Doom 3 (XBOX) Review

Doom 3 is a faithful port of the PC version to the XBOX. Although they have gotten all the graphical goodness of the PC version onto the less powerful XBOX the frame rate doesn't suffer at all. The game runs with a rock steady FPS hindered with only occasional slowdowns at certain points of the game.

The PDA is accessible with the "Back" button on your Game PAD but the game has noticable lag when entering and exiting from the PDA which gets annoying considering how often you need to use it.

For those of you who never played Doom 3 on the PC the PDA holds voice logs and emails from people whose PDA's you pickup off their corpses. You need to refer to it frequently throughout the game to open storage lockers and certain doors.

Alongside all the features of the PC game Doom 3 also adds a new co-op mode which allows you to tackle the monsters of hell with a buddy over system link or with a complete stranger over XBOX Live. Sadly co-op is limited to only 2 players.

The co-op mode removes almost all story elements and the PDA and is a blast to play through. We played over XLink Kai with a ping of 35 and experienced no lag during the game. At times either Cameron or myself were left without a Flashlight though which got annoying considering how dark the game is, at points it was so dark I was just wandering blindly bumping into all the walls.

Since the co-op removes a lot of the story elements from the game we managed to clock in a 3 hour finish time. It's damn fun while it lasts and holds significant replay if you leave it for a few months in between play sessions.

One of the best additions to co-op is that near the start of the game there are 2 Super Turkey Puncher games setup so you can verse each other. The first to 3000 wins the game, I don't think I beat Cameron once.

Since we got the collectors edition of Doom 3 it came with the original Doom & Doom 2 in the Extra's section. I was terribly disappointed with it as there was no system link support and playing 2 player split screen had you both playing on screens the size of the 4 player split screen. I ended up adding 4 players to the game just so we could have the screens positioned in a normal portion of the screen. Along with this the bad lighting effects make for a totally unplayable experience. I would stick to the Doom Legacy XBOX port for playing Classic Doom. It features Internet, Network & Split Screen play.

Doom 3 contains graphics & physics that are leading games to the next generation. It makes the move to XBOX with no loss of detail and would make an excellent addition to your XBOX collection.

I rate it 4/5.