A quick refresher (or an introduction, if you're unfamiliar with the franchise): Doom is the series that really kicked off first person shooters. Wolfenstein 3D came before it, but it did not quite blow the minds of every PC gamer the same way that Doom did. For reference, go watch someone play the first level of Doom. Now go watch someone play Wolfenstein 3D. See the difference? These games were released a year apart, 1992 and 1993, and made by the same developer. The original Doom is a gaming classic and for a very good reason - it's a great example of level design, difficulty balancing, and pacing. I won't pretend like it's all sunshine and rainbows - it's not, there are actually rivers of blood and lava aplenty - but it still holds up as a must play. Its sequel is fun but it's brutally difficult and some levels are terribly designed.
To go through the rest of them quickly: Doom 2 came out in 1994. Final Doom, which consisted of two different expansions to Doom 2, came out in 1996 and was actually a fan-made game until id software thought it was good enough to be an official Doom game. Master Levels for Doom 2 came out in 1995, and Doom 64 came out in 1997 (64 was a whole new game exclusive to the N64). And that is all we saw of Doom, aside from re-releases and compilations, until 2004, when Doom 3 came out.
Doom 3 rebooted the whole series' story. There was not much there to begin with. The story is "you are a marine on Mars, a gate to Hell opened up, and demons started pouring out and killing everyone". Doom 3's story is largely the same, and frankly you don't need to know much more than that. Unlike Doom 1 and 2, though, Doom 3's horror tone is played straight instead of being incredibly campy. This is where the series's fan base has split - many wanted something similar to the cheesy tone of the originals. It does not work for everyone. Look on any forum thread about the quality of Doom 3 and you will see it referred to as everything from "boring" to "great". I fall pretty hard into the latter camp.
Doom 3 begins as a spaceship dock s at a scientific facility on Mars, run by a fictional mega-corporation called the "UAC". Out comes three men. The first two are a businessman, here to give the facility's shady overseer a good talking-to, and a marine, his bodyguard. The unnamed and completely silent player character lags behind when coming out of the ship. Exactly why he's there isn't terribly clear - are they a team of bodyguards or did he just hitch a ride with those two? Either way, you don't follow them. You make your way to a commanding officer and are given orders to find a missing scientist. Along the way to this scientist, you give yourself something of a tour of the base. You can run straight to the scientist - it's not hard, the game has characters and a little robot point you along the way - but you can also stop and see what's going on around the base. Optimistic monitors introduce the facility as if you were on tour. Workers toil over broken parts of the base, often snappy at each other and their bosses after a rough day's work (and, as we'll see later, after all of the weird things that happen around the base). You go into a kitchen and can play a game on an arcade cabinet or open and close the shutters. You surprise a jumpy marine coming out of the bathroom. This facility has a great sense of place - it comes across as a real setting that really could have been lived in. There's not much in the way of alien architectures or weird design - this place is believable. Doom 3 is not the first shooter to do this - the original Half-Life is - but it is very good at it.
The missing scientist has somehow made his way down to an underground part of the base, where the power hasn't been dependable and where many of the people have been hearing voices and seeing things. When you find him, the scientist warns that "the devil is real" and that he's "opened his cage". As soon as he says this, all Hell literally breaks loose and he is turned into a zombie. How some people escape zombification and others do not isn't particularly clear (I believe it has something to do with willpower, which is just a handwave), but nevertheless zombies are the first enemies you fight. You have to make your way out of the area you're in through the way you came, this time with flickering lights and zombies all around you. This is only made scarier by the base itself falling apart, as if Hell itself was willing it apart. Indeed, the late game sees the base infested with fleshy masses covering the walls, rivers of lava visible in some areas, and demonic architecture replacing some small corners. Of course you do wind up visiting Hell two thirds of the way through, but it's hands-down the worst part of the game. It's not downright bad, but all of your weapons are taken away, including the flashlight that you've been using to see for the entire game.
Let's break this up and talk about the flashlight for a minute, shall we? After the invasion, the Mars Facility's power is shaky at best. It doesn't help that many of the lights have been knocked out of commission as well. You have to depend on this flashlight to see a lot in the game, or else things appear as outlines, shadows, and moving shapes. You cannot, however, use the flashlight and your gun at the same time, so many times you have to depend on these outlines and shapes to aim well. This isn't the case throughout every encounter, but you do have to get a grasp on shooting things you can't quite make out, and this single mechanic does a whole lot for the game's horror tone and atmosphere. As a quick note, the BFG Edition scraps this mechanic in favor of a more traditional shoulder flashlight whose rechargeable battery runs out as you use it and refills when you're not. I think this takes a little bit away from the game, but your mileage may vary.
The actual gameplay is fairly simple to grasp, even for someone who doesn't play video games. There are monsters. You have guns. You shoot the monsters before they can claw your face off/ shoot/ throw fireballs back. You keep an eye out for health, ammo, armor, and PDA's that will give you audio logs and e-mails of now-dead workers as well as codes for lockers that usually contain more health, ammo, armor, and sometimes early access to guns (though you won't find much ammo for them so there isn't much point).
Part of the reason this game is only unsettling instead of downright terrifying is the genre that it is bound to. In some ways, it's a shame that the Doom name has been applied to this game. Oh, it's a terrific shooter, don't get me wrong, but perhaps it depends too much on shooting and not enough on the emotion of fear that it so desperately wants to instill in the player. Parts of it can succeed at being unsettling. The game comes fairly close to honest-to-God fear about halfway through, where you get to an area where the elevators have no power and you have to restore them to working order. Nothing attacks you for about twenty or thirty minutes as you search for a way to get the elevators running. You hear them, you know they are nearby, but you don't know where. You've been hearing these sounds for half a game length (about five or six hours, in this case) but you suddenly realize that you can't quite match sounds to creatures. You wonder if there are some things you haven't seen yet, maybe something that this armory in your back pocket can't kill. It's all nonsense in your head, of course. By the time it's over, you'll breath a sigh of relief as you empty your handy shotgun into a few imps and zombies, but it still shakes you.
