Doom 3 (Collector's Edition)

Reviewed by CL on 4/3/2006

I must say I was not impressed by this game. This is the sequel to the best selling Doom and Doom II, the two games that practically invented the first person shooting genre and as expected, the hype surrounding this game was phenomenal. It was lauded as having some of the best visuals to ever grace the Xbox and be a very scary game to play. In reality, the visuals might be stunning, but you would never know it because everything is so dark that you can't see anything. To combat the darkness, you're given a flashlight which illuminates the area directly in front of you. However, nobody ever decided it would be a good idea to train space marines how to use a flashlight and a gun at the same time. There are countless times you'll have your flashlight out in a dark room and you'll see an enemy start to come at you. Naturally, you whip out your nearest gun but when you do this, the flashlight goes away and guess what? Now you can't see anything since it is pitch black. This might be okay if it only happened once or twice but you spend the majority of your time running down dark hallways and into dark rooms just waiting for cheap enemies to pop out of closets or teleport in behind you. This gets old really fast. The game started out as genuinely scary and then devolved into running into a room, triggering the hidden enemies and blowing them away. Repeat ad nauseum.

The collector's edition does include the original Doom and Doom II which I played for like 15 minutes. In conclusion, there is some fun to be had but only if you can deal with the some serious design flaws and staring at a mostly black screen for the majority of the game.