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DOOM 3 is a great game. Not necessarily for the gameplay aspects, but for the fact that my eyes and ears never went a moment without being completely entertained. DOOM 3 is extremely immersive with about as perfect a presentation as I've ever seen in a game. Visually, it has no peer at the moment. Even Far Cry's impressive vistas and wonderful environments can't stand up to the artistic and technical might of this sensory feast. Playing this on a 5.1 surround sound in the dark is an intense experience that, if possible, must be enjoyed.

Without the atmosphere, DOOM 3 is a plain shooter that hearkens back to those of the '90s. Certainly, that's what id was trying to do, and they've done it. While I don't appreciate those types of shooters as much as I used to, it didn't really matter. I was drawn in and addicted almost completely from the moment that nameless marine arrived at Mars City to the moment the final credits began rolling.

The original DOOM, when released in 1993 on DOS, helped to start a wave that swept PC gaming. First-person shooters were still just a twinkle in the gaming industry's eye, and DOOM, while not the first of them, really kicked the genre into high gear. Eleven years later, id has finished developing its remake of the original game, this time with a state-of-the-art graphics engine and a lot of talented people.

It turns out, the first impressions I wrote the other day were not too far off to my final opinions of the game. The shift in opinion was towards the positive however, mainly to do with the increasing level of creepiness, the fact that the art actually kept getting better than it was at the beginning and the pacing was very good. The action was fairly repetitive and AI was not the most impressive (I'll get more into my thoughts about that in a minute), but by the end of the game, I just didn't care. I was having a great time being in that environment while mindlessly blasting mindless creatures.

The environment in which the game takes place is really the high point here, but it's a very, very high point. Not only is the technology that renders everything in the game amazing, even on low settings, but the actual art is beyond good. The design and art team kicked ass over every part of this game, even managing to throw in an ode to the old box art in an unlikely place.

Everything about DOOM 3 oozes dread. Even if I hadn't known what this game was all about when starting it, I'm pretty sure I would have felt that something was terribly wrong. After the first few emails left in a PDA, that feeling becomes cemented and then it's just a matter of time before the stuff hits the fan.

The choice to make the station on Mars look industrial and depressing was obviously deliberate. This station must have had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the galaxy outside of Hong Kong. No bright spots cheer the complex web of connecting labs. Tubes, pipes, steam vents, grates, and tons of metal sheeting are the theme. It's oppressive and a testament to the unnatural nature of the events to take place. In some ways the art reminds me a lot of another Hell in space movie called Event Horizon. A lot of the same artistic feel, though the actual movie was terrible.