The Haunted Hoard: Doom 3: BFG Edition (PS3)
The Doom series often has the player pitted against the horrors of Hell, but since you’re so easily obliterating them with a shotgun, you don’t often come to a stop to really let the horrific demon designs and walls of flesh register as something to be terrified by. Doom 3 sought to rectify this, an initially slow narrative build working up to the horror and providing scenes specifically designed to be eerie or unnerving, but a controversial choice to not allow your character to hold a flashlight and gun at the same time made the departure from the series’s typical design sensibilities hard to swallow for some. Doom 3: BFG Edition aimed to pull things back towards more familiar demon blasting. While your flashlight was now mounted on your armor, the horror wasn’t completely done away with, Doom 3: BFG Edition trying to find the right way to mix the original intended horror design with the kind of action where you can go on a demon slaying power trip.
Doom 3: BFG Edition gets off to a good first impression by actually providing three games, lightly altered versions of Ultimate Doom and Doom II available as part of the package so you can at least be guaranteed to find some action packed first person shooting over in those classic titles. Doom 3’s reworked version is naturally the centerpiece though, the story beginning with the unnamed marine the player plays as arriving at Mars City. More a military base on the red planet than a proper city, Mars City connects to the Union Aerospace Corporation’s broader Mars terraforming facilities, but before your marine really gets a chance to settle in, something goes horribly awry. This is actually where Doom 3 and its BFG remake can both do some very effective horror work, the player starting off under-equipped since they’ve yet to receive the proper gear right as the facility goes dark and your fellow marines turn mindless and aggressive. Your pistol takes a long time to wear down anything that isn’t a standard zombie, and while you get a shotgun quickly enough, it also needs to land its shots right or you’ll run through the ammunition for your better gun more quickly than you’d like.
When you see the world distort, hear unusual sounds, or spot some strange demonic energy at play during this portion of the game, you do feel vulnerable enough that you do worry you might get in fights where you come out worse off than you’d like. Armor and health have to be found in the environment just the same as ammunition, and while the game starts to get much more generous with these later down the line, you are left wondering how far to push your shotgun use and seeing a big chunk of your armor disappear can be disheartening. Doom 3: BFG Edition does something early on that remains effective throughout in terms of enemy placement too. While you’re exploring you will often expect enemies to be ahead of you, but quite often during quiet exploration or a firefight, some zombie or creature can come out of the walls or even appear from an unexpected high position, the player ending up constantly on edge and checking all around them since a single good ambush can really leave you aching after. Getting caught between demons is even more deadly, so while you’ll eventually get things like a machine gun, plasma gun, and even a rocket launcher where you can find yourself with 50 rockets ready to fire without having to be stingy in using them, you still know the space around you can hide nasty surprises that preserves some of the unease you experienced in the campaign’s early hours.
Rolling out new enemy types is also done quite well, often because the game isn’t always going to make a big deal about throwing some new demon at you. The monster design can certainly make something like a big charging beast or a skeletal creature with shoulder mounted missile launchers look intimidating and since they can suddenly be added to the enemy pool you can’t be certain if what you’re up against is some powerful creature that will only make rare dangerous appearances or something that’s going to be folded into regular combat. The weapon rollout is similarly effective, since something that may eventually be easy enough to get rid off with a shot or two from a powerful weapon will first face you when your options aren’t as strong, your marine eventually blasting through Hell’s forces like a whirlwind of destruction but not before he had felt how terrible they must have been for the other people on the Mars base to face with their limited options. Admittedly, late game attempts at horror with sights and sounds lose their sting once you’ve got so many guns that you’re never really too worried about what lies ahead, but those ambush attackers do keep you listening close because you’ll never be immune to the danger an attack from behind presents. Even the powerful guns aren’t perfect, a rocket launcher obviously eliminating something simple like a zombie with no fuss, but later demons are durable enough that you still have to move around and time your shots well.
One thing that definitely falls off though are the various PDAs you find around the base that at first provide plenty of notes and audio logs that work to set up some of the setting and eventually atmosphere as you hear what lead up to this demonic invasion. Perhaps abundance is more the problem here though than an eroding tone, since reading typical office chatter or bureaucratic woes starts to lose its purpose later in the game, but there is a clever method of making you pay attention to them early on. Plenty of lockers with useful items are found around the Mars base and to get the codes for them requires perusing the files you find or listening to them, meaning you pick up lore while looking for something practical. Little touches like chainsaws accidentally being shipped to the tree-free Mars due to inept corporate bureaucracy just so you can find some for some satisfying carnage make these occasionally fun finds as well, but considering Doom 3: BFG Edition is named for the BFG that can easily obliterate most opposition outside bosses, the action does eventually settle in as the only thing you’ll really be paying attention to. Some segments like heading out onto Mars surface and keeping your oxygen up by grabbing tanks add a new kind of pressure, but soon you’re wondering more about what monsters are in the next room and which weapon you’ll whip out to keep an effective ammunition rotation going so you’re never truly on the backfoot.
