Doom 3 still holds up well after almost twenty years. The game play is simple but fun. There’s a lot of different weapons to play around with, all of which have strengths and weaknesses. The story is decent but the lore is fantastic. I love finding tablets with audio logs and emails. They help fill out the backstory and make the Mars site seem like a real place that was a living breathing ecosystem before the events of Doom 3. The enemies are like the weapons, which is to say they have a lot of variety in terms of attacks and speed. The level design is fairly good with exception to a couple bits that were more maze like than I wanted. I do wish we had more time on the Martian surface than we got. The difficulty curve was a little all over the place. For instance I found the hardest part of the game to be when I had to face two Hell Knights for the first time. I hadn’t yet found the BFG or had access to the soul cube so it was a tough fight that I had to try at many times. In contrast any fight before then had been only mildly difficult or easy and even after that any boss fight was pretty easy because I had the BFG and soul cube. Even the final boss fight was much easier than those two Hell Knight’s or two spider like bosses that could hurtle projectiles at me. The graphics were amazing at the time of launch. They still are serviceable overall and even look better than some games today but that says more about those games than about Doom 3. The lighting and shadows are still very good but the faces of people as well as object detail lack their old luster. You can try to correct this with mods but I chose to run the game without any mods save Dhewm 3. A couple other little nitpicks of mine are the fact that you can’t toggle crouch and you can’t change the difficulty level after starting the game. You also can’t hold onto med kits, they are instantly used when you touch them. You have enough room on your body to hold a dozen guns as well as over a thousand rounds of ammo but a health kit would just be pushing the limits of reality I suppose. It would have also been nice to have iron sights to aim the guns with but I know that is maybe just not in with the series style. Another issue I have is that climbing down ladders seemed weird to me. It would often make me fall unless I did it at just the right angle. Other games of the era like the Half-Life series had similar issues.
I played Doom 3 on Linux using the Dhewm 3 mod which I installed using Luxtorpeda. This allowed me to run Doom 3 as a native Linux title rather than use Wine or Proton. The game never crashed but I did notice one issue where I couldn’t set the AA to 16X, it would always reset to 8X. I didn’t notice any other bugs or glitches. There were four AA settings; a v-sync toggle; and five other graphics options. Sadly the game’s frame rate is capped at 62 FPS regardless of the v-sync option being on or off. The game performance was luckily a constant 62 FPS for me. I mention this because some games I notice if they have a 60 or 62 FPS limit that they can have more micro stutters and small drops then games that support frame rates higher than 62. You can manually save whenever you want and there didn’t seem to be any limit to how many saves you could have. You can rely on auto saves if you want but they’re spaced pretty far apart.
Game Engine: id Tech 4
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 1.5.2
Luxtorpeda Version 67.0.0
Disk Space Used: 1.7 GB
Settings Used: Ultra; 8x AA; v-sync off; all other options yes; 2560x1440
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1853-2452 MB
CPU Usage: 2-13 %
RAM Usage: 3.1-4.3 GB
Frame Rate: 62 FPS
If by some way you haven’t played Doom 3 and love FPS games then go get it now. If you have played it and like it then go replay it. I enjoyed this game more than many other games that are being released these days. It isn’t full of politics or trying to force an agenda on you. It’s simple fun that has aged well. I finished the game on veteran difficulty in fifteen hours and forty eight minutes.
My Score: 9/10
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.1.6 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Solus | Mate 1.27.0 | Kernel 6.5.9-262.current | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz