Doom 3: BFG Edition Review

Doom 3: BFG Edition Review - IGN (2024)

Few games in history were so saddled with unreachable expectations as Doom 3. 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. 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. 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.

Eight years later and sans expectations, Doom 3: BFG Edition feels like it's arrived at the perfect time. 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. 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.

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. 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.

In 2012, Doom 3: BFG Edition feels like it's arrived at the perfect time.

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Many games drop players into a world on the verge of going awry, but few ever do it as compellingly as Doom 3. Corporate propaganda disguised as public service announcements spews forth from information kiosks as overstressed employees toil at their workstations. 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. Doom 3 uses this strong sense of location to get your buy-in early, which makes its sudden decent into madness believable and frightening.

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. While it isn't technically impressive by today's standards, it's applied artfully, elevating simple monster appearances to the kind of jump scares Resident Evil used to care about delivering. Anyone with a godly gaming PC experienced this back in '04, but for those who only experienced Doom 3 as a watered-down console release on the original Xbox, BFG Edition is a real treat. Even some PC owners couldn't have run it on the highest resolution at a blazing 60 frames per second as it's presented here.

Doom 3 is, in every way, a post-Half Life FPS. It's impossible to ignore the influence Valve's opus had on id's big sequel. The slower pace, the added emphasis on story, and the inclusion of light adventure elements were all radical departures for the franchise. Where Doom 1 and 2 were all about circle strafing while unloading hundreds of rounds into a swarm of imps, Doom 3 is about managing your ammo as you fight one or two at a time. That might sound a bit underwhelming, but the tight quarters and myriad ways in which your foes can ambush you makes it anything but. Enemies lurk behind dense shadows, jump down out of ceiling vents, and crawl through mangled pipelines in every room, keeping you from ever feeling safe.

Adding to this air of desperation is the way Doom 3 adheres to the old tenets of FPS gameplay. Health doesn't regenerate, and hell knights don't exactly drop shotgun ammo, so every time you eat a fireball to the face, or hit nothing but air with a volley of plasma bolts, it really hurts. You know that's another health pack or ammo pickup wasted – consequently, each one of those feels earned. While there's just enough munitions to scrape by on in plain sight, exploration is handsomely rewarded. Heading down a dimly lit corridor feels terrifying, but knowing there could be a shiny new plasma rifle at the other end of it makes facing the darkness feel entirely worthwhile.

Doom 3 keeps you from ever feeling safe.

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This same sense of urgency and risk/reward carries over nicely to the newly added “Lost Missions”. While it's only a short stint following a member of the ill-fated Bravo team from the main story, it still adds a few more hours of satisfying carnage to an already lengthy campaign.

Unfortunately, for all its merit, BFG Edition fumbles the ball in a number of baffling ways. Load times are atrocious, (particularly on PS3), mandatory auto-saves interrupt gameplay, and there's absolutely no way to customize your control settings.

The BFG Edition also packs a few bells and whistles in the form of additional content and gameplay tweaks, but it seems like for every step forward, another gets taken back. An option for 3D displays is present, though setups prone to ghosting will suffer from it greatly. Doom 1 and 2 are playable, along with the bulk of their additional campaigns (including Thy Flesh Consumed), but their presentation makes them feel like a bit of an afterthought. Plain, ugly menus sit between thick black bars due to the 4:3 aspect ratio, and there's no way to return to the title select screen from either, forcing you to quit out and restart BFG entirely. You'll be thankful that the flashlight in Doom 3 is now a toggle instead of a separate weapon you need to equip, but it no longer casts dynamic shadows, even in the PC version. These are minor issues, but they represent missed opportunities to make BFG Edition the ultimate Doom showcase it rightfully ought to have been.

Verdict

Doom 3 is a very good game, probably better than you remember. For PS3 owners who've never gotten any of this content, it's a particularly great deal. BFG Edition is a tough sell for the PC crowd, but console jockeys who missed it when it was the next big thing should dive on in. While several nagging issues can make it feel more like a rushed port rather than the definitive director's cut it should be, there's no denying that Doom 3 has improved with age.