DOOM 3 is a difficult game to assess. It absolutely has its flaws, but not all of it is bad. Visually impressive for its time, and in some ways, still stunning to this day. Its atmosphere is consistently intimidating. Its combat is a neat push and pull of survival horror and frenetic action. Despite this, it does have its fair share of issues, more so than many of the landmark titles released around the same time. I wonder it its perhaps looked back on so critically, not because it isn't a good game, but because it isn't a great one, in a time where the bar was set so high.

In some ways, this game is ugly. Though overall, it looks fantastic, and still holds up to this day. Honestly, if they had just spent more time ironing out character models, the humans in particular, I wouldn't be complaining. The level design is admittedly average, mostly held up by the well-crafted environments. This game's cold steel corridors honestly reminded me of MGS2, of which I think both games do an incredible job with. Still, visuals can only do so much when about two-thirds of the game are just stretches of tech-base. Both Hell and the Excavation Site are a nice change of scenery, but they come and go so quickly. I don't even think this game needed more diversity in areas; if they had just expanded these segments, and cut out some of the repetitive stretches of laboratory hallway, it would've been enough.

The combat wont be for everyone, but I personally appreciated the way this game makes you take advantage of your entire arsenal. I made constant use of all my tools; even the slippery grenades. The shotgun in particular gets a lot of flack, and while its spread is unbelievably loose, it is honestly overpowered in the right situations. With proper usage, it even can make mince-meat out of Hell Knights. The weapons have their kinks, but since it is a horror game, I'm going to take these as deliberate decision, especially considering they aren't objectively terrible, just quirky. I will admit, there are way too many ammo types. They should've at least consolidated pistol ammo with the chain-gun.

I did appreciate the expanded narrative the game provides, and some of the flavor text is fun, but the pace of the game is so fast, it really demotivates me from reading any of it. Most of the time, I was skimming through logs, worried about getting ambushed by a monster closet (it doesn't seem like the game pauses while your PDA is out, though I may be wrong). When I'd have an audio log play in the background, half of the time, the loud combat would drown out everything that the characters were saying. My only other option would be stopping entirely listen to it for about one or two minutes. So, neat idea, but I don't think this game quite pulls it off.

As a horror game, it isn't necessarily scary, but it is undeniably tense. As mentioned earlier, weapons aren't always reliable, and this definitely adds pressure while playing. Having played through the original release, I had to deal with the flashlight, and while it was definitely stressful, it never felt unfair. This game is absolutely littered with monster closets, but they're always filled with fodder, and as long as you aren't going in guns blazing in the earlier areas, you shouldn't be seeing any unfair deaths. I felt like mentioning, Dead Space clearly takes a ton of inspiration from this game, but I think when it comes to horror atmosphere, DOOM 3 does it better (than the 2008 release; I haven't played the remake). I hate to say it, but I think the former mostly takes from this game's least effective scares.

It's hard to ignore the fact that future DOOM titles take so much from this game. I was completely surprised by this, honestly! In some ways, they definitely make it their own, but this game is where the foundation was built, in a lot of ways. DOOM 3 is a vital part of the series. It definitely doesn't feel like Classic DOOM, but in a lot of ways, Modern DOOM feels like 3. Love it or hate it, you have to respect the roadwork this game laid down for what was to come. Either way, not everything this game delivered is bad; this game surprisingly does a lot of things well. Though I came out with a good amount of complaints, I can overall appreciate it for what it is, and I'm glad I managed to get to this one.