If you were a fan of the first Star Wars movies like I was, you were really excited about the upcoming "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace."  The trailers looked impressive.  You loved the whole light saber thing and the cool "Force" stuff.  You couldn't wait.

Then you saw the movie.

Taxation of trade routes?  Annoying alien characters with ridiculous accents?

You probably walked away simultaneously impressed with the new special effects and saddened by the lack of anything that resembled a good plot.

That's Doom3 for you.

The game is good at conveying a "Things That Go Bump In The Night" effect...dark, cramped corridors... eerie music and lighting to set the mood.  My first hour playing it with all the lights off and the sound cranked up was quite hair raising.

Then by the third or fourth hour I noticed something else: Everything looked the same as the first hour.  Dark, narrow areas with interesting lighting, but it was like a 3D shampoo bottle, "Enter room, shoot bad guys, exit into new room.  Repeat".  And the backstory?  Dull.  Dull.  Dull. 

Reminds me of the manuscript Jack Torrance (the character famously played by Jack Nicholson in "The Shining") wrote: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."  Over and over again.

Ok, so maybe the single person gameplay experience could be made up by the multiplayer experience.

Nope.

This is where Carmack and Co. score a big, fat, "F".

A few things to note about the "out of the box" multiplayer experience:

You are limited to 4 players (although I've heard there are some hacks that get past this, I haven't played in such a game)

The "sort by ping" feature uses the new high speed "Random Sort", whereby it doesn't give a damn what you ask it to do. 

The "Don't show passworded servers" feature also used a variant of the "Random Sort", whereby it also doesn't give a damn what you ask it

Connecting to games, when you can, yields an experience that cannot be forgotten, mostly because the experience is so bad.

So there you have it.  Doom3 ain't worth spit.  Certainly not the $55 retail (in the US) that iD is demanding (I paid $43 at Fry's and I still feel robbed).  It's pretty to look at, and fun for a short while, but I could say the same thing about the Pet Rock.

P.S. -- I've been a playtester for both Halo2 and Half-Life2.  Both of them stomp all over Doom3's butt any day of the week.  My advice is to save your money for those.