| DOOM
3: Resurrection of Evil
Review by Steerpike DOOM 3! There seems to be no consensus on how to rate DOOM 3. Many argue that it personified 1994's embarrassingly vapid jumping-puzzle, monster-closet, trap-dodging bromidity; noting that it's not 1994 any longer and strongly implying that id Software has never evolved beyond that thoroughly antiquated design paradigm. Others insist that the game delivered precisely on the promises it made: to be pretty and scary, to display for us an engine the likes of which none had seen, and to liquefy us with a uniquely DOOM-y fear. Both sides are right. DOOM 3 is a childish game by modern standards, over-relying on design techniques that are outdated at best and shamefully clumsy at worst. And yet no one can claim that it's ugly, nor can anyone dispute the fact that it made them jump or uneasily check their six. DOOM 3 was awkward, but also pretty and scary. That's why I gave it a Gold Star—it was a lovable idiot, a game that scared me and looked astounding but probably could have used a better writer and level designer. Those who judged it harshly criticized it for being the game it was rather than the game it could have been, something I myself have been known to do from time to time—but not in this case. DOOM 3 claimed that it would be pretty and scary. And it was. So it got a Gold Star. The expansion, DOOM 3: Resurrection of Evil, claimed nothing; most people took no news to be an admission that it would be more of the same, which is pretty much true. Resurrection does a few things better and a few things worse, but it's still the same game. There are facets of Resurrection that would have made DOOM 3 better, and vice versa. In replaying DOOM 3 in anticipation of this review, I was definitely more irritated by the so-last-decade design issues—like the monster closets—than I had been, but the game experience remained great. Maybe more imperfect the second time than it was the first, but still a solid, super-pretty, action-packed, oh-so-scary moneymaker. At first I didn't like Resurrection, but over time it grew on me. While other reviews are saying it's tight at the beginning and loses focus at the end, I couldn't disagree more. The early stages must be endured rather than enjoyed, but about an hour in it gets really good. Near the end it gets amazing. Generally, though, if you liked the original game, you'll probably enjoy this expansion. Nothing Ever Happens on Mars Resurrection of Evil takes place a couple of years after the events of DOOM 3. The Union Aerospace Corporation has quarantined its Martian research facility in the wake of a hideous accident that opened a gate to Hell and killed hundreds of people. But now a leftover satellite has picked up a signal from a site where they'd been excavating remains of an ancient Martian civilization. And because they're just so damn smart, the UAC whips up a survey team and pops them onto a spaceship to reopen the facility and see what's what. Your character in DOOM 3 was the only survivor of the catastrophe, and he's clearly not dumb enough to go through it again. By the time this new mission to Mars rolls around, he's probably on a beach in Pattaya doing Jell-O shots off Thai hookers, hard at work spending the enormous payoff you just know he got from the UAC in return for his silence. You're a different cookie-cutter space marine, under the command of Dr. Elizabeth McNeil, who appeared in DOOM 3 only as a disembodied email to a coworker saying that she was leaving Mars before things got weirder. The introductory cutscene sees your character's squad enter the dig site and start poking around. This well-directed, well-acted opening cinematic gets us back into the DOOM mood and starts the story rolling very quickly. Entering an unexplored chamber, your team comes face to face with an Artifact of unknown but almost certainly malevolent origin. This thing is a floating, still-beating heart covered with ugly boils and nasty bumps and icky stuff. It couldn't look more evil if it had a sign that said "I am very, very evil." It's one of those things you don't need a mother to tell you not to touch. And yet one of the Marines pops off his helmet, walks to the Artifact and picks it up. Here's a thing that throbs with malice, a thing that looks like jellied Satan, and this jarhead grabs it with both hands. It's kind of hard to identify with a character that could do something so colossally stupid, and harder still when you realize that this is the character you play. But that's how it is. Naturally, about nine seconds after your character picks up the Artifact, one of the old teleporters blinks on, and suddenly there's a new express lane straight to Hell. What happened last time the portal was opened proceeds to happen again: demons swarm through, and the occupants of the facility are quickly overwhelmed and eviscerated. Dr. Betruger, the human villain of DOOM 3 who couldn't have been more ridiculously contrived and terribly written if he'd appeared in a melodrama penned by a nine-year-old, is back. He's just a head now, attached to a demon's tongue, and this time he intends for the invasion to succeed. Betruger needs the Artifact, plus some way to get his demons to earth, and the UAC has unwittingly provided both. DOOM has never had much story. And yet to me, that story—the story of the original from 1994—is one of its strongest assets. Only the vaguest anorexic wisp of a plot exists, so your own imagination (if it works like mine, at least) delights in filling all of the gaps with self-invented thematic spackle. DOOM is about the price of scientific hubris, about reality's darkest corners, places into which humanity was never supposed to peer, where rationality and science meet their end in a strange twilight realm occupied by cackling nightmares. And they kind of screwed it up with DOOM 3, which is supposedly a remake of the original. By tying in a human villain who knew exactly what he was doing, by including all of the crap about the extinct Martian civilization, by making it less about a disastrous experiment and more about one person's plans to manipulate Hell for