Hands-On Review--DOOM 3, the Latest First Person Shooter 3D Mac Game

A couple of weeks ago we picked up a copy of DOOM 3, the latest 3D first person shooter game for the Mac. DOOM 3 is published for the Mac by Aspyr Media. We bought our copy at an Apple Retail Store for $49.95 but you can get it from the online Mac Game Store for $47.95 or Amazon.com for $44.99.

The story takes place in an earth colony on Mars where, after a number of strange events, demonic forces from the underworld begin taking over just as you arrive to investigate the events. There are some pretty wild creatures along with zombified scientists, workers, marines and commandos among the attackers. Curiously, none seem smart enough to have planned the attack in the first place--what do they do when they are not attacking and eating earthling invaders?

In the single-player version of the game, your job is to fight your way back to the entrance, shooting the creatures and zombies along the way. The zombified marines and commandos shoot back and some creatures throw fireballs or shoot at you with plasma guns or rockets but otherwise they strike, claw or chew on you. Mars City is a pretty dingy place before the attack but it gets darker as the lights malfunction or are turned off by the creatures--this just makes your job harder, of course. You get the picture.... In the multiplayer online game, you just run around Mars City and shoot the other players without interference from creatures or zombies.

System Needs

The minimum system requirements for DOOM 3 are pretty high. They include a PowerPC G4 at 1.5 GHz or faster and an ATI Radeon 8500 or Nvidia GeForce 3 or better graphics card with 64 MB VRAM. We normally use a dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 with an NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card that has 256MB of VRAM for testing 3D games. It easily meets the minimum requirements. But we also tried DOOM 3 on our 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 with ATI Radeon 9700 graphics that has 128MB of VRAM, just a cut above the minimum requirements.

Settings

Out of the box with DOOM 3's default settings for our PowerBook G4, the latest and most powerful that Apple makes, was unable to run DOOM 3 at an acceptable frame rate when confronted with a zombie or creature. Here are the settings:

• Video Quality: Medium Quality
• Screen size: 640x480
• Fullscreen: Yes
• High Quality Special Effects: Yes
• Enable Shadows: Yes
• Enable Specular: Yes
• Enable Bump Map: Yes
• Vertical Sync: No
• Antialiasing: No

Using the built-in demo (see our SpeedFAQ for how), our 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 managed an average of 19.6 fps. Disabling shadows moved it up to a respectable 27.5. Disabling specular yielded 28.1, disabling Bump Map also gave 28.1 and disabling high quality special effects provided 29.0 fps. The latter steps also obviously degraded the visual quality for just 1.5 fps. It seems the best combination of performance and visual effects is with just disabling shadows. Playing at an 27-28 fps is generally okay until you meet up with two or more creatures. Then the frame rate drops significantly to yield lags and choppy action. Most gamers will not like this so we'd say that the minimum requirements are probably set too low.

The default settings for our Power Mac G5 are:

The default settings averaged 52.1 fps. However, we like to play at a resolution of 1024x768 which reduced the fps slightly to 51.8. Turning shadows off increased the speed to 60.6 fps and provides very smooth play, even with many attackers present.

Play Experience Tips

Here are some tips we learned while playing. Skip this section if you would like to discover things by yourself.

Use your flashlight to search the corners of every room for ammo. It's there after every skirmish and virtually impossible to see without the flashlight. If you see ammo or armor or a med kit too high to reach, look for a container that you can move by "kicking" to jump up on. Don't forget to search under stairs.

If you are a serious gamer, you have a multi-button mouse. Map the flashlight to the second mouse button rather than the "F" key so it is easy to flip between the flashlight and a weapon. There is a mod that tapes the flashlight to the weapon if you are into hacks. We don't use it because we think it significantly detracts from a unique skill requirement for the game.

