The guns you will acquire are updates on the classics and all of them make their return with a few new ones. You’ll start out with a pistol and eventually move onto bigger and better firepower. Gun effects are pretty good and the models are done well. The machine gun does sound a little wimpy though. Yes, the BFG is back and you’ll have the opportunity to unleash its wrath. And once you get the chainsaw, it’s Evil Dead time as you plow through demons and zombies. You’ll have to be conservative on ammo as there’s little to be found between the waves of monsters. As with the old
Doom, you can try to punch some monsters our and if you have the flashlight equipped, you can bludgeon them with the handle if you’re desperate. None of the weapons have an alternate fire mode unfortunatly.
I’ll be honest. If I had never seen
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, I’d say there is no other game right now that looks anything like
Doom 3.
Escape from Butcher Bay is the closest thing out there right now though that comes close
Doom 3. I’m not saying
Escape from Butcher Bay is graphically equal to
Doom 3 but they do share similar styles.
Doom 3 is big on atmosphere in both visuals and audio. The dark atmosphere helps illustrate what a hellhole the station is like and how horrible it must be to work in such a God awful place. Monsters will jump out from hidden areas and make you leap out of your seat. It seems they like to hang around in nooks and crannies waiting for someone to walk in front of them. Taking a cue from various horror movies, moving lighting will illuminate various parts of the area and you’ll get that occasional glimpse of a zombie or demon heading your way as the light passes over it. The use of colored lighting or lack there of, is very effective in the game to help produce a terrifying experience. It’s really dark, almost too dark and you’ll have one trusty flashlight to help guide you around. Some of the best sequences is scanning a pitch black area, passing over a zombie walking towards you, illuminating his demonic flesh, and causing you to quickly shuffle back to a weapon whereby dropping the room back in to complete darkness and firing blindly into the night. That’s a quick adrenaline rush right there. A small problem I do have with it is that you can’t be holding a gun and using the flashlight at the same time. I can understand for larger guns such as the shotgun and chain gun, but even the single handed pistol will force you to wade through darkness. At least the batteries never run out on the flashlight.
You’ve obviously seen the models that exhibit incredible detail. While you can still see some corners on rounded objects such as heads and pipes, the detail in the textures is what is truly amazing. Close ups on characters and creatures show how well crafted the textures are. It’s this that truly brings the characters to life along with the smooth animation. It’s pretty intense seeing spiders crawling out down the walls around you or an imp charging at you. The updates on each of the monsters that appeared in the original
Doom is impressive and the design of them are top notch. You’ll recognize your old favorites by what they do and when you see how far they’ve come, you’ll be amazed. A good example is seeing the imps throw fireballs at you. The warping effect around the ball from the heat is truly spectacular. Some are missing however and we can only hope an add-on for this game will add some of the missing monsters into the game.
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