Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Activision

Since the day the Catacombs 3d engine was conceived, John Carmack has been at the forefront of the industry's graphics technology. As per all of his engines, Doom 3 is feature filled, trim, bug free, and fast! Per-pixel lighting, bump mapping, ultra high resolution character models, specular highlighting, and the, bar none, best lighting I have ever seen in a game to date place Doom 3's visuals in rarified air. At its highest quality settings with uncompressed textures especially, Doom 3 is a feast to take in.

Rarely does it seem that as much time is spent by a developer on how their games sound as how they look; Doom 3 is an exception to that trend. Aside from a cheesy, generic rock theme song, there is no music in this title; the aural qualities come from the sound effects. At any time while playing, there is seemingly a dozen ambient sounds playing their way into the air simultaneously, and whether you're using ten dollar speakers or an eighty dollar pair of headphones, the sounds are positively spine tingling and rich. As a bonus, the ample voice acting is reasonably well done also.

Eschewing the Far Cry fad of "more buttons is better", Doom 3 focuses on choosing a weapon, firing, and reloading. The only other gameplay dynamics involved are jumping, crouching, and toggling between a weapon and a flashlight, the use of which is necessitated by the unnverving darkness that is likely to reduce to babbles even the most stalwart gamers. All is well, until the map design is taken into perspective: perhaps John Romero should have rejoined the group to inspire some creativity into what is very vanilla and, occasionally, monotonous map layouts.

The slow, darkness-laden, heart-attack inducing gameplay, coupled with the sharp visuals, is perhaps more a nod to Resident Evil than it is to the original Doom. Considering the years of wait that most gamers endured for this title, the very limited scope of the gameplay, and wanton nature of the Deathmatch could be a letdown for the hardcore Doom followers. On the flip-side, there is, simply, no Doom 3-equivalent when the "scare factor" is taken into tally, and this, perhaps, is where Doom 3 forges ahead of other titles in this genre.