As an expansion pack to their big hit from last year, Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil has already peaked Activision’s sales charts and has caused a bit of commotion – admittedly a bit to my surprise, given how easily the original release of Doom 3 was overshadowed by Half-Life 2, and how many other FPS titles have been popping up. Regardless, I still found Doom 3 to be a thoroughly gripping and downright spooky experience while I was playing, with some absolutely sickening visuals, creative level design, and of course the GPU-crushing graphical technology, and I was hoping to see those kinds of elements expanded on further with the expansion. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil offers a new singleplayer campaign that revisits Mars in a new setting, adds a couple of new weapons, a number of new enemies, and of course some interesting multiplayer features, but is it all enough to warrant the purchase? Assessing that is obviously the entire point of this review, so let’s move forward!

Resurrection of Evil starts its singleplayer aspect off two years after the original, where a research team has returned to Mars in an attempt to uncover the secrets behind the horrific accident (provided one can file away the process of opening a nearly irreversible portal to hell itself as an “accident”) that practically annihilated the inhabitants of the Union Aerospace Corporation’s original station on the planet. The new research team has discovered a strange beacon in a forgotten part of the base (called “Site 1”), and hopes to uncover the secrets of the ancient civilization that once existed on the planet. Of course once a strange new artifact is discovered, all it takes is the bone-headed move of one of the marines to try and grab the object, which promptly unleashes a fresh, new offensive from hell. It seems Dr. Betruger is a little pissed after his last defeat as a fresh minion from hell, and has been waiting for the chance to get a little payback. That is, of course, where the nameless marine whom constitutes the player character steps in, shotgun in-hand, to end the threat from hell once and for all and prevent it from ever returning again.

The campaign’s pacing, in a nutshell, can be summed up as “fast and furious”. Given its relatively brief development time it is understandable that RoE’s campaign is shorter than the original’s, but there’s still plenty of fulfilling content. The campaign is littered with little cutscenes, scripted events, and assorted objectives, but it’s all rather tightly packed, and the ending seems to come all-too-soon. The presentation of the storyline isn’t too bad: there are numerous little communication fragments you pick up during the early parts, a lot of the cutscenes involve more character interaction in some way, and there are even a fresh set of PDAs and video discs to pick up and dig through, but these only seem to be done in a half-assed manner (the PDAs in particular, as I only found two or three in the whole game that actually had audio logs attached, and most of the text emails were copy/paste repeats of “We dug up your locker code, here’s the number”). The cutscenes themselves also seemed a bit too awkward due to the enforced policy of keeping the player character silent, and it looked really strange to see NPCs directly addressing my marine during a movie with no response on his behalf beyond some weird expression changes on his face. Really guys, if you’re going to do the whole “silent hero” thing, just keep the entire game first-person like Half-Life, or at least don’t give the main hero a whole bunch of useless screen cameos.

That’s the storyline, but what direct gameplay changes / improvements does the expansion bring to the table? New levels and general content are always nice, but is there anything else the game adds to make the experience more interesting? Indeed there is, although not to a huge enough degree to separate RoE from its non-expansion cousin in any significant way. All of the old weapons make a comeback (with the exception of the chainsaw, which I was unable to locate), but there are also two new major toys: a double-barreled shotgun (GLEE), and a crude knock-off of Half-Life 2’s manipulator tool called the “Grabber” – except that this thing feels really clumsy to use at times and can only hold objects for a couple of seconds before running out of power and dropping it. Still, being able to lob enemy projectiles back at them is quite an amusing trick, and immensely satisfying when squaring off against those pesky Hell Knights or Imps. Going back to the subject of the super-shotgun for a moment though, the expansion is actually incredibly gratuitous in how ammunition (shells, specifically) is handed out to the player, and I actually never really had a moment beyond the initial parts of the game where I ran low on shells – or most other types of ammo, for that matter.

Probably the most interesting weapon-based addition however is the “Artifact”. This thing basically replaces the original game’s Soul Cube and eventually becomes an overpowered tool of might that allows the player to crush his enemies with utter and complete impunity – eventually, anyways. When the player first picks it up, it’s just a little floaty pulsating relic, but as the game progresses upgrades are eventually acquired that allow the player to enter a high-speed “bullet time” kind of mode, go “berserk” and cause insane amounts of damage from a single attack, and finally even go completely invulnerable – all at the same time, and the only downside is that all it can hold is a maximum of three charges, which are replenished only by absorbing the corpses scattered throughout the level (provided you don’t accidentally hit them with your flashlight and cause them to explode that is – yes, that still happens). Suffice it to say, continual random use of this artifact actually made the game insanely easy, although the few level-based puzzles that required the use of this thing were rather nifty.

Of course the game isn’t entirely a picnic thanks to some cleverly implemented boss fights that require a bit more creativity than simply switching to your largest weapon and discharging repeatedly. In fact, the first boss (early in the game) is completely immune to normal attacks and requires that you use the Grabber to pick up projectiles being fired from nearby turrets and deflect them back at the monster. Other bosses move so fast that they require careful use of the artifact to beat so you can find their vulnerable points, or careful analysis of the environment to figure out their weaknesses, almost Metroid Prime-style. This is all pretty cool, and the expansion delivers fast-and-furious action more consistently than the original ever did, but it’s still ultimately just the same kind of run-and-gun experience that’s been done numerous times before, and the focus on this style of gameplay over a gradual buildup of fear means that the expansion still isn’t all that groundbreaking, in spite of the few new elements it adds. To players who just want “more Doom 3” this won’t be any kind of problem, but I was hoping for a bit more of a creative approach to things.

Of natural interest to many will be the new multiplayer functionality Resurrection of Evil adds to the Doom 3 experience. RoE adds some new maps and a new gameplay mode (or rather the addition of something that should’ve come with Doom 3 in the first place), CTF. Capture the Flag plays out exactly as one would expect it to in this kind of setting, but the maps have some nice, logical layouts and good playability thanks to the guys at Threewave. But my main concern was with the technical aspects of Doom 3’s multiplayer, given how my last encounter with it proved it to be an unstable, unplayable mess, yet I find myself happy to see that it’s improved since then and is actually pretty entertaining, especially thanks to the increased player limit (up to 8 – still somewhat small, but better nonetheless) and numerous technical fixes. The overall active multiplayer community is still fairly small in comparison to, say, Half-Life 2, but it’s good to see that some improvements have been made since launch, and the additions added in RoE will propel things even further. At least, I hope it does, given the amount of effort I had to go through to find some decent CTF matches online.

The decision to pick up the expansion isn’t all that complex – either you’re a fan of Doom 3 who wants to log even more time running through spooky dark corridors, flashlight in hand, expecting danger around every corner, or you hated everything the original game stood for, and as such won’t find anything to love about Resurrection of Evil. For an expansion it’s certainly solid and offers enough new content to make it interesting (although the revamped old content was also sweet, such as the segment where you revisit the old Delta Labs), but really doesn’t try to be innovative or try to do things differently aside from adding a couple of new monsters and weapons. My personal opinion is that this is an average release – fun enough to be worth playing through, yet not sufficient to dance over – but as I said, your own mileage will vary depending on how much you truly loved the original game.