Having to cycle through your entire growing weapon collection does end up a bit of a sloppy way to handle your arsenal and there are some lengthy load and save times, leading to some interruptions and rough recoveries from a death. Doom 3: BFG Edition does have a few more areas where it could have tidied up, but generally it can find a balance for providing some more thrilling action segments and moments of atmospheric horror even if one has to give way to the other eventually. A multiplayer component certainly doesn’t have room to lean into horror as players aim to earn the most kills against a few other players online, but Doom 3: BFG Edition also includes two extra campaigns outside of the main story of the unnamed marine. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil looks to deal with a loose end in the main story mostly, the player now part of a team sent to investigate the incident on Mars and quickly coming across plenty of demons to fight on their own. While it has a similar early vulnerability to it until near the end you’re handling so many powerful weapons you fear very little, it’s a faster story so it seems more about facing some new dangers and playing with some new toys.
Resurrection of Evil’s grabber gun lets you utilize environmental objects to your advantage, and now the abundant explosive barrels that sometimes lead to rough accidents if you were careless with your aim are now something you can hurl about to blow up enemies from afar. The grabber seems to be intended more for this story’s bosses and unique enemies, Doom 3’s major encounters often including some small required action outside of weapons fire to harm them or they take so much damage otherwise using something of their own powers against them speeds things up. Resurrection of Evil also gives you a gradually upgrading demonic heart item, but while you get some benefits like a strength boost from later additions, its main purpose is as a way of slowing the action down, something needed to get around specific dangers or make some speedy demons easier to handle. The Lost Mission on the other hand mostly just feels like more of the same, it giving you the perspective of some other marine in the mayhem on Mars at the same time as the first campaign and not rolling out quite as many new ideas to set it apart. The gun play still asks for smart movement, appropriate weapon usage, and situational awareness so if you just want more time shooting demons then these extra campaigns definitely provide it and some environmental variety means they don’t just blend in with the game’s normal activities.
THE VERDICT: Doom 3: BFG Edition does undergo a shift from its early attempts at atmospheric horror and player vulnerability to the player becoming the ultimate demon slayer, but some effective ideas like danger appearing frequently from unexpected angles keeps you on your toes even after you’ve got more gear than you can conveniently cycle through. Once you’ve gone through an effectively spaced climb in power and capability though you reach thrilling gun fights where you can still find yourself in quite a bit of danger because the various demon types have potent attacks if you don’t deal with them properly. Bundling in the older Doom games and adding in some extra campaigns for a bit more action, Doom 3: BFG Edition is a content rich package that manages to provide quick action classic Doom fans love on top of some effectively eerie moments.
And so, I give Doom 3: BFG Edition for PlayStation 3…
A GREAT rating. Opinions on the BFG Edition versus the original seem to be mixed, many feeling that the unnerving tone and harder survival of the original Doom 3 was lost by upping the lights, giving you a convenient armor-mounted flashlight, and laying more ammo around to ensure you can handle the action. Funnily enough, perhaps the initial concerns that it was too far a departure from Doom ends up being the reason I hold little against this game’s reconfiguration. Both Doom 3 and Doom 3: BFG Edition will always be judged for what they’re not in some degree so instead, it feels wiser to accept them for what they are, especially since on places like Steam you get both the original and BFG Edition should you choose to buy it. Since I don’t need Doom 3 to be a tense atmospheric experience nor do I need it to be a thrilling first-person shooter, I can instead appreciate the interesting mix presented here. Early events build up Hell as something to fear and later situations can still keep you on your toes because the game never loses its sense for devious enemy placement, and by the time you are equipped with guns that can start trivializing tougher demon types, you’ve already gone through an excellent rise in threat level where you were having to learn the ropes and feeling moments of desperation as your limited tools were strained. Many Resident Evil games go through a similar rise in power but just put more limits on how well-equipped you can potentially be, but since the gunfights here are well designed around your eventual power, it doesn’t feel like resource strain is necessary to make them entertaining. Ideas like the grenades and rockets being abundant are balanced out by the tough enemies you’ll want to use them on being able to take quite a good deal of punishment before going down, but there is definitely room for perhaps reducing the abundant ammo a touch without dampening the energy of the action.
There’s always going to be elitism in what people consider effective or valid horror and perhaps in some other version of history Doom could have started to lean more deeply into scary story-focused conflicts with the demons of Hell, but at the same time, the older Doom games thrived on being power trips because they had a good handle on how to lay out areas and provide weapons that empowered you but didn’t reduce the efficacy of the danger you face. Doom 3: BFG Edition brings the excellent gunfights while putting forth some legitimate attempts at being eerie before the action fully takes over, and this is just as valid of an approach as leaning strongly in one direction or the other. While perhaps contentious with purists on either side of the aisle, Doom 3: BFG Edition knows what’s unnerving and knows what’s satisfying and places them well in its campaign for the game it is trying to be.