Intelligent (if slightly aggressive) lighting helps thicken the atmosphere, lending the complex an appropriate sense of soulless sterility before the inevitable demonic invasion, and a macabre, horror film menace afterwards. Doom 3 uses this strong sense of location to get your buy-in early, which makes its sudden decent into madness believable and frightening. You can zip through to make with the shooty-shooty if you like, but taking the time to read in-office correspondences and listen to the well-voiced audio logs invokes a Weyland-Yutani vibe that makes Mars City feel truly doomed before you so much as fire a shot. Corporate propaganda disguised as public service announcements spews forth from information kiosks as overstressed employees toil at their workstations.
“Many games drop players into a world on the verge of going awry, but few ever do it as compellingly as Doom 3. As anyone who's watched any movie ever could probably have predicted, things take a turn for the demonic pretty quickly, and before long Hell is both figuratively and literally breaking loose all over Mars City. Doom 3 casts you as the newest transfer to a civilian research outpost on Mars, where the Union Aerospace Corporation has begun analyzing artifacts excavated from a recent archeological dig. Though certain elements of this re-release feel dialed in, and some of its visuals and mechanics date it pretty clearly, the quality of the game itself shines through in a way it couldn't have for players with a Doom 2 sized chip on their shoulder. You get the best looking version of Doom 3 ever presented on consoles, the Resurrection of Evil expansion, a solid new 8 level mini-campaign, plus Doom 1 and 2 with most of their expansions. After all, Doom 3 is about as much of a traditional FPS as Resident Evil 6 is traditional survival-horror, and sometimes change simply isn't what players want.Įight years later and sans expectations, Doom 3: BFG Edition feels like it's arrived at the perfect time. While a quick glance at old reviews would seem to indicate an unqualified success, you don't have to look far to find fans who were less than pleased with the results.
With a huge pair of decade-old shoes to fill, and the hungry eyes of PC gamers everywhere fixed on them, id Software had undertaken mission: impossible – to create a Doom game honoring the series' traditions while keeping in step with an FPS landscape transforming rapidly in the wake of Half-Life. Few games in history were so saddled with unreachable expectations as Doom 3.