DOOM 3

My first hour with DOOM 3 felt like someone had turned off the lights on the franchise I thought I knew, and not entirely in a bad way. Coming off DOOM and DOOM II, which are basically controlled chaos with a pulse, this one drops you into the UAC Mars Research Facility as a single marine, armed with a pistol, a flashlight you cannot hold at the same time as a weapon, and more dread per square metre than anything id Software had shipped before. That tension is the point. The whole game is built around tight, low-lit corridors, jump-spawning imps and zombies, and the constant low-fi ambient noise that makes you second-guess every shadow. For a horror-shooter hybrid, the audio engineering is legitimately good, and when a Pinky Demon charges out of a dark alcove and you fumble the flashlight swap, the design is working exactly as intended. From a shooter mechanics standpoint, the arsenal covers the expected classics: pistol, shotgun, chaingun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, BFG 9000, and the Soul Cube, an end-game weapon that recharges on kills. Time-to-kill is on the slower side by modern standards, and the original shotgun notoriously underperforms, which the community has addressed with mods for the base game. Movement speed is deliberately sluggish, with a stamina-limited sprint that makes you feel vulnerable rather than powerful. Circle-strafing and corner play matter here more than they do in DOOM 2016 or Eternal, but there is no movement tech to speak of, no bunny hops, no wall tricks. If you came from Apex or Titanfall expecting mobility options, this game will feel like wearing boots full of concrete. That is not a flaw, it is a design position. The Steam version on PC is the original 2004 release, not the BFG Edition remaster. That distinction matters. The original forces the flashlight-versus-weapon choice, which is the core tension mechanic that makes the horror work. The BFG Edition, released separately in 2012, switched to an armor-mounted flashlight, boosted ammo availability, and raised the gamma, making the game noticeably less punishing but also less atmospheric. Both versions run on modern hardware, though the original may need config edits for widescreen and high refresh rates. For competitive multiplayer, the original supports Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag modes, but realistic expectations apply: active servers in 2025 are sparse, and this is not a game you are buying for its multiplayer scene. The main campaign runs roughly 10 to 12 hours, with the full BFG content bundle adding the Resurrection of Evil expansion (12 more levels, the Grabber weapon, The Artifact) and The Lost Mission, a smaller cut campaign. Story delivery leans on PDAs, audio logs, and scattered documents, which is either atmospheric world-building or tedious busywork depending on your patience for environmental storytelling. The pacing criticism is real: the first few hours drag through functionally identical corridors, and the monster-closet spawns become predictable enough to feel cheap by the midpoint. Critics in 2004 landed at 87 on Metacritic, which holds up as a fair number. It is a well-executed game that knows exactly what it is trying to do, even when what it is trying to do frustrates you. Bottom line for shooter players: DOOM 3 rewards patience and atmosphere over reflex. If you have a dark room, a decent headset, and zero expectation of fast-paced gunplay, it earns its reputation. If you need your shooters to move fast and reward mechanical skill with a controller or mouse, the newer entries in the franchise will serve you better. Fred, Scout Team