personal gain, they've actually diluted the whole thing. And since Resurrection includes even more of that stuff, its story is a bit tinny and sad. It's a shame that they loaded so much crud onto a plot that was elegant in its minimalism. My own script and design for DOOM 3 and its expansion would have been very different, and I do wonder which would have made the better game. Got DOOM? I was overjoyed to get reacquainted with my dear friend Flashlight, which, like a faithful dog, guides you through the gloomy corridors of the UAC's Site One Complex. The DOOM 3 engine is as dark as ever, but still pretty and still running on modest systems. Carmack has admitted that the darkness was a conscious insert because the game engine wasn't capable of rendering fully illuminated scenes fast enough; it's certainly true that your computer will plod on the rare brightly lit occasions. The sound is again incredible, especially in 5.1. Though many games claim to support full 3D sound and 5.1 stereo, none of them have a chance in Hell (get it?) of beating DOOM 3's self-urinatingly scary audio. You will jump and look back every time one of those rear speakers pipes up, even if it's just the pneumatic swish of a closing door. This game has a near monopoly on scaring the bejesus out of you with diegetic sound. Quake 4 and other DOOM 3–powered games will arrive soon, but for now all we've got on this engine is DOOM 3 and Resurrection. I'm curious to see how easy the codebase is to develop for, and whether its surprisingly moderate requirements (considering what it looks like) will hold up. Just because the engine's creators made a beautiful game with it doesn't mean everyone can—Troika somehow managed to make Source look downright repellent in Vampire, so let's hope that DOOM 3 is easier for noninventors to work with. It goes without saying that id's games are just technology demos. Nearly everything they create requires the hand of another design team before a really groundbreaking game is spawned from it. The same is very true with DOOM 3; we mock id for creating a game with design schemas from 1994, but the truth is id's designers never evolved beyond that point, and they wouldn't hire designers who had—because it's not a game-making company, it's the world's best-publicized engine seller. We'll see more from the DOOM 3 engine soon enough. Grabber? I Hardly Know Her The gameplay is identical; this is an action game with a slightly slower pace than something like Serious Sam but far faster than the cerebral, lonely experience of System Shock 2. Dr. McNeil has locked herself in her office and has whole list of things that need to be done, and you're the lucky volunteer. You shoot your way from objective to objective, learning the story through emails, voice communications and simple progress. Once again you find yourself locating the PDAs of now-gutted coworkers for clues and necessary info. But within a few years, that method of progressing the story is going to be as antiquated as monster closets are now. Design in general needs to move past games where you spend all your time looking for three-digit codes. Finding dead characters' PDAs, reading their email and copying their email and security clearances is contrived; it's a lazy form of game design. In the future, this stuff needs to be part of the game world—if I need a password or some other small clue, put it on a sticky tacked to a bulletin board, or in an email on an employee's workstation, or a note on a desk, or a voice mail or in a file cabinet or something. Running around picking up everyone's Palm Pilot and reading messages is just not good enough any more. With physics practically assumed in modern games, more and more we'll be seeing the ability to manipulate the physical world built right into the level design. Designers are still cutting their teeth on this interesting new concept, and early attempts like the one in Resurrection are well-intentioned but, like the progression options above, not fully embedded into the game. So far, they've taken the form of a weapon that can alter small-object physics. Along with the power to pick up, fling and drop objects, Resurrection's "physics weapon," called the Grabber (nice name, guys; don't think too hard), can snatch enemy projectiles—and even small enemies—right out of the air. Despite the fact that it's the first of what's sure to become many lame ripoffs of Half Life 2's Gravity Gun, the Grabber does manage to differentiate itself. There's a more kinetic feel; it bucks like a mule and shudders wildly when it gloms onto something. It's a lot harder to use with finesse because it doesn't maintain its grip forever, doesn't hold objects firmly and can't be used to knock objects away without first pulling them toward you. Mastery of the Grabber is no mean feat. The device emits a bright green beam and ripple effect that seriously distorts the picture, and any grabbed object totally obstructs your field of view while it's being held. This makes aiming quite an adventure. Moreover, it needs to lock on grabbable objects, and the targeting system is very unforgiving. Learning how to snatch enemy fireballs and hurl them back is fun but often frustratingly hard, especially against the no-margin-for-error Hell Knights that appear with alarming regularity late in Resurrection. The double-barreled shotgun, missed in DOOM 3, is in its glory in Resurrection, and it goes a long way toward balancing later portions of the game. There's also a cute anecdotal story about what such an archaic weapon might be doing on Mars. I appreciated this, just as I appreciated DOOM 3's hilarious justification for the chainsaws. The DB's shell-gobbling nature is offset by the fact that Resurrection is much more generous with ammunition. Constant shortages in DOOM 3 were frankly frustrating; you don't have that problem here. If you can't get the hang of the Grabber, you can still get through with regular weapons—be warned, though, some creatures are only harmed by the Grabber, and most enemies are surprisingly vulnerable to their own ordnance. It's also incredibly satisfying to snatch up Trites and