It still shook the hell out of me, anyway.
To go through the rest of them quickly: Doom 2 came out in 1994. Final Doom, which consisted of two different expansions to Doom 2, came out in 1996 and was actually a fan-made game until id software thought it was good enough to be an official Doom game. Master Levels for Doom 2 came out in 1995, and Doom 64 came out in 1997 (64 was a whole new game exclusive to the N64). And that is all we saw of Doom, aside from re-releases and compilations, until 2004, when Doom 3 came out.
Doom 3 rebooted the whole series' story. There was not much there to begin with. The story is "you are a marine on Mars, a gate to Hell opened up, and demons started pouring out and killing everyone". Doom 3's story is largely the same, and frankly you don't need to know much more than that. Unlike Doom 1 and 2, though, Doom 3's horror tone is played straight instead of being incredibly campy. This is where the series's fan base has split - many wanted something similar to the cheesy tone of the originals. It does not work for everyone. Look on any forum thread about the quality of Doom 3 and you will see it referred to as everything from "boring" to "great". I fall pretty hard into the latter camp.
Doom 3 begins as a spaceship dock s at a scientific facility on Mars, run by a fictional mega-corporation called the "UAC". Out comes three men. The first two are a businessman, here to give the facility's shady overseer a good talking-to, and a marine, his bodyguard. The unnamed and completely silent player character lags behind when coming out of the ship. Exactly why he's there isn't terribly clear - are they a team of bodyguards or did he just hitch a ride with those two? Either way, you don't follow them. You make your way to a commanding officer and are given orders to find a missing scientist. Along the way to this scientist, you give yourself something of a tour of the base. You can run straight to the scientist - it's not hard, the game has characters and a little robot point you along the way - but you can also stop and see what's going on around the base. Optimistic monitors introduce the facility as if you were on tour. Workers toil over broken parts of the base, often snappy at each other and their bosses after a rough day's work (and, as we'll see later, after all of the weird things that happen around the base). You go into a kitchen and can play a game on an arcade cabinet or open and close the shutters. You surprise a jumpy marine coming out of the bathroom. This facility has a great sense of place - it comes across as a real setting that really could have been lived in. There's not much in the way of alien architectures or weird design - this place is believable. Doom 3 is not the first shooter to do this - the original Half-Life is - but it is very good at it.
The missing scientist has somehow made his way down to an underground part of the base, where the power hasn't been dependable and where many of the people have been hearing voices and seeing things. When you find him, the scientist warns that "the devil is real" and that he's "opened his cage". As soon as he says this, all Hell literally breaks loose and he is turned into a zombie. How some people escape zombification and others do not isn't particularly clear (I believe it has something to do with willpower, which is just a handwave), but nevertheless zombies are the first enemies you fight. You have to make your way out of the area you're in through the way you came, this time with flickering lights and zombies all around you. This is only made scarier by the base itself falling apart, as if Hell itself was willing it apart. Indeed, the late game sees the base infested with fleshy masses covering the walls, rivers of lava visible in some areas, and demonic architecture replacing some small corners. Of course you do wind up visiting Hell two thirds of the way through, but it's hands-down the worst part of the game. It's not downright bad, but all of your weapons are taken away, including the flashlight that you've been using to see for the entire game.
Let's break this up and talk about the flashlight for a minute, shall we? After the invasion, the Mars Facility's power is shaky at best. It doesn't help that many of the lights have been knocked out of commission as well. You have to depend on this flashlight to see a lot in the game, or else things appear as outlines, shadows, and moving shapes. You cannot, however, use the flashlight and your gun at the same time, so many times you have to depend on these outlines and shapes to aim well. This isn't the case throughout every encounter, but you do have to get a grasp on shooting things you can't quite make out, and this single mechanic does a whole lot for the game's horror tone and atmosphere. As a quick note, the BFG Edition scraps this mechanic in favor of a more traditional shoulder flashlight whose rechargeable battery runs out as you use it and refills when you're not. I think this takes a little bit away from the game, but your mileage may vary.
The actual gameplay is fairly simple to grasp, even for someone who doesn't play video games. There are monsters. You have guns. You shoot the monsters before they can claw your face off/ shoot/ throw fireballs back. You keep an eye out for health, ammo, armor, and PDA's that will give you audio logs and e-mails of now-dead workers as well as codes for lockers that usually contain more health, ammo, armor, and sometimes early access to guns (though you won't find much ammo for them so there isn't much point).
Part of the reason this game is only unsettling instead of downright terrifying is the genre that it is bound to. In some ways, it's a shame that the Doom name has been applied to this game. Oh, it's a terrific shooter, don't get me wrong, but perhaps it depends too much on shooting and not enough on the emotion of fear that it so desperately wants to instill in the player. Parts of it can succeed at being unsettling. The game comes fairly close to honest-to-God fear about halfway through, where you get to an area where the elevators have no power and you have to restore them to working order. Nothing attacks you for about twenty or thirty minutes as you search for a way to get the elevators running. You hear them, you know they are nearby, but you don't know where. You've been hearing these sounds for half a game length (about five or six hours, in this case) but you suddenly realize that you can't quite match sounds to creatures. You wonder if there are some things you haven't seen yet, maybe something that this armory in your back pocket can't kill. It's all nonsense in your head, of course. By the time it's over, you'll breath a sigh of relief as you empty your handy shotgun into a few imps and zombies, but it still shakes you.
It still shook the hell out of me, anyway.