Doom 3 has multiplayer, but it's more of a placeholder than anything else. Minimal four-player deathmatch with a few variations like a rocket-style tournament mode and team deathmatch. To be fair, the game is smooth (with a decent ping) lag seems minimal and its definitely fun to play, but it's obvious that more is to come here.

The built in game-finder feels a bit unfinished. It does the job, but with some oddness. The number of players shown playing a particular game is often incorrect, and refreshing does not seem to help. Likewise, clicking the columns to sort them by ping, game type, etc. does not seem to work correctly. Taken together, these flaws can make it take much longer than it should to find a good game.

A mod is already available that removes the four player limitation, and judging by the number of other mods available so soon in the game's life, this bodes well for the multiplayer community.

Technical points

As you might expect, state-of-the-art graphics and animation come with a price in hardware. Doom 3 demands a fairly mighty system to run effectively with all the eye-candy enabled. The game uses four separate detail levels for different For what it's worth, the video card seems to be more important than the rest of the system when it comes to determining how well the game will run. Id actually segmented the detail levels based on the amount of video memory available, since the two highest detail levels use uncompressed textures which require at least 128MB of VRAM to run smoothly.

Doom 3 still looks fantastic in the lower detail levels, but the higher levels do offer compelling extra eye-candy. For what it's worth, we'd recommend a 256MB video card, either ATI or Nvidia and at least a 2Ghz Intel or AMD processor with 512 MB of memory to get the most out of your gaming experience.

The options menu has some advanced graphical options, though all of these are turned on by default except for Anti-aliasing. AA seems to be less of an issue in this game than in others of the genre, simply because the game is so dark and frantic most of the time that's it's unlikely you will notice the jaggies. It does give a significant performance hit when turned on, of course.

As you can probably tell, we liked ID Software's rendition of Doom 3 quite a lot. The graphics have drawn the most critical attention, but we feel that it's the work that Id poured into building the atmosphere of this game that makes Doom 3 a must-play. This is a fully realized, painstakingly designed first-person shooter, and if you are at all a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to play it. Id have taken the conventions of the 3D shooter, and polished them to near perfection.

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