Writing this review on my PC in the dead of night, my bedroom lit only by the eerie glow the monitor casts, there's not a sound to be heard as the world sleeps peacefully, oblivious to the terrible danger that lurks in shadowy corners, to the all-consuming terror ready to sweep across this planet and AAAAH! What the hell was that? Oh, phew, it's okay, it was just the central heating firing. Where was I? Oh yes, my heart pounding as the keystrokes almost echo in the deathly silence, glancing fervently around my room at the long, sinister shadows cast by HOLY CRAP WHAT'S THAT?! Oh, right, it's just the shadow of a shirt I've got hung up on an open cupboard door. Anyway, like I was saying, all those unwitting souls are resting in their beds, little knowing that they might never GOOD GOD DID THE CURTAIN JUST MOVE?! Bollocks to this, I'm putting the light back on.

If you treat Doom 3 like any other game and just whack it on during the daytime, you won't think it's that frightening. Sure, it gets a few jumps here and there, freaking you out occasionally, but you'll wonder what all the fuss is about. However, if you treat it with the respect it deserves and wait until everyone in your household is tucked snugly in their beds, switch all the lights off (go on, all of them, you big chicken!) and set the volume just right, I guarantee that you're in for some good quality scares.

Our story begins in the year 2145, viewing a sophisticated computer display plotting the approach of a shuttle. As you watch the nifty inset videos tracking the shuttle's approach through the atmosphere, you'll think it's pretty cool. But when the camera pans back from the display just in time to see the shuttle roar past the control room, you'll be wowed. It seems almost a shame that the next Xbox is nearing its release, because it's only now that games like Doom 3 are realising this wondrous console's full potential. And as graphics go, Doom 3 is stunning. Three people leave the shuttle now docked at the UAC research facility on Mars, a UAC investigator, a tough-looking Sergeant and a hapless Marine freshly transferred to the base. The latter is you, the man destined to become the only one with the chance of saving mankind from a fate worse than death.

Walking inside the base, everything is beautifully realised - detailed textures, a rich variety of scenery and even a moving video display that you can watch before you report to reception. The lighting effects cast brilliantly realistic shadows of every object and as you walk up to the metallic security doors, they slide open to reveal a creepy looking robot spider that wanders past and settles down in the corner. But don't panic, it's only a sentry droid, extra security installed due to the disturbances that have plagued the facility over recent months. Walking through the door, the camera pulls back behind you for a brief cut scene where you are issued with your PDA, a vital and useful device that you'll need to get around the sprawling complex.

Although seemingly complicated at first, a simple press of the black button takes you into the PDA, where you can read emails and watch videos that you've downloaded. Vitally, as you progress through the game you find dozens of other peoples' PDAs, automatically downloading their logs and security clearances to your own device. As well as being essential for getting through secure areas, it's a lovely touch that these logs also give you access codes to the many storage lockers scattered throughout the game, topping you up with extra ammo, armour and health. Some codes you'll find in emails, others from listening to voice logs.

While this aspect of the gameplay slows the proceedings down a little, it also does a fantastic job of building tension and gradually unfolding the plot as you piece together, little by little, exactly what the hell is going on. It's very Resident Evil in its style, although while Resident Evil is renowned for its cheesy dialogue (in both emails and cut scenes), here the script is outstanding. Emails, whether work-related or personal, read and sound like real emails written by real individuals and the voice acting for the many voice logs is excellent. As you listen to an account of a marine going mad and vaporising his own head with a plasma rifle, or the way someone got mauled in a freak industrial accident, along with the many accounts of people hearing strange noises, seeing things and generally being very edgy, you get a really uneasy feeling that something here is very, very wrong.

Anyway, hit that black button to close the PDA and you make your way through the facility to report to your commanding officer. You meet several characters, all of who you can chat to and who say several different things when you repeatedly hit the talk button. Some are impatient and tell you they're too busy to talk, while others greet you and welcome you to the facility. Wandering through the corridors, you are also witness to a conversation between the UAC investigator and Dr. Betruger, the head scientist of the facility, who it quickly becomes clear is mentally unstable, to say the least. Reporting for duty at last, after a reprimand for taking your sweet time to get there, you're sent on a mission to find a missing scientist. You follow a sentry droid back the way you came and down to a lift, which takes you into the underground of the facility. Here you are kitted out with a pistol, some body armour and your torch, while the guard at the checkpoint gets your radio up and running.

