If you're a pentagram-sketching headbanger who has thrown the horns a few times too often and now obsesses over books of production designs from The Matrix, your ideal computer game is ready. Doom 3, the latest chapter in id Software's famous series, combines the hoary thrills of mwah- hah-hah! demonic imagery with the most lovingly imagined and rendered depictions of futuristic machinery I've ever seen. All of this is enclosed in bleeding-edge computer-graphics technology and a dense, sensory-assault soundscape to make a game that's an entirely worthwhile experience.

Doom is an elemental game, and has remained so in its latest incarnation: You're a space marine running through the corridors of a research facility on Mars that has opened a gate to Hell, furiously blasting away at zombies, monsters, and demons. A couple things are different this time, though. First, this Doom wants to scare you--it wants to scare you as badly as a high-school jock wants to get into a cheerleader's pants. Previous installments were more about action than mood. This one starts you off with 20 minutes of walking around and talking to people, setting the scene and foreshadowing the horrors to come. The encounters are different, too. The large open spaces and groups of angry monsters are pretty much gone, replaced with tight, twisting corridors and cramped little rooms with a single zombie lurching toward you out of the shadows. Each encounter is carefully planned for drama, and the effect is powerful.

Then there's the visuals. It's safe to say that you've never seen a computer game look like this. For most people, the visual quality and photorealism of Doom 3 is indistinguishable from, say, Toy Story or (ugh) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It really does look that good. The world outside my screen is just gone, and I am so thoroughly in those shadowy corridors with the horrible flying heads that are on fire and want to eat me. The sound really sells the experience as well, particularly in the first hour or so after the gate to Hell opens and the critters come calling. You're enveloped by clanking, throbbing machinery, gushing jets of steam, the constant radio traffic of your fellow marines screaming and dying, and even distant but distinct sounds from nearby areas of people frantically running, shooting, and yelling.

And then there's Hell. Really, this is a vision of Hell that high-school metalheads will be entirely comfortable with: flaming red pentagrams, cackling laughter of the damned, eviscerated corpses pleading, "Help me!" and so on. There's no clever reimagining of what Hell might be like. For Doom 3, the aesthetic of the damned begins and ends with Iron Maiden album covers.

The technology of the Mars colony is vivid. The place is composed of nothing but short corridors, small control rooms, and highly active and unsafely exposed machinery, all bathed in shadows and flickering fluorescence. It's the machinery that gets the most love in Doom 3: Every enormous construct has a life and purpose of its own. Robotic arms swivel around, grab canisters of goo, lurch them across the room, shake them violently, immerse them in coolant, plug them into some other machine, and then start over again. This stuff is everywhere, it's always moving, and it's lovingly detailed. You see the same zombies and demons over and over again; I don't think I saw the same piece of machinery twice, which tells you where the art director's interests lay.

As a game, Doom 3 is surprisingly forgiving. The game is very generous with ammunition and healing, and the bite-sized-encounter design makes it quite possible to get healed up between fights. My style of play was pretty cautious, though. I moved slowly, examined everything, and really enjoyed the mood. You can also charge through it quickly, blasting like mad, but taking more risks.

You may be worried about whether your computer can handle the game, given its technological innovations and intense graphics. The answer is almost certainly yes. Even on two-year-old mid-range hardware, Doom 3 plays and looks great at lower resolutions. To find out how your machine stacks up, visit www.hardocp.com for the official Doom 3 hardware tests.

After four years of development and untold millions of dollars, id Software has created a remarkable experience. Whether you're a metalhead, a technofetishist, or someone who just wants to kill some goddamn demons, your Doom is here.

editor@thestranger.com