Sorry to resurrect another dead thread, but I just saw in the random review box on the front page that EmP did a takedown of Doom 3 and I just had to read it and comment.
This is a great review that I personally resonate with. Doom 3 is complete garbage. However, at the time of its release, I was one of the only ones who thought so. It was as though the overwhelming force of its marketing had everybody under a spell.
You covered the idiocy of the flashlight pretty well, but how about the fact that your character never wears a helmet, yet he apparently switches to an oxygen supply every time he goes outside? A supply that lasts about 30 seconds, at that. Because that's useful.
Or how about the extremely long, poorly voice-acted audio logs that you couldn't skip through and had no accompanying text, which you had to endure listening through because they had necessary passcodes hidden at the very, very end of them? Yeah. That sure was fun. System Shock 2 had already done this better, but let's all just step backward in time for a second and call it innovation.
I could probably write a 3,000 word article about how awful this game was, but I won't, you've already covered most of what I would say here. Suffice to say, Doom 3 illustrated to me how anything can be sold if it has enough marketing dollars behind it.
Thankfully, now that we have the 2016 Doom, we can put this awkward bastard child of the series behind us forever.
placid like acid