's belief.

For instance, Imps will burst through the floor, smash through doors and swarm across ceilings and walls to get to you, while zombies lurch out of corners and from behind access panels baying for your brains, but most of this is pre-coded and many people won't realise that what they are seeing is not the result of brilliant AI but rather painstaking location-node scripting.

Graphically, Doom 3 sets a new benchmark

Still, it's mighty effective, and the first time the lights go off and you hear a growl right by your ear where there could not possibly be a zombie - oh dear, you'll really appreciate the kind of thorough job id has done.

Scares are a big part of Doom 3's charm, and you will brick yourself more than once on coming face to face with some kind of undead mutha when least expecting to.

Aside from AI specifics, or lack thereof, fending off evil is, of course, made up of another equally important component, namely weaponry, and in this all the old favourites are back, bigger, meaner and more gibtastic than ever before.

From the Shotgun and Chaingun to the crowd-pleasing BFG, Plasma Rifle and, oh yes, Chainsaw, there's something here for everybody. Indeed, a running joke throughout the game is made of the circumstances by which a crate of chainsaws accidentally arrives on Mars.

Newer inclusions to the armoury are the Soul Cube, an odd device that requires fresh souls to operate, hand grenade (great for fixing up close-knit ambushes and parcelled with a great shockwave effect) and machine gun, a.k.a the Poor Man's Chaingun.

I'm sure that, somewhere out there, there's a whiny little bastard complaining about the lack of decent multiplayer. Four players, a handful of maps, tight LAN code, sounds fine to me, but I'm just as certain that he still thinks this isn't fair. You were told time and again that Doom 3 was not going to be a multiplayer experience and that only the most rudimentary setup would be implemented, but that's not good enough for some people, apparently.

Doom 3 plays well over a LAN, but it's no threat to the multiplayer market by a long run.

So, thirteen hundred words later, what's the bottom line, Clyde? Doom 3, it's here, it's brilliant, and not buying it will result in immediate unleashing of the Hellhounds. So there.

Game: Doom 3
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: id Software
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 95%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Doom 3 is on the shelves now.

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