Doom3: Resurrection of Evil Review

Publisher:	Activision
Developer:	Nerve
Genre:	First Person Shooter
Official Site:	http://www.doom3.com/
Platform:	PC
Multiplayer:	Yes
Release Date:	April 8, 2005
Reviewer:	Craig Dudley (Mani)
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Resurrection of Evil takes place a minimum of 9 months after the events of Doom3, the SAC has passed that off as an industrial accident and has now restarted research on Mars. Your character, a marine of course, is a member of the team sent to investigate a strange power reading at one of the dig sites.

The power reading would seem to emanate from an artifact that is central to the whole game, it's ancient and evil powers need to be returned to hell and destroyed for good, and you are the only one who can do it

Graphics

As with the first game, it's graphically stunning, superb lighting and quality smoke effects all combine to give us a truly amazing looking game. But just like Doom3, everything does look too shiny, almost shrink wrapped. I'm hoping the next generation of games can calm this down a bit, specular highlighting and normal maps are certainly good at giving things the appearance of depth, but the Doom3 engine does have that slightly plastic look, there's no denying it.

There isn't really that much more to say about how it looks, by now you've all seen Doom3 in action and don't need me or anyone else to tell you.

Sound

Just as with Doom3, sound is excellent all the weapons are convincing, clear and crisp. Directional audio also seems top notch. I won't break the habit of a lifetime on prattle on about sound too much though.

Voice acting, as much as there is, is fine. There is really not enough to annoy anyway, just a few pieces of dialogue in between missions and some crackly radio chatter at some mission starts, it's all good enough and sets the scene well.

Gameplay

The variety of map and their design was high on most peoples list of dislikes when talking about Doom3, lot's of similar metal corridors with far too few open areas was not a popular combination. While there are still a fair few metal corridors in Resurrection of Evil, they generally have a much more industrial feel. Nerve also seem to have made much more use of height in their level design to great effect. There's much more variety of in Resurrection of Evil and that's very welcome.

False walls with monsters behind them are another one of gamers' pet hates in Doom3. For the most part, the monsters you meet in Resurrection of Evil do not come from behind hidden walls, they tend to be already in the rooms you enter or spawn in areas as you approach, it's just so much easier to relate to, even though you are fighting fantasy monsters from Hell, it's whole lot more believable too.

My final major moaning point with the original Doom3 game was the strange lack of movable small objects, quite often almost everything in a room would be fixed. Fortunately this too has been rectified, now the game has a gravity gun I guess it had to be really. You still can't blow up cardboard boxed with high explosive rockets though, that was still asking too much apparently.

All the new weapons work well, especially my old favourite the double barrelled shotgun, there are few more satisfying things in the world of FPS gaming that blowing away your enemy with a single blast from the old shotty, hmmm. The games gravity gun, or should I call it 'Ionized Plasma Levitator' is also fun to use, catching an Imp's fireball and throwing it back is great fun. But I would suggest that the Artifact can make the game a little bit easy at times, not a major moan though, it's still fun.

Resurrection of Evil also features several new monsters, for starters there another type of super slow zombie to shoot, this time wearing a Hazmat suit, of course you'll only encounter him in toxic areas and the oxygen he drops when you kill him will come in handy.

By far the most common enemy you'll meet in the game are quite similar to Imps but throw blue plasma balls rather than red fireballs, there's also a new type of flying, flaming head. These are a bit easier to kill than the standard ones in Doom3 but seem faster. There is one more larger monster you'll see quite often that seems to have some sort of computer in it's elongated mouth.

The other 3 new monsters, other than the final boss which I wont discuss, are all variations of the Hell Knight, they are the so called Hunters, each has it's own special power which the Artifact gains when you kill them. These are Hell-Time, Berserk and Invulnerability. While the later two might be obvious, Hell-Time is similar to the quite common bullet time but it only slows down the enemy. Each use of the Artifact requires a soul, much like the Soul-Cube from Doom3, fortunately there are plenty of dead bodies lying around with which to recharge.

The game also features a number of arcade machines throughout the base that are actually playable, well, almost. They are fun for a few minutes anyway, a nice touch.

Multiplayer is again not much to shout about, we can now play 4 v 4 in a CTF game if you so desire, if you can find 7 other people playing that is. I haven't had much luck yet.

Summary

I wasn't expecting much from Resurrection of Evil and for a change I was pleasantly surprised. While it is still Doom3, the level design has much more variety and as such the game just flows better. If you got bored playing Doom3, it's much less likely you'll get quite as bored playing this, part of the reason is that you simply won't get time. Unfortunately Resurrection of Evil is just too short for an expansion pack costing as much as most full games.

If it was longer, I'd recommend you buy it.

If it was cheaper, I'd recommend you buy it.

Can you guess what's coming? Thought so, Resurrection of Evil is much more fun to play than Doom3 ever was, if you loved Doom3, you'll most likely love this more and the fact that it's too short and way too expensive won't bother you a bit. For the rest of us that own Doom3, I'd recommend you give it a go, but not until it's going cheap, around �15 is probably about right. I don't know who suggested the RRP should be �29.99 but they want shooting, virtually of course, preferably with the double barrelled shotgun.