I made an impassioned defense of DOOM 3 here in which I pointed out that the usual criticisms of the game are actually due to players having the wrong expectation rather than a fault in the vision of the game.
But by no means is DOOM 3 a perfect game and it has certain flaws that are most definitely due to poor implementation or erroneous design choices that hold back the enjoyment of the game.
First off, DOOM 3 is most definitely a survival horror game and not a run-and-gun FPS, and it has every right to be so. The DOOM series has always been a mix of horror and action and the latter games in the series like DOOM 64 had been leaning more heavily into the horror aspects for narrative purposes, so turning DOOM 3 into a survival horror shooter in the first few levels seemed like a logical progression for the developers. Too bad they didn't have game designers like John Romero still on the team to make the idea amazing instead of pretty bland.
So the first real flaw of the game is the opening sequence on the Mars base where you just walk around and listen to NPCs direct you to the first mission. This sequence is a straight rip off of the opening of Half-Life, which was a fad in the early 2000's. Every FPS released then, such as Halo, Half-Life 2, and even the Battlefield and Call of Duty games, had a sequence where you just walked around to be 'immersed' in the world. Thankfully the industry has moved past this trend and sequences like this do not hold up with age. Literally the only games that do it correctly are the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2.
The second flaw is due to the number of levels that take place on the Mars facility before you first arrive in Hell. Everything between Alpha Labs and Delta Labs should have been cut from the game - even if the layout of the stages was unique the reused textures, backgrounds, encounters, and limited enemy variety made these levels seem bland and repetitive. Only hyper nerds care about how transportation, communication and waste management are handled on Mars and nothing happens in these levels except new monsters appear occasionally. Delta Labs, on the other hand, has a unique design and plot importance - here is where you learn how the demons were able to arrive on Mars and you begin your journey into Hell to stop them.
The third is a technical issue - the reload and weapon switch systems being bugged so that you cannot switch weapons while reloading, and weapons must cycle in order to be switched. This severely handicaps the player while in game and will lead to many frustrating moments while the character is stuck in a reload or weapon swap animation and the enemies are free to constantly attack. The workaround is to turn "auto reload" and "auto switch" off, but its not a perfect fix, and every other game in the genre allows you to cancel the reload animation if necessary.
The fourth are the hitscan enemies. They automatically target you, and know of and can follow the player character's position anywhere on the stage, and by definition their attacks cannot be avoided. The only way to beat these enemies is to cheese their AI and force them to run in circles for a bit to try and blast them, or just soak up their attacks and try to kill them by outputting more damage than they do. DOOM 3 has fairly weak enemy AI across the board, but the hitscan soldiers really highlight the issue, and the problem is compounded by the fact that they fire faster than the player character and do not flinch or suffer accuracy penalties when hit as the player does.
The last major flaw that I will touch on here is the enemy AI in general. By 2005 some games were making real leaps in game AI. F.E.A.R. is the usual, most touted example but even the Halo games, the first Half Life, and indie modders were starting to make smarter, more complicated AI that acted intelligently in a manner approaching human behavior. The AI in DOOM 3 has none of this, and actually regresses in intelligence from Quake 3. The enemies all attack you from predetermined positions and will move in a straight line directly toward you, spamming their only attack. (Some demons get two attacks). Due to the ambush and unavoidable nature of some attacks, this makes some encounters feel like bullshit, and it makes ALL encounters feel completely repetitive, as since you've killed one Imp demon, you've killed them all. There is no variation in their attack methods or the strategy, beyond pre-scripted ambushes.
DOOM 3 could have been remembered as a really great game. If all portions of the game not directly related to the Hell invasion had been cut, and the pure action portion of the game was available earlier, if the designers had not followed trends and fads of early 2000's game design, and a couple of AI, monster, and technical issues been fixed I'm sure it would be remembered far more fondly than it is today. As I've said before, the gunplay is solid, the engine performance is great, the physics system is nice and fluid, the graphics and lighting are used to great effect (and is probably the system that has aged the best, despite the low poly count and texture resolution compared to modern standards). After all, the original DOOM was just "Evil Dead" meets "Aliens" in Hell.
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