After playing the main campagin, let's take a look at the first of two official expansions in Doom 3 BFG Edition

This review is an "expansion" of the previous one on Doom 3 where I'll only view the technical differences with the main campaign, as well as the details around the extra campaign itself.

Graphics

The graphics stay in the style of Doom 3, still quite nice, but for being a "second episode" it's a lot less inspired since the textures are practically the same and there also copied bits of maps from the main campaign, which gives everything a bit more consistency but at the same time it has a "lazy" taste.

Story

Instead of the "Setup and Performance" section, I want to talk about the story for a minute. It's so linear it gives horror. The most unexpected twist was so unepic that I can't recall it.

The final battle takes place in a microscopic arena, in two phases, with boss patterns really easy to foresee. If you know what you're doing, you can beat the boss in less than 120 seconds (at normal skill level).

The finale should be epic, but it isn't. It's not even so badly made that it makes you laugh; it just... is. Doesn't leave anything to the player.

Sounds

Translations are good, sounds are directly from the main campaign, the problem of the volume levels stays, but you notice it less in this expansion.

Gameplay

The expansion introduces some new enemies and two new weapons:

• Super ShotGun, a double-barreled shotgun
• The grabber, which tastes like a sub-brand Gravity Gun (From Half Life 2)

and also gives you "The artifact" instead of the "soul cube". Towards the end of the game, the artifact is so overpowered that it will offer you:

• Higher Speed (Everything will be seen in slow motion)
• Higher Weapon power
• Invulnerability

The "Spikey" challenge level stays, even though the flatness of this campaign makes everything extremely simple.

I found quite many bugs, including invisible walls and invisible floors (you can clearly see a hole, but you can't fall), enemies that pop out of nowhere (no, it's not the demons teleporting) and some misaligned polygons that made me scream bloody murder on a small climb.

Add this to the physics that at times are literally "flying" and real problems with game and weapon balancement.

The game goes more towards the old "shooty shooty" style of Doom and Doom II, but we're still not quite there.

Conclusion

Even though the idea of an expansion was already launched in the main campaign's finale, this "successor" is so insipid it could desalinate the Dead Sea; the story is linear and at times boring, the balancement needs a review, bugs need to be squashed.

This expansion doesn't leave you with anything, exists only for the sake of existing.

The score of this expansion campaign is 35/100

Considering the size of both the main campagin and the expansion, we have a weighted average for Doom 3 + RoE of 52/100

Again, thank you for reading this and see you in the next post, as well as in the last part of this 3-post series about Doom 3.

Penaz.

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