Doom 3

John Gillooly boards the dropship and takes an express elevator to hell.

Quite simply, Doom 3 is one of the finest gaming experiences ever delivered. The key word is experience, for at its heart it is a linear corridor based shooter. But unlike the majority of games to bear this moniker, it is not just an endless series of boring hallways and poorly defined enemies. From the moment the intro ends and you step off the dropship onto the surface of Mars, Doom 3 sinks in its hooks.

The regulation staring-into-a-bathroom-mirror scene.	The reason we learned to circle strafe is back, these fireballs will have you ducking and dodging.

To reveal too much about the storyline of Doom 3 is to dampen the experience of the game, as it is the excellent story that drives it forward. You are a Space Marine sent to the UAC encampment on Mars, heading quickly into a straightforward mission to locate a missing scientist. Soon after all hell breaks loose, in quite a literal sense, and you are thrown into a rollercoaster ride that will have you jumping at the faintest of noises and perched on the end of your seat until the end is reached.

This game is all about atmosphere, the type that is delivered in big steaming buckets. It is a seamless combination of graphics, sound, art, audio and level design, and it is this that turns what could be another corridor run and gun affair into an experience not to be missed.

The majority of pre-release hype has been given to the engine coding ability of the allegedly godlike John Carmack, and it was well worth it. While games like Deus Ex: Invisible War; Thief: Deadly Shadows and Far Cry have delivered spanky lighting models, Doom 3 employs the delicate balance of light and shadow in ways never yet seen.

No longer mindless grunts, these zombie marines use cover and tactics to good effect.	Doom 3 features the best use of lighting in a game. Ever.

Unlike these other games, the shadowing doesn't seem to be forced on top of the environment: thanks to the way global illumination is employed it is seamless, and at the heart of it this is what makes Doom 3 special.

It is also one of the first games to employ normal mapping extensively and to good effect. One of the inherent problems with normal mapping is that while it makes for highly detailed characters, it is still inherently a texturing process and so models end up with angular outlines. This makes for screenshots where most characters heads look like Kryten from Red Dwarf, but in practice it is hardly noticeable thanks to some beautiful character animation and seriously fast movement.

While even the token storyline of the original Doom games was bare minimum, this is more than made up for in Doom 3. The level design and storylines coalesce to create a believable sci-fi horror world, one devoid of blank featureless walls and where every nook and cranny smacks of attention to detail. In fact, this makes the games linearity so important, as atmosphere is created through the careful use of scripting and timing of events that often use the environment to maximum effect.