DOOM 3

At first, it was fine. Dim scenes, good scary vibes, until the fourth hour I was playing I'd had enough of it all. A variety of mechanisms are constantly repeated with high intensity, a weak sense of attack, and the scene style is repeated, and it is constantly re-completed every minute. I became increasingly agitated, asking myself what the hell was I playing at?

First of, the BFG edition is only if you don´t want to fuck around with the microstutter issues, fov issues, console commands, and other tons of issues of the original DOOM3 for modern OS´s. Hence I choose it over the original. as dialogue audio cutscene audio and generally the story are just cringey shit for fanboys. I mostly ignored those if they got too tiresome. I don´t care about some microminor censorship of some random non gore related stuff, or worse speechaudio or even the flashlight changes. What pissed me the fuck off is how bad the game in general is, OG DOOM3 as well as BFG. The BFG Edition has the same shit audiomixing as the OG DOOM3 but worse sample rates for voices and cutscenes. Thanks consolecompression..... The rest is fine, brightness is balanced and can be adjusted without much white filtering, you sadly can´t skip cutscenes and those also were downgraded, but the 90% of the game´s experience is the same. I recommend the mod BFA Edition. BFG Edition has retweaked ammo balancing and difficulty and made them too plentiful, ripping out the survival horror aspects of the game. At the beginning you will be scared a bit, especially if you turn off the HUD in the console, but at some point the jumpscares will only annoy you SO MUCH. I still recommend to play it on easiest mode because, let´s be honest, the entire game feels like a giant LONGASS SLUGGISH SEWER LEVEL IN SPACE with some fresh air once you get into the hell levels. Sadly those levels are only 30 mins and that´s it. The level design is constant revenant shooting rockets meets corridors... good luck not getting your health constantly unfairly taken from you, because having a shotgun equipped that sounds whimpy and barely hits anything, instead of a plasma rifle. Good luck dodging the spalsh damage of those rockets. Same goes for camping hellknights and other idiotic annoyances. From start to finish by the way. Pacing is nonexistent. AVOID THIS PRODUCT.

User Woodentusk already has pretty much summed up Doom 3's major flaws a few comments down from mine, but I'd like to add a few points I have noticed. Doom 3 relies heavily on a shadowy atmosphere and cheap tricks, ticking all the boxes of bad map design classic Doom mappers have been rightly discouraged from applying. It also completely reverses some of the core points of classic FPS combat. Combat here is lame and unimaginative. It gets boring very quickly, and after three or four maps, you will already have developed a sense as to when to expect the next stupid horde of monsters coming out of the walls or getting teleported in right behind you. It is all highly repetitive and nowhere near the fun and variety of the old games. To make it worse, monsters in Doom 3 are seemingly unaffected by physics. Their attacks will stun you but your attacks barely, if ever, stun them... until they die, in which case their corpse either gets thrown through the room, or simply disappears right in front of your eyes. Another thing is the bad sound design. It is very difficult to locate sounds in this game. You could just as well set your sound card to mono, and it wouldn't make much difference. Even Wolfenstein 3D had better stereo. It is also difficult to tell monster sounds from other sounds apart, and the 'soundtrack' only adds to that. Actual music is only ever played in certain combat situations while the rest of the game carries an ambient soundtrack that is different from area to area and oftentimes will be decisively rhythmic, resembling music somewhat. That in itself is not an issue, but there is no way to turn it off, so you always have to listen to some sort of rhythmic sound which can be distracting considering the spooky overall theme of the game. Regarding the BFG Edition, it is technically the better game that fixes a lot of issues, but it also takes away the forced darkness and tension that Doom 3 relies upon so much, with BFG ending up as the worse game.

It's not dark and atmospheric, it's often pitch black and irritating. On the plus side you don't notice everything looking the same, no matter whether you are an hour into the game or ten. The gun play feels bad with weapons taking to long to reload or swap, enemies being extremely bulletsponge-y and the staggering effect on hit for you is ridiculous, making you sway all over the screen while enemies are completely unphased by getting hit. The atmosphere is good and horror enough in the beginning, but the overuse of certain mechanics like enemies spawning behind you, coming from "secret doors" or jumping at you when you open a door turns it into an annoying repetition feast fast. Also no subtitles anywhere. Considering some of the codes to open lockboxes are gotten from audio files, that's a baffling decision to not at least get them for the repacked BFG edition.

I thought Doom 3 wasn't such a bad game as I remembered... it was not, it was even worse... it's not only a bad Doom game, it's "somewhat under-average" FPS game... I would give 2* only, BUT you get Final Doom and Doom 2, so... it's worth the price itself :)