Conserve your ammo, especially the shotgun shells, because it is easy to run out and the shotgun is your best friend. The creature who throws fireballs is difficult to stop from a distance with either a pistol, shotgun or machine gun. You will waste a lot of ammo stopping them because they show up frequently once you find the shotgun. The best way to dispatch them is to move to the right, wait until they throw their fireball, dodge it easily by moving back to the left and then charge up and shoot them point blank in the upper torso--one shot instead of 3-6. Always just use your pistol on the scientist or worker zombies with a shot to the head at close range to conserve shotgun shells. The creature the climbs walls and looks like a lean gorilla can be stopped with one shotgun blast to the head at close range. The two-headed creatures can be dispatched easily with one shotgun blast to either head at mid range. Save the grenades and machine gun ammo for the marine zombies who hide behind containers and the myriads of spider-like creatures who seem to pour out of nowhere, almost endlessly at times. The toughest creature is the largest one--it resembles a grizzly bear in form and first attacks in the very close quarters of a small room. Dispatching it takes nearly a full submachine gun clip or 4 shotgun shells at very close range--we've found no way to not lose a lot of health to this creature per encounter. There are also skeletons with plasma guns and creatures with chainsaws and rockets that will need grenades and the longer range weaons like the BFG to stop.

Make sure that you do not miss collecting any PDAs along the way. They have essential information, like codes to get into supply and ammo lockers. Write down the codes and the locker that they work on. They also permit access to the various compartments you will need to pass though. You will have to knock off a couple of scientists for their PDAs--remember, DOOM 3 is only a game and you have to survive to win, right?

Save often--press the F5 key. When you find a health station, do a save so its easy to come back to if you get stuck further along in the game. Do this for every health station that you find, especially if you are at near full health when you find it.

If you seem to be stuck in an area with no way out look around for a vent or an area under the floor. Keep walking around the broader area of several compartments because passages will be revealed by creatures breaking through walls or from under stairs or through formerly malfunctioning doors to attack you.

Finally, look at every computer screen you encounter. Some will be a "touchscreen" and allow you to mouse-click to turn on lights, open secure areas, etc.

If you really want some help, there are many walkthrough files to help you get oriented, like the donationware DOOM 3 Guide v1.19 from Grawl for example. Just use Google to find others.

In Summary

We are still enjoying DOOM 3 and are about 80% of the way through it at medium difficulty. It's a very challenging game. We find it hard to believe that anyone is good enough to make it through at the highest difficulty level (Nightmare) but some are--amazing. We find DOOM 3 to be difficult, not so much because of the attackers but because it takes place indoors and the companion ways and compartments all look so much alike, especially with the lights dimming or going out all the time. It's very disorienting and easy to lose direction, inadvertantly backtracking.

The best thing about DOOM 3 is its fabulous graphics. They are truly outstanding as every reviewer has claimed. Of course, this is the reason for the high hardware requirements. Nevertheless, we are very impressed. In our view, DOOM 3's graphics edge out Halo's as the best.

DOOM 3 is not particularly scary to us as some reviews have claimed. Many of the creatures/zombies (except for the "grizzly bear," zombie marines/commandos and creatures that shoot rockets and plasmas) are fairly easy to dispatch at medium difficulty after encountering them a few times. Maybe we are just jaded from playing way too many first-person-shooter games. Alien vs Predator (or Marathon for that matter) is very similar in being dark, inside a space "city" and having ugly creatures suddenly appear and try to rip you apart before you can dispatch them.

Most of the weapons (fists through BFG) are taken right out of the stock of previous games so they hold no real surprises, good or bad, for the initiated. The Soul Cube is different so I won't spoil it for you.

We don't find the multiplayer online maps to be particularly interesting. They are all inside, or at least the ones we found were, and there are darn few servers at the moment. Like other 3D games of this genre, the players simply run around the confines of Mars City with rather small compartments trying to frag one another. We prefer bigger maps like the original Unreal Tournament and outside areas like Quake III Arena. DOOM 3 is too much like Unreal Tournament 2003 for us, even if it is better. So we prefer the single player version, a first for us.

Hopefully, Aspyr Media can keep DOOM 3 up to date for Mac users. It has been out on the PC since last summer and the PC version has recently received a patch to v1.3, which may be the reason why we could find only a handful of servers. According to IGM (scroll down), they are working on a similar patch for the Mac version and it should be out soon. When that happens, we'll retry the multiplayer online version and provide an update if it is warranted. [Bill Fox]