splatter them against the opposite wall. That scary Artifact your character so smartly bearhugged at the beginning of the game isn't just a creepy item, it's an important weapon and the key to victory. At first it just sits there and looks disgusting, but once you defeat the first of the game's three interim boss monsters, it starts to gain power: it slows time, multiplies your damage and finally renders you invulnerable for short periods. The Artifact feeds on human souls to fuel these powers, but there are plenty lying around. It's easy to forget the Artifact or to conserve it for "special" occasions. Big mistake: hotkey the Artifact and use it often. Without it, you cannot hope to proceed through the nightmarishly difficult final stages. Human: It's What's for Dinner Nerve got a stack of new monsters that id didn't have time to finish before they shipped DOOM 3, so their responsibility there was pretty minimal. Old favorites like the Fire Imps and Cacodemons return bolstered with some interesting new creatures, including an especially terrifying one that has a television set for a mouth, which I would imagine does cut down on dental bills. Best of all, the most annoying enemy from DOOM 3 (yes, tentacle soldier, I'm talking about you) barely appears, while we get a lot more exposure to unusual creatures like the big fat Mancubus and the cry-for-mommy Arch-Vile. Countless video games have proven that nothing good ever comes from research into teleportation. In Episode Two of the original DOOM, the situation unfolds with exquisite pacing. At first, the Deimos Base looked pretty much like its twin on Phobos: blandly military in a today's-graphics-can't-communicate-much sort of way. But later in the episode, it became very clear that something much more horrible than an alien invasion was taking place (remember, that's what you thought at first—the truth wasn't revealed until the end of Episode Two). Indeed, the Deimos Base is slowly passing into the realm of Hell, and it's changing accordingly. They tried to accomplish something similar in DOOM 3, with disastrous results. Basically they threw in some tentacles and glistening stuff and called it a day; it seemed more like the base had a bad fungus infection than a case of the Going to Hells. Resurrection, on the other hand, does it so well that it's practically indescribable. Late in the game your character is obliged to teleport back to Delta Labs, the scene of the original explosion in UAC Site Three Complex. You've been warned that the entire area is phasing in and out of this reality, but when you get there ... well, I won't spoil it, but let's say that Nerve did a really good, viscerally upsetting job of making you feel like you're not in Kansas any more. Hell, also, is cooler, even though it has the same basic look and feel of the version we saw before. Truth is, in DOOM 3 you barely spend one hour of the game's 20 in Hell, and that in the middle rather than the end—odd considering the structure of the original. Resurrection is a much shorter game, but Hell—which you're still not in for that long—is a better-designed level and much more gratifying. The final confrontation, too, is more DOOM-like than DOOM 3's own pathetic emulation of the Cyberdemon of old: no tricks are needed at the end of Resurrection, just a hell of a lot of firepower. If Resurrection has one serious problem, it's that it isn't that scary. It tries to be, it tries so hard, using the same questionable devices as its forebear: tiny cubicles containing demons just waiting to fling themselves out; creepy whispers; flickering red lights; annoying laughter. The usual stuff. But it comes off as an action game rather than survival horror. This isn't a good thing or a bad thing; it's just a thing—and certainly not a deal-breaker. I was all set to hand Resurrection of Evil a Rotten Egg early on, when I was obliged to pass through an incredibly annoying series of crushy smashy squishing traps, followed immediately by an inordinately obnoxious fireball puzzle. I'd never felt so glued to the anachronism of DOOM 2 as I did during those moments, but thereafter it became clear that the point of those scenes were to teach you how to use the Artifact correctly, and they never reappeared so I forgave it. The first hour is intended to introduce you to the Grabber and the Artifact, both of which are game-changers. Think of it as a tutorial and you'll be fine. If you didn't like DOOM 3, well, you won't like Resurrection. The Grabber is fun, but there's one in Half Life 2. The last nine-tenths of the game feature wonderful level design, but it's still pretty much an extension of its predecessor. And certainly you won't find it as scary, though on harder difficulties, it's a lot more challenging. But it still looks amazing, and it's still an enormously gory, satisfying experience for those who just want to blow off some steam. I'm assuming that this is the end of DOOM. It's conceivable that id will farm out a DOOM 4 to some other company, which may or may not continue the remake tradition and glue on DOOM 2's narrative. I'd be okay with that, because DOOM 2 also had a fun story that would have been quite engaging if they'd bothered to write more than a line or two. But I doubt a DOOM 4 will happen at all. id and the world both seem to have moved on, evolved beyond DOOM. Just as Sonic died when 2D scrollers did, DOOM died when the last of the brainless shooters finally flatlined. Personally, I'd like more than anything to see them remake the
original DOOM again in about seven years, when graphics are
photorealistic. Better still, hire me to write it. The games still
have a capacity to terrify, and a good remake would finally give
us DOOM as it was always supposed to be. For now, though,
fans could do a lot worse than Resurrection, while those
who never cared for DOOM 3 won't find anything here to change
their minds. |
The Verdict
The Lowdown Developer: id
Software; Nerve
Software Available for: Four Fat Chicks Links Player
Feedback Screenshots
System Requirements Full version of DOOM 3 Where to Find It
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