As you make your way through the passages, you come across a number of characters - a shady looking worker who almost tells you something and then will say no more, an engineer who can't understand what is causing some equipment to malfunction, a guy in conduit working to fix something and a scientist running tests with some futuristic looking and beautifully animated technology. Then, as you're making your way up a set of metal steps, weaving your way through the walkways of this industrial area, all the lights go out and for the first time, but definitely not the last, you are immersed in complete darkness. Thankfully, a press of the white button switches from your current weapon to your torch, which is one of the nicest effects I've ever seen in a game. It's just like a real torch, casting a bright beam of light ahead but doing little to help you see anything outside the spotlight. You shine the torch around frantically, checking the darkness for unseen foes until the back-up lights come on. Unnerved, you carry onwards, a foreboding feeling nagging at you.

When you finally find the missing scientist, he's at a communications bank, trying to send some sort of warning message to Earth. However, before he can complete his task, all hell, quite literally, breaks loose. The lights flash off and then an eerie, flaming glow lights the room as satanic symbols flash all around, a wicked, hoarse laugh sounding as flaming spirits streak past you. One of them hits the scientist, transforming him instantly into a lumbering zombie, who stumbles towards you, arms flailing. No sooner have you got your pistol out and despatched him than an armed security guard comes in and starts shooting at you. Meanwhile, all the communications screens are going out one by one, disturbing images and gruesome attacks flashing up on some of them before the feed dies and, for the next couple of minutes, as you make your way back through the complex in the semi-darkness, under attack from all those scientists and workers you saw on the way in, you get to listen to screams of panic and gunfire as marine after marine is slaughtered by the assault, until the radio is silent once more. And this is just the beginning.

It's fair to say that Doom 3 is a massively atmospheric game - when played in the dark. Rarely, if ever, have I seen a more complete and convincing research facility than is present in this game. It is absolutely enormous, yet each section that you work your way through has its own purpose and theme, perfectly fitting with this vision of the future. Everything from the way you click a panel to call a lift or enter an access code, to the way doors open and a huge variety of machinery works away in the background, looks luscious and very hi-tech. The accompanying sound effects are just as outstanding, with hisses, clanks, bangs and thumps in the background. Pipes steam, lights crackle and die, panels explode with a fizz of electricity and bumps in the walls and vents are frequently heard - just at the point when you're expecting something to jump out at you. Without doubt, the sound effects are just as amazing as the graphics and serve to complete an atmosphere simply dripping with dread. The almost complete absence of music throughout the game is, very unusually, a good thing, enhancing that feeling of isolation and letting the graphics and sounds do their job more effectively.

Using the next-gen power of the Xbox, most of the old enemies from previous Doom games are revamped into far more terrifying visions than their pixelly ancestors. For starters, the zombies look incredible, with such detail in their faces (be it bleeding eyes or half the face missing and skull showing through) and clothes, that if you stop and zoom in on a corpse, you'll be quite disgusted by what you see. It isn't long before the imps make their debut. Gone are the lumbering, shaggy beasts; now they are tall, sprightly creatures with an array of spider-like eyes, jagged teeth and vicious claws. They generate and throw fireballs at you (check out the heat shimmer and glowing ash effect as they come speeding past your head) as they run quickly towards you, often going on all fours to make a massive, super fast leap right in your face, ripping at you with vicious talons, causing the screen to shake and your vision blur for a moment as bloody claw marks scratch across the screen, accompanied by the sound of tearing flesh. Just keep shooting!

All the old favourites are back and re-imagined in hideous new forms - your first encounter with "Pinky" is one of the scariest in the whole game, as you are trapped in a room as the huge beast ferociously batters at the door. The rocket launching Revenants are back and as nasty as ever, the Cacodemons are now much quicker and fly at speed towards you, looking very different than before, the Flaming Skulls are now the tormented souls of people in the base (indeed, the cut scene showing how they come about is possibly the most disturbing in the game), the Mancubuses are huge beasts still with their deadly triple fireball combo and the Hell Knights, well, they are brutal to say the least. Along with these are a few new foes, including teleporting creatures with long, bony arms, two-faced freaks that charge right at you, upside down human skulls turned into vicious spiders (surely a nod to classic movie The Thing) and very freaky half cherub, half larval insect creatures that make a disturbing noise and whose eyes glow in the dark as they twist and slither towards you.

