Dream of Waking

#11 – Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (PC)

This is an expansion pack. Does this count? Sure!

Though I’ve finished Doom 3 around four times, this is only my second time finishing Resurrection of Evil. It took even more tweaking to get running than Doom 3 did. For weapons it adds the grabber (a gravity gun) and the double-barrel shotgun. For monsters it adds the Forsaken (it’s an original Doom lost soul), the Vulgar (it’s an imp, and basically replaces the imp in every occasion) and the Bruiser (the size of a hellknight, shoots like a mancubus). It replaces the soulcube with the hellstone, which accumulates abilities like invulnerability as you beat bosses.

The grabber feels like a lost opportunity. RoE sticks to the Doom 3 formula of straight forward demon shooting so doggedly that it can’t toss in a physics puzzle or any other use for the grabber besides tossing boxes and barrels at demons or catching projectiles and tossing those instead. So, given an opportunity, I prefered to use the grabber to save on ammo.

The hellstone by the end of the game basically becomes thirty seconds of god mode, as you’re invulnerable, do way more damage, and everything else is moving in slow-mo. Until that point, I barely used it. Between the grabber and the double-barrel I felt I had enough firepower to deal with anything. It’s at the end when they’re tossing three revnants and two hellknights at you at once that you feel the need for that thirty seconds of god mode.

There’s nothing new in the games’ environments. Dig site, tech base, hell, they’re all there. There’s less monster closests, which is appreciated, and more demons that teleport in at will, which is not.

As far as expansions go, this one’s not bad. It’s more Doom 3, which I liked, with a couple new toys and a couple new targets and not much else.