Weapons
As I’ve mentioned weaponry, time for a quick run down of what we get here. Your default or starter weapon is the pistol which is accurate but not exactly powerful. After that comes the FPS close quarter standby, the shotgun. Then we have a machine gun, a mini-gun, hand grenades, a plasma rifle, rocket launcher, chainsaw, BFG and soul cube, all lifted directly from previous versions of Doom and given the 2004 re-mix. id seem to have missed a vital point here though, which is that the shotgun was immensely satisfying first time round simply because it WAS the first time we’d been given a shotgun in any FPS game.. ever.
Nowadays its more unusual not to have one, so if you stick one in your game, its got to be better than anything that others have done. Sadly, in every respect, all of the weapons in Doom 3 are lacklustre at best and terrible at worst. They all sound incredibly weedy for a start. Have you ever heard a shotgun go off in a confined space? I have and its deafening, my ears didn’t stop ringing for the rest of the day. I’ve got a nice big sub sitting under my desk and even with the boost cranked right up it still sounded like every weapon noise was recorded in a steel lined bathroom.
Another problem with the weaponry is their weakness in taking the baddies down. You can quite happily pump half a clip from the machine gun into an advancing imp before he drops but with each weapon having a small ammo clip it becomes tediously hard to remain an effective fighter if you have to reload all the time.
Take the chain gun, you’d think it would be a devastating area effect weapon with massive stopping power. It is, but then id go and cripple it with a stupidly small ammo clip of only 60 rounds, effectively rendering it useless for mowing down large numbers of oncoming monsters. The BFG is as good as ever, but for some reason, given the superb (if way too dark) game engine, it feels that it should be better and more impressive, which it isn’t.
