Remembrances of Games Past, Part #39 - Doom 3 (2004) (PC) (id Software)
0Doom 3 is probably one of the least well-named games in the history of video games; simply because it doesn't play much like an entry in the FPS genre's most legendary series at all. The sprawling urban environments, towering military installations and vast hellish vistas of the original two games in the series were all replaced by narrow, poorly lit corridors and - even worse - there was no more frantic slaughter of impressively large number of enemies anymore since Doom 3 is all about dull small-scale encounters. It's difficult to know just what the hell (pun very much intended) went wrong, but one is of course tempted to blame John Carmack & Co. for wanting to squeeze as much graphical firepower out of the undeniably impressive idTech 4 as possible. Ever since Quake 1 the developer had clearly been moving away from the rapid pacing and sheer epic scale which make Doom 1-2 so memorable, but Doom 3's confused and repetitive shooter/survival horror hybrid nonetheless represented a radical departure from classic FPS gameplay. Nowadays a lot of people mistake Doom 3 for a pretty traditional arcade shooter, but despite the admittedly generic feel of the whole experience this game's faults aren't related to some sort of stubborn traditionalism and should should instead (much like in the case of RAGE) be seen as the result of a failed attempt to embrace another design philosophy altogether.
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