While the enemies mostly behave in the same way, that of charging right for you, some of them do dodge around and take cover sometimes too, revealing a little more intelligence than you might initially think. The way they teleport in or come out of panels that slide back all around you means that you really have to be quick on your feet and watch your back. Indeed, very few games will have you constantly looking around at every dark corner like Doom 3 does, advancing cautiously because you just know something's about to leap out and get you. And even then I still found myself crying out with surprise on a number of occasions.

Fortunately you have a range of weapons at your disposal, although the range almost seems limited when compared to games like Unreal Championship and Halo 2. Beginning with your basic pistol, you soon get the kick ass and lethal at close range shotgun, the useful but not very powerful machine gun and some grenades. The cooler weapons such as the awesome new Gatling gun, plasma gun and rocket launcher are a little way ahead but are each introduced at just the right time. The chainsaw is back (and it's more fun than ever to go on a zombie massacre with it!) along with the BFG 9000, which sadly you don't get until right near the end, and the Soul Cube, a lethal device that charges up from the souls of the dead. Every weapon feels good, looks spectacular and has wonderful animations for firing and reloading, with realistic lighting effects as the Gatling gun flashes and the plasma balls glow. However, it's sad to see that there's no damage modelling on the bad guys, so no shooting the heads and arms off first.

One of the game's most controversial choices is how the torch works - and I for one love it! You cannot hold a weapon and the torch at the same time, so when working through dark, shadowy areas you must shine that light to see where you're going and look for foes, leaving yourself vulnerable to attack. Sure, your weapon of choice is only a button press away, but boy is it tense. It's great that, if you end up cornered and panicking as an imp claws away at you, pulling right trigger allows you to melee attack with the torch and beat that hell scum down! Truly, the lighting effects from the torch are amazing, with real-time physics casting true shadows on every object and, if you have the lights off, you'll even find that shining the torch around casts moving shadows right into your living room too. The game also plays with your head regularly - imps burst out of the ceiling, bodies fly across the room and sometimes you'll be frozen to the spot as hellfire erupts around you, that cackling laugh taunting you about your imminent doom.

The level designs are very well thought out, although they are perhaps the biggest departure from the original Doom, mostly keeping the gameplay in the research facility's narrow corridors and confined rooms. While this generates a claustrophobic feeling, it is also a crying shame that those fiendish levels set in Hell that we know and love from the older games are nowhere to be seen. Yes, inevitably we end up in Hell but even then, while the graphics and feel of the place is wonderfully twisted and, well, hellish, those sprawling levels with doors to unlock, trap rooms to make your way through and literally hordes of hellspawn to contend with simply aren't there. Gone are the days of walking into a room and picking up body armour, only to find twenty pink demons charging at you as half the wall slides up to let them loose. And that seems a real shame. Still, while the action is somewhat confined and linear, it certainly retains tension throughout the game and the level design is still a cut above the average shooter.

While Doom 3's campaign is pretty damn long, it does suffer to a degree from repetition, as although the scenery changes a little, it's can feel quite samey at times. The normal difficulty level is a bit of a walkover for any accomplished FPS gamer too; I got through it with relatively few deaths and little challenge - Veteran is much more like it and I strongly recommend you try that mode first, as the game will last longer and is more rewarding with enemies that hurt you more and are tougher to kill, causing you to have to strategise, conserve ammo, watch your back and hide quite a bit. And then, for those brave or suicidal souls, there's Nightmare. Bolstering the Campaign are two multiplayer modes and so I recruited Corporal Chris to accompany me into the depths of the online co-op mode, as well as blasting our way around the multiplayer games. Report, Marine!

