I blame Tim Burton and Batman the movie. That was the first time I can remember being sucked inside the hype machine, the first time I have listened to rumour, read previews, looked at shiny pictures and got excited. Unfortunately as a fan of the comics I was very let down by the whole thing and felt cheated out of my time and money. However since then hype surrounding “the next BIG thing” has grown and grown, but fortunately I have never since allowed it to get to me, well not until Doom III...

You see I loved the first Doom game. It came out not long after I actually got my first PC and I remember searching the town for a magazine that had the shareware version on its cover disc (a 3.5” floppy disc) – I remember being blown away upon getting it to run. My first real experience with the FPS genre won me over, and I’ve been a fan ever since. It was full-on action, running around like a loony – outnumbered and out gunned at all times, learning how to circle-strafe and trying to find all the secrets. I liked it so much I actually purchased the full game and played it almost every day for months on end.

Doom III may have Doom’s bad guys and all of Doom’s weaponry, but it’s just not Doom. Doom was a full-on frag fest – room after room, wave after wave the enemies kept coming. Some rooms even had them fighting amongst themselves leaving you to pick off the stragglers. Doom III however is a much more relaxed affair. It’s much more story-driven, you are a new Marine arriving at a research base on Mars. The first few minutes of the game play out very much like Half Life did all those years back. Weaponless you are just doing your day job, exploring your new home and looking for someone to give you your orders. It’s probably a good ten minutes before you get your hands on a weapon and probably a good 20 minutes before the game proper begins.

The graphics are gorgeous, or at least they would be if you could actually see them. The game is dark, very, very dark. It’s like living in the countryside and trying to find your way home at night, drunk and with sunglasses on. This does add to the atmosphere I guess, and having to rely on a torch to search around does make things interesting, but it’s always the same. What could be a great feature if used sparingly is ruined by it being used constantly. Games like Thief 3 and Splinter Cell manage to have good use of lighting and shadows, but here it just becomes dull.

But as I said, when you can see the graphics they are gorgeous. Probably the best yet seen on the PC and very impressive to look at, but as all PC gamers know, these graphics come at a price. I ran it on a 2.6GHz PC with a 9800 pro GPU and 512 MB of Ram. I was able to run it in 1024 resolution and have most features turned on and I got no slowdown - however I would not like to try running it on a system any slower. The enemies from the original Doom are all back and all look great, making full use of the new graphics engine. The same selection of weapons also return, from the humble pistol to the ever-reliable shotgun – we even get the good old Chainsaw. The weapons were another problem for me though – I never got any sense of feeling from them. They all felt samey and regardless of which one, be it shooting a Zombie with the pistol or the shotgun it was hard to tell any difference.

So what is wrong with the game? Why no 9 or 10 score? Well it’s just not Doom. Rarely to you get a large confrontation with the enemies, mostly they just appear one after the other giving you time to reload and gain health before taking on the next one. All the tension that the darkness and sound are supposed to build is lost when it’s just another Zombie that appears. Even as the game progresses the enemies (although being bigger, and more impressive to look at) rarely offer a huge challenge, and as yet I haven’t encountered a full-on wave after wave swarm as in the original Doom. The AI of most of the enemies does not match the quality and effort put into the graphics and sound. Although they look clever ducking behind walls, the AI routines seem limited and most of the time you are just as well off charging at them and shooting as you go.

Despite the criticism, it’s well worth checking out though. Maybe if I had not been such a fan of the original and was not so hoping for the same game with newer graphics it would be an 8 or a 9 – but I have to stick by my guns and go for a 7 – unlike the original, Doom III is nothing special for me.