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ars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids—or take on an insurgent demonic gangbang, as it turns out. But that's what's on the menu with the official expansion pack to id Software's recent eye-popping tour de force. Where Doom 3 eased players into the hellish bedlam of a planet overrun by Old Scratch's scabby minions, Resurrection of Evil wastes no time at all getting straight to the bloody business.
In Doom 3, players assumed control of a nameless marine sent to Mars on behalf of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), and who ends up single-handedly staving off a massive demonic invasion led by one of the UAC's head scientists. The expansion continues two years later, as the UAC returns to Mars to investigate a curious signal coming from its abandoned base. A new flock of marine combat engineers head to the subterranean ruins of the ancient civilization previewed at the end of the first game, and within a few minutes the game is in full-fledged incubus-slapping mode.
Resurrection of Evil requires the original to play and adheres to the same rote first-person control scheme. New weapons include a double-barreled shotgun with roughly twice the power of the standard pump-action shotgun (but it takes longer to reload), an ionized plasma levitator, aka "The Grabber," which allows small- and medium-sized objects to be lifted and/or tossed, and something called simply "The Artifact"—a strange pulsating heart-shaped tool that's charged from corpses and over the course of the game enables its wielder to slow time, go berserk (one-punch kills) or become invincible. Multiplayer is also expanded with the addition of "Capture the Flag" arenas in which two teams of up to four players each attempt to steal each others' flags and return them to their own bases.
Uninspired retro gameplay
The cynical theory is that id Software doesn't actually makes games at all, but rather crafts elaborate tech demos that spawn mega-bucks 3-D engine license deals. In truth, they manage to make average games with way-above-average looks (that do indeed end up being licensed to make much better and memorable games), and this expansion pack is no exception. But where Doom 3 had its kicks reminding us that the legacy of "boo!"-meisters like John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Clive Barker isn't yet bygone, the expansion pack is more of a cobbled-together rehash that may please fans of claustrophobic tunnel crawlers, but for the rest will be a reminder that id remains a one-trick pony.
Still, it's a very pretty pony, and as long as players avoid getting too close to textured objects (they continue to appear solarized up close, even on high detail), the 3-D modeling and atmosphere are unparalleled, though 3-D genius John Carmack's developmental lead has now narrowed to a fraction of its former measure, with similarly sophisticated engines (some available prior to even Doom 3's release) hitting the market in waves. The only complaint worth airing about the expansion's visuals is that they can sometimes appear to be tar-dipped—to keep the scares a-coming, at the expense of fun. Cycling from weapon to flashlight and back again just to move around was tolerable in Doom 3, but it's exceedingly irritating here.
The handful of new hellspawn are also a bit of a letdown, failing to one-up the original's masterful creations and behaving like the original's lineup in new duds. Fortunately, the new weapons add a bit of color, particularly the Grabber, which makes playing fireball-tennis (by grabbing incoming fireballs out of the air) somewhat amusing, until the realization that most beasties are a one-hit kill sinks in.
There are more puzzles in Resurrection of Evil, many of which require the use of the mysterious Artifact, but much of the expansion is spent sleuthing for keys and moving power cells from one location to another. Whereas Doom 3 had an almost smart and certainly deliberate sense of level design, the expansion's levels are disjointed and illogically pieced together. There's also quite a bit less gameplay here, and the game takes about half as long to plow through since part of its artificial difficulty is based on making players brawl from X to Y to accomplish a goal, only to have to retread the same path through respawned vulgars, bruisers and hell hunters.
In a world full of mediocre shooters, Resurrection of Evil would stand out simply for giving players a second peek at id's stunning visual technology, but we live in a world presently exploding with exceptional shooters, which makes Resurrection of Evil a half-hearted recommend at best.
id knows where its base lies, but imagine if the Beatles had just made "Love Me Do" clones for 10 years straight ... I suppose someone has to do it. —Matt
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