Yes sir! (Who put him in charge anyway?!) Doom 3 is one of those rare instances nowadays where I feel that the single player portion is vastly superior to the multiplayer - specifically online - areas. The new co-operative mode, which was tailor made for the Xbox, is a great idea and one that had me thrilled for some time; however, it doesn't quite live up to what I envisioned. You and a friend are put into the boots of two space marines sent to Mars, just like the single player, playing through much shorter sections of the solo campaign's levels. This is the first thing that let me down: the campaign is packed full of great long, intense levels and the co-op mode really chops them up to the point where you can breeze through the whole thing in a couple of hours if one person has played the campaign before.

The pace is much faster, especially if one player knows what he's doing. It can still be quite eerie and scary in some areas, but the fact that there are two of you and, more importantly, that the mode simply is not that difficult really takes a lot of the fear away. It certainly doesn't capture that feeling of isolation the single player has, but it could have been more nerve-wracking if you actually feared some of these monsters! Here come my other two complaints; the difficulty is simply not very high and is not adjustable, meaning there's no going back Splinter Cell style to attempt the same area on a higher level. The fact, however, that they've removed any story bits, any section where you must enter a key code and the PDAs completely is a huge letdown after coming off the fantastic co-op mode in Chaos Theory, which featured similar things. It can be argued that it would just slow down the gameplay, but in my book that isn't a bad thing. Imagine finding a PDA that belonged to a dead comrade and having one player listen to it to find out vital info whilst the other play had to guard him. Hell beasts could be triggered when the PDA was brought up, so one player would be left scrambling to fight them off and protect his buddy, who is trying to find a specific key code for a weapons locker that contains powerful guns needed to take down the beasts. It could have made for some great moments or tension and really helped recreate the atmosphere the campaign beautifully creates.

The co-op is by no means bad - it's a great dose of old school shooting action - but it just ends too quickly and doesn't live up to the amazing single player in my book. It's nice to have another co-op game on Xbox Live, as it badly needs them, and the moments where one player has to follow behind with a flashlight and aim it at beasts for the other to shoot are priceless. However, the mode could have been so much better and more memorable if it included elements from the single player and wasn't cut so short.

The other multiplayer mode gives you Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Tourney and Last Man Standing. They are all self-explanatory and, like the PC version, feel like an afterthought. It doesn't make them terribly bad, though; the graphics are still great, the gameplay has been sped up (you're constantly charging around instead of walking) and it makes for - again - some classic old school shoot 'em up fun. You only get five stages but those five are quite good and are taken right out of the campaign mode. There are even special bits on each one, like a room you can lock enemies for them to be crushed or a giant reactor that will kill you if you're too close. Still, with the likes of Halo 2, Rainbow Six, Unreal Championship 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Thoery, Doom 3's four player limit with bare bones deathmatch gameplay feels a bit outdated and will easily be outlasted by its competitors, especially when it's only equipped with a limited amount of maps and modes. In both cases, the multiplayer modes are here and aren't really bad - they each offer quite a bit of fun - but each is short-lived and feels too much like an afterthought to the great campaign mode. You've got to give them credit for at least putting them in, though, which can't be said for a certain excellent movie-based shooter! That's all I have to report, sir!

At ease, Corporal! Sadly I have to agree with Chris that, while the multiplayer modes are good for a short blast, they won't keep you coming back like the many other deep shooters that Xbox has to offer, making this a mainly single player affair for the majority of gamers. This is why I'm marking the lifespan down a little, as once you're through the single player and have had a quick go on multiplayer, you probably won't come back for a while.

Doom 3 is an excellent shooter that deserves a place in the collection of every FPS fan and it's a worthy successor to the Doom legacy. The single player mode is a huge, action-packed adventure, dripping with atmosphere and tension, brought to life with beautiful lighting, incredible textures, realistic sound effects and great voice acting. It really is a treat to play and strikes you as being the game that the original Doom wanted to be, had the technology been available. While the co-op mode is definitely worth a play with friends online and the multiplayer is great for some old school gut-spilling, neither will keep you coming back for more once you've completed the campaign. Nevertheless, it will remain lurking in the shadows of your memory, as one of the most intense gaming experiences of recent times. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to try and get to sleep - it takes me longer when I leave the light on…

Reviewed by Geoff Holland & Christopher Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).